ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
John McWhorter, Mark Z. Danielewski: Dictionaries and the Bending of Language
12 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Through the etymology of words, the OED exhibits the shape-shifting nature of language across time, reflecting how it bends to the task of describing ...
Sarah Bakewell: At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails
07 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The best-selling author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-Winner How to Live, a spirited account of twentieth century intellectual movements a...
Helen Macdonald: H is for Hawk
05 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald’s story of adopting and raising one of nature’s most vicious predators ha...
Baz Dreisinger: Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World
24 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
As mass incarceration has reached record levels, professor, journalist, and visionary founder of the Prison to College Pipeline (P2CP), Baz Dreisinger...
Ellen R. Malcolm: When Women Win: EMILY’s List and the Rise of Women in American Politics
18 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In a potentially historic election year for women, Ellen R. Malcolm, the pioneering founder of the three-million-member EMILY’s List and one of the ...
Jamaica Kincaid and Sarah Ogilvie: Empire of Words: An Unsentimental Journey to the Birth of the OED
16 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The OED represents arguably the first example of global crowd-sourcing and documents a language rich in loanwords from other cultures. At the same tim...
Radio Imagination: Octavia E. Butler's Los Angeles
11 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Ten years after the passing of Los Angeles’ own Octavia E. Butler–one of America’s best science fiction writers and one of the few African-Ameri...
Hanya Yanagihara and Matthew Specktor: A Little Life: A Novel
24 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most talked-about books of last year (nominated for the Man Booker Prize and The National Book Award), A Little Life is a profoundly bold e...
Rachel Sussman and Ursula K Heise: Deep Time: Ancient Lives and Modern Eyes
18 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Artist Rachel Sussman has traveled around the world to photograph organisms—trees, lichens, bacteria—that are 2,000 or more years old. Confronting...
Ingrid Betancourt: The Blue Line: A Novel
10 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Betancourt, the extraordinary Colombian French politician and activist, whose New York Times bestselling memoir chronicled her six and a half year cap...
Elizabeth Alexander and Kevin Young: Kinds of Blue: Two Poets
05 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Acclaimed poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elizabeth Alexander, who composed and delivered the 2009 inauguration poem for President Obama, offers a de...
Burning Voices: Stories that Fuel Us
21 Jan 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Allen Ginsberg spoke of "the voice in the burning bush," that illuminates as in a fire, yet never destroys even as it burns. Luis Rodriguez, L.A. Poet...
Brian Seibert: What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing
15 Jan 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Brian Seibert, a dance critic for The New York Times, offers an authoritative account of the great American art of tap dancing in his new book, What t...
Michael Cunningham: A Wild Swan: Fairy Tales Reimagined
03 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
A poisoned apple and a monkey’s paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human a...
Simon Winchester: The Pacific: From Silicon Chips and Surfboards to Brutal Dictators and Fading Empires
11 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The acclaimed author and passionate explorer of subjects from the Oxford English Dictionary to earthquakes to the Atlantic Ocean, offers an enthrallin...
Stacy Schiff: The Witches: Salem, 1692
05 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The panic began in 1692, when a minister’s daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women h...
Sandra Cisneros: A House of My Own
29 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In a new memoir, the award-winning novelist, poet, and beloved author of The House on Mango Street, shares over three decades of true stories, essays,...
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me
27 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In a revelatory testament of what it means to be black in America today, this timely new memoir solidifies Coates as one of today’s most important w...
Roberta Kaplan and Lillian Faderman: Then Comes Marriage: United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA
20 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Roberta Kaplan, the renowned litigator who recently won the defining United States v. Windsor case to defeat the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), takes...
Mona Eltahawy: Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution
09 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Award-winning Egyptian American feminist writer and commentator Mona Eltahawy is no stranger to controversy. Through her articles in The Washington Po...
Jessica Jackley and Larissa MacFarquhar: Impossible Idealism: Inventing a Moral Life
02 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to devote yourself to helping others? Larissa MacFarquhar, a staff writer for The New Yorker, follows the joys and defeats of people...
Lauren Groff: Fates and Furies
01 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia delivers an exhilarating new novel about the creative pa...
Mary Karr: The Art of Memoir
25 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past three decades, the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of three previous memoirs, Mary Karr has elevated the art of the deeply p...
