ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

 Taking from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin’s new memoir This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression. In trying to sort out the root causes of her affliction, Merkin reflects on her childhood, her mother, her life as a writer, her marriage, and the birth of her child as she discusses in poignant detail various therapists, treatments, and hospitalizations for depression along the way. In an intimate conversation on her lifelong battle with depression and her search for release, Merkin is joined by Jill Soloway, the Emmy-winning creator of Transparent.For photos from the program, click here. 

Who gets to see Shakespeare and act in his plays?  Celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s extraordinary legacy, Lisa Wolpe and James Shapiro will explore the defining guidelines of performing his work today, and consider how and why Shakespeare still matters in contemporary America. Wolpe, actress, director, teacher, and producer, is the Artistic Director and founder of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, an award-winning all-female, multi-cultural theater company. James Shapiro, professor at  Columbia University, is the author of numerous books and essays on Shakespeare, including his most recent work, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. Join these two Shakespeare aficionados on an enlightening journey of what this master means to us today.For photos from the program, click here. 

Dickens, an “agrarian ghetto,” is the fictional Los Angeles hood at the center of Paul Beatty’s scathingly satirical novel, The Sellout. It’s a book that, as poet Kevin Young writes in his perceptive New York Times review, “isn’t for the fainthearted.” Beatty — the first American novelist to win the coveted Man Booker Award — is a comic genius at the top of his game and in The Sellout, he dares to question almost every received notion about American society. Buckle your seat belts.

 Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and UCLA Professor Emeritus Saul Friedländer returns to memoir to recount a tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents. In Where Memory Leads: My Life, a sequel to Friedländer’s poignant first memoir, Where Memory Comes, published forty years ago and recently reissued with a new introduction from Claire Messud, he bridges the gap between the ordeals of his childhood during the German Occupation of France and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. Reflecting on the wrenching events that induced him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, Friedländer discusses this book and his life’s work with historian Steven J. Ross.For photos from the program, click here. 

 In her riveting oral history of the end of the 60s, Witness to the Revolution, Clara Bingham unveils anew that tumultuous time when America careened to the brink of a civil war at home, as it fought a long futile war abroad. For ALOUD, Bingham looks back at the local history of the non-violent draft resistance movement of men and women known as The Los Angeles Resistance. (The Los Angeles Resistance Collection is now being archived at the Los Angeles Public Library). To tell this revolutionary tale, she’s joined by David Harris, Resistance founder, and then-LA  Resistance activists, Winter Dellenbach and Bob Zaugh.For photos from the program, click here. 

 Writers and artists routinely reckon with anxiety and loathing as part of their creative process. Author and comedian Sara Benincasa, writer and illustrator Mari Naomi, and novelist Shanthi Sekaran, in conversation with writer and literary organizer Michelle Tea, discuss with humor and honesty the role fear has played in their work and their creative process. Be part of a larger discussion of how we learn to manage the stress of daily life.For photos from the program, click here. 

 With a brilliant blend of environmental and natural history, Dan Flores’ Coyote America traces the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the “wolf” in our backyards. The journey of the coyote to the American West and beyond isn’t just the story of an animal’s survival—it is one of the great epics of our time. Illuminating this legendary creature, Flores will be joined on stage for a conversation with playwright and chronicler of urban wildlife Melissa Cooper, who will also perform an excerpt from her play, New York City Coyote Existential.For photos from the program, click here. 

 Young children often seem especially creative and imaginative. But can we prove that scientifically? And what is it about children’s minds and brains that makes them so imaginative? Alison Gopnik, pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher and author of the new book, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children, discusses her cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn and how thinking like a child can make adults more creative too.For photos from the program, click here. 

 In what author C. Nicole Mason calls an “insider’s story, ” Born Bright follows the journey of her own childhood in Los Angeles—an improbable path from episodic homelessness, hunger, and living in poverty—to becoming a leading voice on public policies impacting women and communities of color and low-income families. With grace, insight, and first-hand experience, Mason sheds light on the systematic structures that render an escape from poverty nearly impossible.  Joined by Ms. Magazine’s Education Director and Editor Karon Jolna, they will discuss a range of issues from poverty to the future of feminism and the ability of storytelling to accelerate social and political change.For photos from the program, click here.  

 Peter Sellars, the renowned avant-garde theater director, and Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar, will discuss the ways Shakespeare remains relevant in our contemporary American world. From expressions of black rage to the challenges facing systems of justice, they hope to illustrate how Shakespeare’s plays provide rich texts through which the most pressing problems in our world can be debated and solutions become, perhaps, imaginable.

 Based on years of research and in-depth interviews with prosecutors, investigators, and diplomats—authors Alexa Koenig, Victor Peskin and Eric Stover examine the global effort to capture the world’s most wanted fugitives in their seminal book, Hiding in Plain Sight. The authors trace the evolution of international justice and how to hold accountable mass murderers like Adolf Eichmann, Saddam Hussein, Ratko Mladic, Joseph Kony, and Osama bin Laden.  The authors will also discuss the United States’ increasing reliance on military force to capture—or more often simply to kill—suspected terrorists, with little or no judicial scrutiny.Click here for photos from the program.

 Writer-performer Barry Yourgrau is a clutterbug—perhaps even a hoarder. In his hilarious and poignant memoir Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act, he unpacks the psychology and culture of hoarding, clutter, and collecting, presenting a compelling look at a mysterious compulsion. Confronted by his exasperated girlfriend, Yourgrau embarked on a wide-ranging project to clean up his chaotic New York apartment and life. Known for his books of magical absurd stories, including Wearing Dad’s Head, Haunted Traveller, and The Sadness of Sex, in whose film version he starred, Yourgrau will join magical realist writer Aimee Bender to ponder the power of objects and memories, and the pain of letting go.For more information about the program, including photos, visit the event page.  

 Writers, musicians, and cultural critics gather to pay tribute and explore the forty-year career of Prince. Drawing on original work, music clips and the emerging field of Prince Studies, cultural workers will consider the impact of Prince on literary culture and beyond.Click here for photos from the program. 

 Leading philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness in his latest book Other Minds. Combining science and philosophy with first-hand accounts of the remarkable intelligence of the octopus, Godfrey-Smith explores how primitive organisms bobbing in the ocean began sending signals to each other and how these early forms of communication gave rise to the advanced nervous systems that permit cephalopods to change colors and human beings to speak. Follow along as Godfrey-Smith shares from his underwater adventures and sheds new light on the octopus brain, the human brain, and the evolution of consciousness.Click here for photos from the program. 

 In his new book, How to Survive a Plague, David France– the creator of the Oscar-nominated seminal documentary of the same name– offers a definitive history of the battle to halt the AIDS epidemic. Joined by Dr. Mark H. Katz, a physician activist on the frontlines of the affected HIV community of Southern California, and Tony Valenzuela, a longtime community activist and writer whose work has focused on LGBT civil rights, sexual liberation, and gay men’s health, France shares powerful, heroic stories of the gay activists who refused to die without a fight.Click here for photos from this program.