ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

The End of Capitalism: My Battle With the European and American Deep Establishment

18 May 2018

Contributed by Lukas

What happens when you take on the establishment? Renowned economist and former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis gives a blistering account...

The Mars Room

11 May 2018

Contributed by Lukas

From the twice National Book Award–nominated and bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner offers a heart-stopping new novel, The Mars...

Should We Praise the Mutilated World? Poetry from California to Krakow

25 Apr 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Two of the world’s greatest living poets come together for a rare Los Angeles reading and conversation. The work of Robert Hass, former U.S. Poet La...

Unbreakable Spirit: The Freed Angola Three

10 Apr 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In a special Los Angeles visit, human rights activists Robert King and Albert Woodfox, the two surviving members of the Angola 3, known for having ser...

Exit West

03 Apr 2018

Contributed by Lukas

New York Times bestselling author Mohsin Hamid returns to ALOUD to discuss his latest novel Exit West, a visionary love story that imagines the forces...

The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption

29 Mar 2018

Contributed by Lukas

During his long tenure on the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia—engaging as well as caustic and openly ideological—moved the Court to the right. In th...

Misfits Unite

14 Mar 2018

Contributed by Lukas

"What if, for once in history, a woman’s story could be untethered from what we need it to be in order to feel better about ourselves?" writes visio...

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Gained Their Civil Rights

09 Mar 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In his new book, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler offers a revelatory portrait of how U.S. corporations have seized political power over time. He trace...

The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches from the Border

22 Feb 2018

Contributed by Lukas

For award-winning writer and former agent for the United States Border Patrol Francisco Cantú, the border is in his blood: his mother, a park ranger ...

The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

07 Feb 2018

Contributed by Lukas

What moved humans to create cultures—intelligent systems including the arts, morality, science, government, and technology? The answer to this quest...

Exiled from Cairo: Humor as Dissent

01 Feb 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Bassem Youssef, a satirist who rose to international fame in the middle of the Egyptian Revolution with his incendiary brand of comedy and his knack f...

Haiku in Zapotec: From Oaxaca to Japan and Back

24 Jan 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Because of its similar celebration of the beauty of the natural world and focus on compactness, contemporary Zapotec-language poetry shares much in co...

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

19 Jan 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Winner of a 2017 Pulitzer Prize, historian Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on the infamous 1971 Attica Prison riot as one of the most important c...

An American Family: Being Muslim in the U.S. Military

08 Dec 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Last fall’s presidential election brought a range of impassioned voices to the national stage, but one of the most captivating speakers rose above p...

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World

06 Dec 2017

Contributed by Lukas

What lies at the heart of humanity’s ability―and drive―to create? New York Times bestselling author and neuroscientist David Eagleman teams up w...

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

30 Nov 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Why has our society become so punitive? In recent years, critics have assailed the rise of mass incarceration, emphasizing its disproportionate impact...

The Revolution of Marina M.

17 Nov 2017

Contributed by Lukas

L.A.’s own Janet Fitch, the mega-bestselling author of White Oleander and Paint It Black, returns to ALOUD with her newest work, a sweeping historic...

Oaxaca’s Third Gender: Man, Woman, Muxe

15 Nov 2017

Contributed by Lukas

The program is conducted in both Spanish and English. Anthropologists have traced the Meso-American acceptance of people of mixed gender back to pr...

La Lengua Sin Frontera (Language Without Borders): Three Indigenous Poets

10 Nov 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Join us for an evening celebrating indigenous poetry from the United States and Mexico with three major poets—Natalie Diaz (member of the Mojave and...

From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

02 Nov 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Caitlin Doughty, a mortician, best-selling author, blogger, YouTube personality, and director of the nonprofit funeral home, Undertaking LA, has long ...

Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America

27 Oct 2017

Contributed by Lukas

No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. There were Nazi pl...

Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York

25 Oct 2017

Contributed by Lukas

New York Times bestselling author Roz Chast returns to ALOUD with her hilarious new graphic memoir, Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York. Chast ...

Threat of Extinction: Language Activism and Preservation

22 Oct 2017

Contributed by Lukas

The essence of who we are is wrapped up in our language. What is human knowledge lost when a language goes extinct? Why should we care? Join ALOUD for...

Manhattan Beach: A Novel of WWII New York

20 Oct 2017

Contributed by Lukas

“Is there anything Egan can’t do?” asked The New York Times Book Review. In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit f...

An American Genocide: California Indians, Colonization, and Cultural Revival

11 Oct 2017

Contributed by Lukas

There’s one major aspect of the popular Gold Rush lore that few Californians today know about: during that period, California’s Indian population ...