An Evening With Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer
22 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of a historic summer of groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions, Justice Stephen Breyer returns to ALOUD to discuss the ever-evolving influ...
Salman Rushdie:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
11 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Returning to ALOUD after receiving the 2012 Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award for his distinguished commitment to libraries and literature, Ru...
Langston Hughes' Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz
30 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
From Africa to the Americas, the south to the north, cities to suburbs, opera to jazz, gospel to be-bop, and "shadows to fire"—discover Ask Your Mam...
Unspeakable Empathy
24 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Leslie Jamison’s critically acclaimed The Empathy Exams confronts our personal and cultural urgency to feel. In The Unspeakable, Los Angeles Times o...
To Live and Eat in L.A.: Food Justice in the Age of the Foodie
15 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The L.A. food scene is as trendy, tweeted, pop-upped, and profit-busting as it’s ever been, and yet more people are going hungry at a greater rate t...
Love, Los Angeles: A Conversation in Words and Images
10 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
"Love, Los Angeles" is a letter in progress—a series of notes, fragments, reflections and odes—written by two native daughters navigating the quic...
Song of Myself: Walt Whitman in Other Words
01 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
With all of its American idioms, virtues, and contradictions, what is it about Walt Whitman’s epic verse "Song of Myself" that so deeply resonates a...
To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City
15 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Can a city’s history be told through restaurant menus? In a second installment of a special collaboration with the Library Foundation to rediscover ...
An Evening With Judy Blume
10 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
On this special evening, one of America’s most beloved storytellers, Judy Blume, will discuss her work—from young adult classics like Are You...
Ordinary Light: A Memoir
29 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet discusses her new memoir, a gorgeous kaleidoscope of self and family that explores the meaning of home against a compl...
A Seismographic Attention: An Evening Of and On Poetry
20 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The masterful poet and essayist shares her latest two works—Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, a dazzling collection of essays on poe...
Prayers for the Stolen
15 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Inspired by the author’s years living in Mexico and ten years of field research, this transporting, the visceral novel tells the story of young wome...
Writing Our Future
01 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Our second annual gathering unites students from five Southland graduate writing programs—CalArts, Otis College, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and USC—...
The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
28 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, has time and time again offered a singular voice of reason to diagnose America’s gr...
The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
28 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, has time and time again offered a singular voice of reason to diagnose America’s gr...
Rebel Spirit: Lyrics of Power and Protest
24 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Espíritu Rebelde: Letras de Poder y ProtestaAna Tijoux en conversación con la poeta y traductora Jen HoferPresentado en conjunto con la Asociación ...
Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land
22 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The veteran journalist and critically acclaimed author of The Lemon Tree brings us another true story of hope in the Palestinian-Israeli impasse. His ...
Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism
03 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
A veteran of twenty years of human rights research and activism and recent recipient of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Bennoune offers an eye-openin...
Crow Fair:Stories
01 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In his first collection in nine years, McGuane confirms his status as a modern master of Big Sky country. With a comic genius that recalls Mark Twain,...
Unveiling North Korea With Fact and Fiction
24 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Coming together for the first time on stage, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson and bestselling nonfiction author Blaine Harden explore how ...
The War in Ukraine: Propaganda and Reality
11 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
A year ago, Russia invaded Ukraine, destroying a peaceful order in Europe and placing its own regime at risk. We in the West have experienced this his...
Story/Time: The Life of An Idea
06 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The multi-talented dancer, choreographer, and director Bill T. Jones presents a provocative collage of movement, music, and personal narrative from St...
Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
05 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and consultant on the Academy Award-winning film 12 Years a Slave discusses his latest book, which unearths extra...
Believer: My Forty Years in Politics
18 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
David Axelrod, the great strategist who masterminded President Barack Obama’s historic election campaigns, sits down with Emmy Award-winning NPR hos...
Expanding our Universe: An Astronomer and a Physicist Walk into a Room…
13 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The work of Wendy L. Freedman, one of the world’s most influential astronomers, is based on being an observer, while that of Caltech cosmologist Sea...
The Sculptor: A Graphic Novel
11 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Internationally recognized authority on comics and visual communication, Scott McCloud wrote the book on how comics work, Understanding Comics. N...
