Library of America presents LOA LIVE

Monday, June 22—William Kennedy is to Albany what Joyce is to Dublin and Faulkner to Mississippi, a fictional alchemist who transforms his native place into novels at once deeply evocative of their setting and movingly universal in their human resonances. In The Albany Trilogy, just out from Library of America, three of Kennedy’s masterpieces—including his beloved novel Ironweed—take readers from...

Walt Whitman’s outrage at American politics and politicians was surpassed only by his passionate faith in democracy’s future. Both his anger and his hope fire his visionary prose writings on democracy, gathered for the first time in a new Library of America paperback edited by acclaimed political commentator and literary critic David Bromwich. Join Bromwich, Mark Edmundson (author of Song of Ourse...

John Quincy Adams was the great visionary of America’s post-founding era, a writer and orator of consummate skill who reframed the origins and principles of the republic for a new generation. It’s fitting then that as the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of independence, that Adams should be the focus of renewed attention. One new book in particular caught our eye at Library of America: Ame...

May 5, 2026—In March 1880, an extraordinary American traveled to Washington, DC, to testify before a Senate committee investigating the exodus of formerly enslaved people from the Southern states. Vividly describing the nightmarish violence and exploitation inflicted by “the very men who held us slaves,” the Louisiana freedman Henry Adams spoke of Black resistance to terrorism and disenfranchiseme...

Tuesday, April 7, 2026—Confronting disenfranchisement, legal segregation, and terrorist violence in the aftermath of the Civil War, Black Americans challenged white supremacy in word and deed in a prolonged struggle to create a better, more just nation. Join Tyina L. Steptoe, editor of the new two-volume LOA edition of writings from the Jim Crow era, and historians Keisha N. Blain and Manisha Sinh...

Thursday, March 12—Inaugurating a series of programs to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, authors and scholars Michael Gorra, Wendy S. Walters, and Brenda Wineapple discuss three classic short stories, each written within fifty years of the American Revolution, that imaginatively explore the meaning of that founding moment: Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” Willia...

February 24—Following a screening of the documentary Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry during the weekend of Feb. 20–22, 2026, filmmaker Laura Dunn and Mary Berry, executive director of The Berry Center, joined Library of America for an online Q&A focused on the film and its subject: author, poet, farmer, and activist Wendell Berry and his home in Henry County, KY. Hosted by Ben Lasman, onli...

Wednesday, February 18—Called “the greatest American diary of the nineteenth century,” the journal of the patrician New York City lawyer George Templeton Strong stands as a remarkable documentary record of the Civil War and a captivating literary accomplishment in its own right. Unfolding like an epic historical novel, Strong’s precise and colorful account plunges readers into the midst of an unpr...

Wednesday, December 17—“The best play I’ve seen this season,” says New York Magazine’s Sara Holdren about Liberation, Bess Wohl’s moving exploration of the women’s movement through the story of an Ohio consciousness-raising group in the early 1970s and a daughter who yearns to understand her mother’s life and her own. To discuss this timely play and the movement’s powerful literary roots, Wohl joi...

December 2—Groundbreaking critic and revered scholar Helen Vendler could “second-guess the sixth sense of the poem,” wrote Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. For Vendler, who died last year, the language and form of a poem can reveal its writer’s deepest thoughts and feelings—an empathic approach that found full expression in her last essays, collected in the new Library of America special publication...

Monday, November 24—Like a signal from a distant star, Octavia E. Butler’s luminous fiction jumps galactic distances to relay searing, often surprising revelations about the universe we inhabit and the planet we call home. In Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy, just published by Library of America, three classics of Afrofuturist speculative fiction from the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award winne...

Wednesday, September 10—Two centuries on, Alexis de Tocqueville’s brilliant Democracy in America remains the most prescient account of the virtues, and potential dangers, of our politics and culture. How do Tocqueville’s insights illuminate current events and political trends, both at home and abroad? Join four distinguished scholars for a lively debate on the continued resonance of this enduring...

Thursday, May 8—Eighty years ago the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany closed the curtain on six years of total war in Europe, a conflict that tested the courage and forever changed the lives of five young Americans who survived to write astonishing personal narratives of their experiences, from the frontlines of the Battle of the Bulge to the navigator’s seat of a B-17 bomber. To mark the 8...