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: From Fiction to Faith

06 Oct 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Stephen Greenblatt—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of The Swerve and Will in the World—investigates the life of one of...

American Inferno: How My Cousin Became a South Central Statistic

27 Sep 2017

Contributed by Lukas

In Danielle Allen’s elegiac family memoir, Cuz: On the Life and Times of Michael A., she tries to make sense of a young African American man’s tra...

Rebellion! Public Art and Political Dissent: Oaxaca and L.A.

20 Sep 2017

Contributed by Lukas

With the likes of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Mexico has a long tradition of politically engaged public art, which has often depicted—wi...

Moving the Center: African Literature in African Languages

01 Aug 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Two generations of African writers—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, an elder statesman from Kenya, and Richard Ali A Mutu, a young novelist from the Democrati...

The Challenges of American Immigration

28 Jul 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum in Washington, D.C., an advocacy organization promoting the value of immigrants ...

Resist, Disrupt, Transgress: Four Poets

26 Jul 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Join us for an electrifying evening of poetry as four bold writers from diverse backgrounds come together on the stage to explore their common experie...

Missing Persons: Two Novelists

12 Jul 2017

Contributed by Lukas

An award-winning writer of short stories, children’s books, and literary novels, Maile Meloy’s new novel Do Not Become Alarmed is a masterfully ex...

An Evening With Arundhati Roy

30 Jun 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Twenty years after her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, internationally celebrated author Arundhati Roy returns to fiction with a d...

Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Accidental Activism

22 Jun 2017

Contributed by Lukas

From growing up as a devout woman from a modest family in Saudia Arabia to becoming an unexpected leader of a courageous movement to support women’s...

An Evening With Alan Alda

13 Jun 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Alan Alda, the award-winning actor and bestselling author, discusses his decades-long quest to understand the intricacies of communication. With his t...

When the FBI Investigates the White House

07 Jun 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Ever since J. Edgar Hoover died, six weeks before the Watergate break-in, the FBI has had to confront presidents. FBI investigations led to President ...

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

26 May 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Why do we do the things we do? Author and MacArthur recipient Robert Sapolsky’s game-changing new book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and...

An Evening With Dennis Lehane

24 May 2017

Contributed by Lukas

From searing stories of suspense to literary novels, historical fiction, and film and television scripts, no other writer today has such a wide-rangin...

Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

19 May 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Since 1916 when Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves—the powerful aftermath occurring when black holes collide—scientists have ...

The Evolution of Beauty

17 May 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays—from pheasants with 3D feathers to moon...

In a Western Light: Poetry at the Edge of America

12 May 2017

Contributed by Lukas

California poetry has looked to the future, as well as to its complex past and the present, as a way of understanding our place at the edge of the con...

From L.A. to the Outback: Two Novelists

10 May 2017

Contributed by Lukas

David Francis’ latest novel Wedding Bush Road follows the visceral journey of a young L.A. lawyer called back to his family’s horse farm in rural ...

Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards

21 Apr 2017

Contributed by Lukas

2017 marks the 25th anniversary of one of contemporary poetry’s most prestigious awards—Claremont Graduate University’s Kingsley Tufts Poetry Aw...

Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River

19 Apr 2017

Contributed by Lukas

The Colorado River is a crucial resource for a large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. Ne...

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

14 Apr 2017

Contributed by Lukas

War used to be a temporary state of affairs, but in today’s post 9/11-world America’s wars are everywhere and forever. Law professor and Foreign P...

Infidels: A Novel

13 Apr 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Born in a public library in Morocco where his father was a janitor, Abdellah Taïa is an acclaimed novelist and filmmaker who lives in Paris, but sets...

An Evening With Cheech Marin

29 Mar 2017

Contributed by Lukas

You know Cheech as half of the comedy duo Cheech & Chong, and you know him for his memorable roles in Up in Smoke, Born in East L.A., Desperado, T...

The Idiot: A Novel

21 Mar 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Elif Batuman, a New Yorker staff writer and author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, offers up a delightfu...

Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean

17 Mar 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Writer, sailor, and surfer Jonathan White journeys deep into the world’s oceans in his new book Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean. From inv...

Night Sky With Exit Wounds

14 Mar 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Award-winning poet Ocean Vuong’s debut full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, has been hailed by critics for its powerful emotional und...

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

08 Mar 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Harvard sociologist and MacArthur Prize awardee Matthew Desmond tells the story of eight families living on the edge in the New York Times bestselling...