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
06 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Ghettoside tells the kaleidoscopic story of one American murder—one young black man slaying another—and a driven crew of detectives whose creed is...
Guantánamo Diary
29 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Though never charged with a crime, Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been imprisoned at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp since 2002. His deeply personal diar...
Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life From an Addiction to Film
24 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Oswalt—comedian, actor, social media genius—illuminates the story of his early days of the comedy scene in Los Angeles and his unshakeable addicti...
Who We Be: Race and Image at the Twilight of the Obama Era
22 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In the waning days of the Obama era, artists and young people are shaping our discussion about race through activism, social media, film, and art. Aut...
On Such a Full Sea: A Novel
16 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Lee, a deeply influential writer about race, class, and immigrant life in America sets his gripping and fiercely imagined new novel in a chilling dyst...
Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class
14 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
When artists and artisans can’t make a living, we all pay the price. Scott Timberg’s original and important new book, Culture Crash: Th...
An Evening with Carlos Santana
02 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most influential and celebrated musicians of our time, Carlos Santana, will sit down with L.A.'s own Cheech Marin to share the story of his...
The Future of the Religious Past: Assessing The Norton Anthology of World Religions
21 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The comprehensive new Norton Anthology of World Religions, under the editorial direction of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack Miles, assembles primar...
33 Artists in 3 Acts
14 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, Thornton, best-selling author of Seven Days in the Art World, uses a structure of richly linked, cinematic scenes that allow us acces...
The Secret History of Wonder Woman
13 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In her years of research, Lepore—Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer—has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the neve...
An Evening with Colm Tóibín and Rachel Kushner
07 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
From Madame Bovary to Hedda Gabler, some of literature’s most passionate heroines find themselves under the fire of their times. In Tóibín’s The...
Lila: A Novel
06 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
One of our greatest American writers returns to the small Iowa town of Gilead—the setting of her earlier Pulitzer Prize-winning novel—in the unfor...
The Warrior's Return: From Surge to Suburbia
28 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
When we ask young men and women to go to war, what are we asking of them? When their deployments end and they return—many of them changed forever—...
The Poet as Citizen
24 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Two powerful poets read from their work and discuss how poetry can become an active tool for rethinking race in America. Robin Coste Lewis reads from ...
Fomenting Democracy: From Poland's Solidarity to Egypt's Tahrir Square
22 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Co-presented with the Consulate General of Poland.It’s been twenty-five years since the ultimate victory of the Solidarity movement in Poland, a rev...
Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle that Set Them Free
17 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In this master work by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Héctor Tobar tells the miraculous and emotionally textured account of the thirty-three Chil...
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
08 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In his thrilling new biography, Lahr—longtime New Yorker theater critic--gives intimate access to the life and mind of Williams- shedding new light ...
Homer...the Rewrite
03 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are among the most adapted works of literature—why would two young, debut novelists take on the classics today? Zachary ...
Documenting Indigenous Stories Through Film: An Alternative Lens
01 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Two filmmakers share and discuss excerpts from their new documentaries that illuminate indigenous stories rarely seen on film. Bering: Balance and Res...
Through Trying Times: Stories of Loss and Redemption in the American South
26 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow grew up in an out-of-time African-American Louisiana town where slavery’s legacy felt astonishingly close, ...
The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher
18 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
For forty years, Heyday Books has been publishing California's stories—stories no one else has told—from native peoples and newly arrived immigran...
The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us
16 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
From one of our finest literary interpreters of science and nature comes an optimistic manifesto on the earth-shaking changes now affecting every part...
Perfidia: A Novel
10 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Ellroy, one of America’s greatest living crime writers, draws on the history of Los Angeles in his newest novel, Perfidia. Together with Kirn, autho...
A Chinaman's Chance: One Family's Journey and the Chinese American Dream
31 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Weaving history, journalism, and memoir, the author of The Accidental Asian and founder of Citizen University explores the parallel rise of China and ...
It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens
30 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Has the Internet ruined everything or is it our savior? boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, skewers misunderstandings and anxieties ab...
The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle
18 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In a follow-up to his masterful Say Her Name, The Interior Circuit is Goldman’s emergence from the grief of his wife’s death as he embraces Mexico...
Not Uniquely Human: The Astonishing Connection Between Human and Animal Health
11 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In their groundbreaking book Zoobiquity, cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and science writer Kathryn Bowers describe how they arrived at a pan-...