Thursday, April 17—Sylvia Plath’s bold and incandescent poems have struck a deep chord with generations of readers. A visionary writer who scaled astonishing literary heights in her short life, Plath may best be understood, says acclaimed classicist and Plath devotee Sarah Ruden, as a modern mythmaker: an artist who, at the peak of her powers, transcends autobiography to give us poems that describ...

Tuesday, March 11—“The rise of totalitarian governments,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the central event of our world.” In her masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt linked the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, seeing them as twin manifestations of a terrifying new political system that sought absolute control over all aspects of life. How does this book, which probed the psychology and pa...

Thursday, November 14—Grief, Joan Didion wrote, “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” In two luminous memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, collected in the capstone volume of Library of America’s Didion edition, she relates the twin tragedies of her husband and daughter’s deaths with stunning precision, poignancy, and power—a late flowering of her genius th...

Tuesday, May 21—Published in 1961, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer announced a major new voice in American fiction. In this lush, New Orleans–based novel, the forty-four-year-old doctor-turned-writer set out to explore what he called “the strange spiritual malady of the modern age.” What he gave us, says writer Paul Elie, editor of a new LOA edition of Percy’s novels, is “the first work of what we ca...

Monday, April 15—Why does the poet Robert Frost continue to beguile and intrigue readers 150 years after his birth? What is it about the four-time Pulitzer winner’s poems—deceptively simple evocations of landscape, work, village life, and love suffused with remarkable power, subtlety, and complexity—that makes them so quintessentially American? Join former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith and Jay...

Wednesday, March 6—Brash, opinionated, funny, and an indefatigable champion of the vulnerable over the rich and well-connected, Jimmy Breslin brought heart and knockout prose to every column and book he wrote. From peerless coverage of the assassinations of JFK and Malcolm X to the plight of immigrants, the Mafia, and the AIDS crisis, Breslin’s instinct for a story’s untold, personal dimensions gi...

Tuesday, February 6—The story told and retold about America’s founding often excludes the Black communities that existed during the Revolution and the early republic. Black Writers of the Founding Era, a new volume from Library of America, changes that. Inspired by the struggle for independence, Black Americans made bold, insightful contributions to debates about the meaning of the Revolution and...

Wednesday, January 17, 2024—Don DeLillo is “our most necessary writer,” says his longtime editor Gerald Howard, one whose “intuitions and sentences have led him deeper into previously uncharted regions of our psyche than any other contemporary novelist.” Isn’t it time the Swedish Academy took notice? To kick off a new year of LOA LIVE, Howard joins Mark Osteen, editor of the LOA DeLillo edition, f...

Tuesday, December 5, 2023—To cap LOA LIVE’s fall season, a killer lineup of panelists explores classic crime fiction of the 1960s, from Donald Westlake-writing-as-Richard Stark’s taut smash-and-grab heist novel The Score to Patricia Highsmith’s eerie meta-thriller The Tremor of Forgery. Join Geoffrey O’Brien, editor of Crime Novels of the 1960s, along with noir maven Sarah Weinman (The Real Lolita...

Wednesday, November 8—The expatriate literary scene in Paris that flourished around Richard Wright and James Baldwin produced brilliant writing, intellectual ferment, and bitter rivalries—all of it, and much else from that turbulent time, thrillingly explored in John A. Williams’s explosive 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am, a lost classic newly published in paperback by LOA.   Merve Emre (The Pe...

Wednesday, October 25—For more than sixty years, in such works as Funnyhouse of a Negro and Ohio State Murders, Adrienne Kennedy has bewitched audiences with plays that transform stages into dreamscapes, actors into ghosts, and personal history into myth. One of only five living writers in the Library of America series, Kennedy “never [takes] a straight path from one event to another if a more bea...

Thursday, September 21—In the hundred years since The Great Gatsby was published, American society and culture have been utterly transformed. Why then do readers and writers continue to turn to this luminous novel of money, class, 1920s glamour, and reckless love to find the elusive key to the meaning of America? What is the secret of its astonishing staying power? To kick off the Fall 2023 season...