Erwin Chemerinsky | The Constitution and the Presidency

03 Mar 2017

Contributed by Lukas

The first weeks of the Trump presidency have raised numerous constitutional issues and a Supreme Court appointment. What are these issues, and what ot...

An Evening With George Saunders

28 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

In his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Lincoln in the Bardo p...

Eccentric Embodiment: Tales and Truths

24 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

The eccentric fictional worlds of authors Valeria Luiselli and Guadalupe Nettel come alive on the ALOUD stage as these two leading voices in contempor...

Daphne Merkin and Jill Soloway | This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

22 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Shakespeare in Today’s America

17 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Who gets to see Shakespeare and act in his plays? Celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s extraordinary legacy, Lisa Wolpe and James Shap...

The Sellout: A Novel

15 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Dickens, an “agrarian ghetto,” is the fictional Los Angeles hood at the center of Paul Beatty’s scathingly satirical novel, The Sellout. It’s ...

Saul Friedländer and Steven J. Ross | Where Memory Leads: A Holocaust Scholar Looks Back

09 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and UCLA Professor Emeritus Saul Friedländer returns to memoir to recount a tale of intellectual coming-of-age on ...

Witness to the Revolution: Draft Resistance in 60s Los Angeles

07 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

In her riveting oral history of the end of the 60s, Witness to the Revolution, Clara Bingham unveils that tumultuous time anew when America careened t...

3 Writers on Fear and Loathing

03 Feb 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Writers and artists routinely reckon with anxiety and loathing as part of their creative process. Author and comedian Sara Benincasa, writer and illus...

Dan Flores | Coyote America

31 Jan 2017

Contributed by Lukas

With a brilliant blend of environmental and natural history, Dan Flores’ Coyote America traces the five-million-year-long biological story of an ani...

Alison Gopnik | Evolution and the Young Mind: Creativity and Learning

27 Jan 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Young children often seem especially creative and imaginative. But can we prove that scientifically? And what is it about children’s minds and brain...

C. Nicole Mason and Karon Jolna | From Nothing to Something: A Path Out of Poverty

25 Jan 2017

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Peter Sellars and Ayanna Thompson | Shakespeare Now: Race, Justice and the American Dream

20 Jan 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Peter Sellars, the renowned avant-garde theater director, and Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar, will discuss the ways Shakespeare rema...

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror

18 Jan 2017

Contributed by Lukas

Based on years of research and in-depth interviews with prosecutors, investigators, and diplomats—authors Alexa Koenig, Victor Peskin and Eric Stove...

Barry Yourgrau and Aimee Bender | Magical Mess: Reflections on Objects and Memories

13 Jan 2017

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

School of Prince

10 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Writers, musicians, and cultural critics gather to pay tribute and explore the forty-year career of Prince. Drawing on original work, music clips and ...

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

08 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Leading philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness in his latest book Other Minds. Combi...

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS

02 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Michael Chabon and David L. Ulin | Moonglow

01 Dec 2016

Contributed by Lukas

In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, Califo...

Tim Wu and Madeleine Brand | The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

15 Nov 2016

Contributed by Lukas

In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials, and o...

Rebecca Solnit and Christopher Hawthorne | Stories from the City

11 Nov 2016

Contributed by Lukas

What makes a place? The stories of a city are inexhaustible and contradictory as cities themselves are in constant conflict between memory and erasure...

T.C. Boyle and Michael Silverblatt | The Terranauts

02 Nov 2016

Contributed by Lukas

One of today’s greatest American novelists, bestselling author T.C. Boyle visits ALOUD to take audiences deep inside his electrifying, eco-visionary...

Hisham Matar and Louise Steinman | The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

25 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

When Hisham Matar was a university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime’s most prominent critics in exile, he was...

Emma Donoghue and Ramona Ausubel | The Wonder

20 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

With all the propulsive tension that made Room an international bestseller, Emma Donoghue’s new masterpiece, The Wonder, is a tale of two strangers ...

The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution

14 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

"What happens to revolutionaries in America?" This was the question photojournalist Bryan Shih sought to answer through his lens and the first-person ...

James Gleick and Charles Yu | Time Travel: A History

05 Oct 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Leading chronicler of science and technology and best-selling author of The Information and Chaos, James Gleick visits ALOUD with a mind-bending explo...

Riad Sattouf and Elvis Mitchell | The Arab of the Future 2

30 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Best-selling cartoonist and filmmaker Riad Sattouf shares from his highly anticipated continuation of The Arab of the Future—a recollection of his c...