Dear ONE: Love & Longing in Mid-Century Queer America
29 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“Dear ONE,” illuminates the lives of ordinary queer Americans as recounted through letters written between 1953 and 1967, to L.A.’s ONE Magazine...
How I Turned into the Writer I Am Not
27 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The work of British writer Geoff Dyer is frequently classified as “unclassifiable;” his writing is wildly eclectic yet gorgeously coherent. His ne...
Denis Johnson and "The Starlight on Idaho"
24 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, celebrated fiction author Denis Johnson (Jesus’ Son and Tree of Smoke) has been writing some of the most adventurous plays in modern Am...
Love: Three Perspectives—Two Novels and a Psychoanalyst
19 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
New novels from Michelle Huneven (Off Course) and Mona Simpson (Casebook) both deal with love and its moral varieties, from quite different perspectiv...
Lost for Words
04 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Edward St. Aubyn’s five-volume series of semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels is one of the most acclaimed fiction cycles in English literat...
No Further West: The Story of Los Angeles Union Station
30 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In 1939, Union Station opened on the former site of Los Angeles’s original Chinatown—displacing thousands of Chinese and Chinese Americans. The ne...
Sentence After Sentence After Sentence: Three Writers on the Not-Exactly-Random Extraordinary Ordinary Key of Life
21 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Form is an Extension of Content, wrote Charles Olson. What is a writer’s relationship to form? Three accomplished, innovative and genre-crossing wri...
Stand Up Straight and Sing!
16 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
On the occasion of her new memoir, one of America’s most beloved and accomplished classical singers shares her life story: a descendant of generatio...
The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death
14 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Whitehead, the bestselling author of Zone One and an amateur player, lucked into a seat at the biggest card game in town—the World Series of Poker i...
Beautiful Acts of Attention: Performance and Conversation
11 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
One of America’s most talented pianists (Musical America’s 2014 Instrumentalist of the Year), and thought-provoking writers on music, Jeremy Denk ...
The Voices of Women in American Poetry
25 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The Poetry of America’s 2014 national series The Voice of Women in American Poetry celebrates an enormous literary heritage. Distinguished cont...
Writing Our Future: Readings from Graduate Writing Programs of the Southland
18 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
What are the ideas, forms, questions, syntaxes, images, and narratives of our immediate future? Who better as our compass in the wilds of the now than...
Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
11 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In the summer of 1998, Kirn—then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage—set out on a peculiar, fatefu...
The Agony and Fun of Fiction
10 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Join us in a celebration of Bark, a new collection of stories (the first in fifteen years, since Birds of America) by one of America’s most beloved ...
The Crusades of Cesar Chavez
02 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
How do you write/convey/film the story of a visionary figure with tragic flaws who founded a labor union, launched a movement, and inspired a generati...
All Our Names: Dinaw Mengestu
28 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
From the MacArthur Award-winning writer comes a subtle and quietly devastating new novel about love, exile, and the fragmentation of lives that stradd...
A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran
26 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In 2009, three American hikers (and UC Berkeley grads) hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan unknowingly crossed into Iran and were captured by a border patrol. A...
The Great Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
21 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
This National Book Award-winning account illuminates the erosion of the social compact—the collapse of farms, factories, public schools—that had k...
Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away
19 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine that Plato came to life in the twenty-first century and embarked on a multicity speaking tour. How would he handle the host of a cable news pr...
Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture
14 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In this revelatory study of Muslim youth movements that have emerged in cities around the world in the years since 9/11 and in the wake of the Arab Sp...
Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot
13 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
On February 21, 2012, five young women entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow wearing neon-colored dresses, tights, and balaclavas to pe...
The Un-Private Collection: Jeff Koons and John Waters
25 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Artist Jeff Koons and filmmaker/author/photographer John Waters discuss Koon’s innovative and ever-changing art-making practice, which ranges from s...
Writing Los Angeles
21 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Walter Mosley, one of America’s most admired crime novelists joins one of its newest stars—Attica Locke—for a conversation about noir, race and ...
Edward Frenkel and Chris Carter
14 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Frenkel, one of the 21st century’s leading mathematicians, works on one of the biggest ideas to come out of mathematics in the last 50 years: the La...