The Seattle Public Library - Programs & Events

Rose Zimmer, an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant, terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with her personality and absolute beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism and flees Rose's influence for Greenwich Village's Age of Aquarius counterculture. The women and the men in Miriam and Rose's lives struggle to follow their own utopian dreams. From 1930s communism to McCarthyism, the civil rights movement to the Occupy movement: the reader and the book's characters come to understand that the personal may be political, but the political -even more so - is personal. "A righteous, stupendously involving novel about the personal toll of failed political movements and the perplexing obstacles to doing good." - Booklist starred review. Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of nine novels, including "Chronic City," "The Fortress of Solitude," "Motherless Brooklyn" and "The Ecstasy of Influence." A MacArthur Fellow and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Lethem's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and other publications.

Edward Curtis was the Annie Leibovitz of his time - charismatic and handsome, a passionate mountaineer and famous photographer. In 1900, at 32 years old, he gave it all up to pursue his great idea: to capture the American Indian nation on film before it disappeared. "Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher" tells the story behind Curtis' iconic photographs. Curtis spent three decades documenting the stories and rituals of more than 80 tribes. His most powerful backer was Theodore Roosevelt, and his patron was J. P. Morgan. He took more than 40,000 photographs, preserved 10,000 audio recordings and is credited with making the first narrative documentary film. In the process, this charming rogue with a grade school education created the most definitive archive of the American Indian. Timothy Egan writes an online opinion column for The New York Times and is the author of seven books. His nonfiction account of the Dust Bowl, "The Worst Hard Time," won the 2006 National Book Award. A graduate of the University of Washington and father of two, Egan lives in Seattle.

Katy Butler's "Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death" looks at her parents' deaths and explores how to have a good death in the modern age. At 79, Butler's father suffered a devastating stroke. A year later, a cardiologist installed a pacemaker, allowing his heart to continue functioning indefinitely even as his overall health deteriorated. When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, Butler set out to understand why medicine was prolonging her 84-year-old father's suffering. In the meantime, her mother rebelled against her own doctors, refused open-heart surgery and insisted on meeting death the old-fashioned way.

The Bushwick Book Club Seattle isn't your run-of-the-mill book club - when they read books, they also write songs about them! Join us for original music inspired by L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." Description Read the book, then be inspired by local Seattle musicians! This performance is an exciting musical event for children and families of all ages. You'll hear songs inspired by Kansas, Dorothy, the Scarecrow, flying monkeys, courage, finding a sense of home and more.

"Driving Home" collects two decades of Raban’s essays - travelogues and commentary that chart a course through American history, the Pacific Northwest, and current events. "A sterling collection... An incomparable travel writer, in this book Raban supplies myriad observations about his adopted home, but also on the larger American landscape, riffing on the West, urban architecture, national political trends, the dot-com economy, and most sublimely, about nature." -- The Seattle Times Raban is the award-winning author, most recently, of the novels "Surveillance" and "Waxwings." His nonfiction includes "Passage to Juneau" and "Bad Land," among other works. Born in Britain, the internationally-acclaimed writer has made Seattle his home for the past two decades.

Philosopher professor Critchley and psychoanalyst Webster, a husband and wife team, study Shakespeare’s play alongside other writers, philosophers and psychoanalysts - from Nietzsche and Freud to Melville and Joyce. They've found that, like an insistent ghost, Hamlet only has more to reveal with each passing era. Hamlet discloses the modern paradox of our lives: how thought and action seem to pull against each other, the one annulling the possibility of the other. As a counterweight to Hamlet's melancholy paralysis, Ophelia emerges as the play's true hero. In her madness, she lives the love of which Hamlet is incapable. Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He also teaches at Tilburg University and the European Graduate School. His many books include "Very Little ... Almost Nothing," "The Faith of the Faithless," and "The Book of Dead Philosophers." He is the series moderator of The Stone, a philosophy column in The New York Times to which he is a frequent contributor. Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is the author of "The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis: On Unconscious Desire and Its Sublimation" and has written for Apology, Cabinet, The New York Times, and many psychoanalytic publications. She teaches at Eugene Lang College at the New School and supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology at the City University of New York.