Sharon Olds and Robin Coste Lewis | The Body in Question

28 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Following the Pulitzer prize-winning collection Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds’ newest book of poems, Odes, addresses and embodies love, gender, and sex...

Maureen Dowd and Adam Nagourney | The Year of Voting Dangerously

23 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Before you cast your ballot this November, join ALOUD for an evening of political takes and takedowns with New York Times Pulitzer-winning columnist M...

Mary Beard | SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

21 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

In SPQR, an instant classic from one of our foremost classicists, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome while challenging the comfortable historical...

An Evening With Colson Whitehead

17 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

What if the Underground Railroad were no mere metaphor, but an actual secret network of tracks and tunnels, conductors and steam locomotives beneath t...

Alexi Pappas and Sharon Ann Lee | Tracktown: On the Run

09 Sep 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Fresh off this summer’s Olympics in Rio, "renaissance runner" Alexi Pappas takes a break with ALOUD to discuss her far-reaching talents and interest...

The End of Ice: Stories from Greenland’s Northernmost Villages

20 Jul 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Greenland's ice sheet is now shedding ice so fast (five times faster than it did in the 1990s) that scientists have labeled Greenland's seasonal sea i...

Live From the Vault: Rare Recordings of James Baldwin

15 Jul 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Join us for a live broadcast (on KPFK 90.7 FM) dedicated to the voice of the author and civil rights activist James Baldwin. Brian DeShazor, host of F...

Eileen Myles and Maggie Nelson: Why We Write

13 Jul 2016

Contributed by Lukas

For twenty years, groundbreaking poets Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls; I Must be Living Twice) and Maggie Nelson (National Book Critics Circle Award, The...

PEN Emerging Voices: A Reading

08 Jul 2016

Contributed by Lukas

In partnership with PEN Center USA, ALOUD presents the culminating event of PEN’s 2016 Emerging Voices Fellowship to mark the program’s 20th anniv...

Ben Ehrenreich: The Way to the Spring

30 Jun 2016

Contributed by Lukas

For three years, award-winning journalist Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, living with Palestinian families in its la...

Rosanne Cash and Joe Henry | Composed: The Intersection of Poetry and Song

21 Jun 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Like dreams, poetry and song enter our lives by way of a mystery—unrecognized and often uninvited. Both represent the speaking of the otherwise unsp...

Yaa Gyasi: Homegoing

10 Jun 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Hailed as "an inspiration" by writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, traces 300 years of history and family lineage through a ...

Judith Freeman: The Latter Days

08 Jun 2016

Contributed by Lukas

How does one become a writer? For acclaimed novelist Judith Freeman—born the sixth child of eight in a devout Mormon household, married at seventeen...

An Evening With Eddie Huang

03 Jun 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Chef, food personality, bestselling author of Fresh Off the Boat, and inspiration behind the hit television show of the same name, Eddie Huang made hi...

Vivian Gornick and David L. Ulin: Two Walkers, Two Writers, Two Cities

27 May 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Like writing, cities are all about process, the back-and-forth between our aspirations and our abilities; we walk to discover them and to discover our...

Maxine Hong Kingston and Viet Thanh Nguyen: Two Writers Reflect on War and Peace

25 May 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Visionary writer Maxine Hong Kingston has been writing about war and peace since her landmark 1976 book The Woman Warrior. Her lifelong efforts on thi...

William Finnegan: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

20 May 2016

Contributed by Lukas

New Yorker writer William Finnegan leads a counter life as an excessively compulsive surfer. In his deeply lyrical self-portrait Barbarian Days, Finne...

Geoff Dyer: Searching to See: Experiences from the Outside World

18 May 2016

Contributed by Lukas

From the Watts Towers in Los Angeles to the Forbidden City in Beijing, Geoff Dyer’s newest collection of essays, White Sands: Experiences from the O...

Kate Tempest: The Bricks That Built the Houses

11 May 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Award-winning poet and rapper Kate Tempest’s electrifying debut novel takes us into the beating heart of London in this multi-generational tale of d...

Writing Our Future: Readings from Graduate Writing Programs of the Southland

03 May 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Our third annual gathering unites students from five Southland graduate writing programs—CalArts, Otis College, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and USC—t...

U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera: The Further Adventures of Mr. Cilantro Man

21 Apr 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Juan Felipe Herrera grew up the son of Mexican immigrants in the migrant fields of California, and became the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United...

Adam Hochschild: Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

15 Apr 2016

Contributed by Lukas

Best-selling author, prize-winning historian, and Mother Jones co-founder Adam Hochschild offers a sweeping new history of the Spanish Civil War. Spai...