Bruce Barcott's love letter to Tahoma, "The Measure of a Mountain," is Transportation Choices Coalition's Books on the Bus spring/summer 2013 selection. The book details Barcott's attempts to know the mountain -- from his initial, disastrous, solo hikes, to his extensive research and interviews, to his ultimate attempt to reach the summit -- and in the process, helps readers understand this natural wonder a bit better. Barcott writes, "Like rain and rivers and trees, the mountain is a continuous presence in our lives, but in our psychological landscape, it occupies a place greater than the forests and falling water... The mountain inspires in us a feeling akin to spiritual awe: reverence, adoration, humility... Rainier is a mountain few of us know." Books on the Bus is a quarterly book club for bus and train riders, designed to take advantage of public transportation's inherent strengths: time to read and immersion in a unique, temporary, and very diverse community. Every quarter, the project selects a book for participants to read on their bus rides. At the end of the three-month reading period, Books on the Bus hosts an event to celebrate and discuss the book.

In a novel that spans the recent past to the future, "Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders" follows Eric Jeffers from age 17 to old age. Eric's journey to the Dump, a utopian community created by a gay black millionaire, delves into the territory of pornography-as-literature or, as Delany calls it, "pornatopia." Delany's work has explored and exploded issues of race, sexuality and genre for decades. He has won four Nebula awards, two Hugo awards and the William Whitehead Memorial Award for his lifetime contribution to lesbian and gay writing. Delany's work includes "Nova" (1968), "Dhalgren" (1975), "Triton" (1976) and "The Mad Man" (1994).

Whether you think you may have a book inside of you, or already have a manuscript outside of you, this panel discussion with six published authors of crime fiction and non-fiction can help clear up the mysteries of writing and publishing in today’s evolving marketplace. Mystery and thriller fans can also gain insights into how their favorite books and series make it from concept to your To-Be-Read pile. Panelists include: Bernadette Pajer, Mike Lawson, Charles Philipp Martin, Waverly Fitzgerald, Judy Dailey, Leslie Budewitz.

Esquith offers words of wisdom, inspiring stories, and useful in-class advice: encouragement to new teachers to see through difficult early years, advice on mid-career classroom building, and novel ideas for how longtime educators can put their expertise to work. Fifth graders at Hobart Elementary in Los Angeles have been taught by Esquith for 24 years. He is the only classroom teacher to have been awarded the President’s National Medal of the Arts. His many other honors include the National Teacher of the Year Award and People magazine’s Heroes Among Us Award. His books include the bestseller "Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire," "There Are No Shortcuts," and "Lighting Their Fires." Esquith and his students were featured in the PBS documentary "The Hobart Shakespeareans."

Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, "Zealot" does not rely on the gospels for primary source material. Rather, it places Jesus in the social, religious and political milieu of his time so as to form a more accurate picture of Jesus, one that views him as a radical political revolutionary swept up, as every Jew of his era was, in the nationalist struggle for freedom from Roman occupation. Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against the historical sources, Aslan challenges the conventional portraits of Jesus of Nazareth.

Teen authors share stories and poetry depicting teen life, love, emotions and street experiences growing up in the multicultural Southwest neighborhoods of Seattle.

In "NOS4A2," a woman with a talent for finding lost things must confront a monster from her past: a man in a 1938 Rolls Royce that allows him to slip between our world and a horrifying place called "Christmasland." Victoria managed to escape his clutches as a child. Will her son be able to do the same?

Is there love after death? In a post-apocalyptic future, zombie boy meets living girl in this funny, bloody romance. "Warm Bodies" is based on Marion's book and was released as a feature film in 2013 starring Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer and John Malkovich. Marion is a Seattle-based writer and musician who is currently working on the sequel to "Warm Bodies."

After being abandoned, the two sisters make their way across country to Charlotte's hometown in Byler, Virgina, in search of an uncle they barely know. Their arrival is as much of a shock to widowed Uncle Tinsley as it is to the girls themselves as they try to adjust to life in the small southern town. Money is tight, so Liz and Bean decide to take jobs doing office work for Jerry Maddox -- the town mill's foreman and bully - with devastating results. Walls' memoir "The Glass Castle" has been a New York Times bestseller for more than five years. Her second book, "Half-Broke Horses," told the fictionalized biography of her grandmother. Walls was born in Phoenix, then grew up in the Southwest and Welch, West Virginia; she now lives in rural Virginia.