Library of America presents LOA LIVE

Wednesday, July 19—In The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, and other visionary works melding science fiction, horror, fantasy, and high literature, Ray Bradbury electrified readers and inspired generations of genre-bending younger writers. Acclaimed authors Connie Willis and Kelly Link join LOA Bradbury editor Jonathan R. Eller and SF expert Gary K. Wolfe for a conversation...

Wednesday, June 21—Best-selling author Kate Bolick joins LOA LIVE to discuss one of the most gifted American writers of the mid–twentieth century. Nancy Hale, winner of ten O. Henry Awards and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, explored women and children’s inner lives in luminous and deeply felt work far ahead of its time. Two new LOA paperbacks restore these lost classics: Where the Light...

Wednesday, May 17—Charles Portis’s novels and stories, with their deadpan style, unforgettable characters, and rollicking plots of pursuit, obsession, absurdity, and intrigue, have a passionate following among readers and fellow writers. “His fiction,” Roy Blount, Jr., has said, “is the funniest I know.” To celebrate publication of LOA’s long-awaited collected edition of the author of True Grit, j...

Thursday, April 20—An unparalleled master of the short story, Bernard Malamud ranks among America’s greatest mythmakers and illuminators of the human heart, blending humor and truth in works that, to quote Saul Bellow, “discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York.” To mark publication of the third and final volume of LOA’s Malamud edition, join...

Wednesday, March 15, 2023—From Pulp Era pioneers to the radical innovators of the 1960s and ’70s, visionary women writers have been a transformative force in American science fiction. For Women’s History Month, acclaimed SF authors Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Pamela Sargent, and Sheree Renée Thomas join Lisa Yaszek, editor of LOA’s The Future Is Female!, for a conversation about the writers who smashed...

Wednesday, February 15, 2023—Frederick Douglass’s first recorded speech, “I Have Come to Tell You Something About Slavery,” inaugurated a five-decade career as the fiery, eloquent champion of abolition and emancipation, equal rights and human dignity. Join David W. Blight, Douglass’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and editor of a revelatory new LOA collection, for an exploration of the genius o...

Wednesday, January 18, 2023—One of the most popular works ever written about the Civil War, Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac Trilogy is a masterpiece of historical storytelling and a groundbreaking work of scholarship. Join distinguished historians Gary W. Gallagher, editor of LOA’s new one-volume edition, and Harold Holzer for a conversation about how Catton’s democratic focus on the experience...

November 14, 2022—Is the all-American Jack Kerouac best understood as an immigrant writer? Join LOA Kerouac editor Todd Tietchen (University of Massachusetts, Lowell) and Kerouac scholar and translator Jean-Christophe Cloutier (University of Pennsylvania) for a centenary conversation about Kerouac’s French-Canadian roots and their connections with his legendary masterpieces, with readings by actor...

October 20, 2022—Fifty years ago, the 20th-century’s foremost political philosopher wrote two seminal essays on questions that have new urgency today: Why do politicians lie? What is the relationship between political lies and self-delusion? And how much organized deceit can a democracy endure before it ceases to function? Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy,...

September 14, 2022—Oscar Hijuelos’s rich and radiant novels bring the Cuban American immigrant experience into the heart of American literature. To celebrate Library of America’s publication of The Mambo Kings & Other Novels, LOA Live convened a starry array of writers and musicians, many of them the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s personal friends, for an hour of readings, reminiscences, and more...

July 20, 2022—A starry tribute to Pulitzer Prize-winning poet laureate of deep ecology Gary Snyder commemorates the publication of his Collected Poems in the Library of America series. Governor Jerry Brown, actor Peter Coyote, novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, poets Wang Ping and Robert Hass, and other guests join Library of America for nearly ninety minutes of poetry and personal anecdotes. The prog...

June 29, 2022 — Since 1964 Fiddler on the Roof, one of the most popular Broadway musicals of all time, has also captivated audiences in new forms: in Norman Jewison’s brilliant film adaptation, “the most powerful movie musical ever made” (Pauline Kael); and, most recently, in an acclaimed Yiddish translation paradoxically hailed as “authentic” and “definitive.” Why is Fiddler so beloved, and what...

June 1, 2022—In The Heart of American Poetry, his revelatory new book from Library of America, Edward Hirsch offers deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knew. Hirsch joins LOA Live to discuss how these poems have sustained his own life and how they might uplift our diverse but divided nation. We thank our promotional partner: the Association of Literary Scholars...

May 18, 2022—Beginning with her stunning 1976 memoir The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston has forged a profound, richly imagined, and genre-defying narrative of the American experience from her vantage point as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. To mark publication of the new Library of America edition, Kingston joins Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, editor of the volume and he...

May 3, 2022—Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, is one of the most-produced classics in the American repertory. How is it that this quintessentially American masterpiece continues to resonate so profoundly in places where both “our” and “town” mean radically different things? We join Tappan Wilder, Thornton Wilder’s nephew and liter...

March 16, 2022 — A new Library of America volume presents three powerful firsthand accounts of WWII by veterans of the Pacific War who lived to tell their stories: E. B. Sledge, Samuel Hynes, and Alvin Kernan. Volume editor Elizabeth D. Samet, professor of English at West Point, joins historian Richard B. Frank to discuss what makes these memoirs classics of the modern literature of war. (The view...

February 24, 2022—Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred, a time-travel thriller that transports its heroine from Southern California in the 1970s to a plantation in antebellum Maryland, is widely acknowledged as a visionary masterwork. Obie-winning playwright and screenwriter Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (An Octoroon, HBO’s Watchmen) discusses the process and the challenges of adapting the novel into a...

January 25, 2022—Producer and director Robert Weide (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth) became obsessed with Kurt Vonnegut’s books in high school and began a correspondence with the author that stretched into a twenty-five-year friendship. Weide joins LOA Live to discuss his new documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, which chronicles their relationship and the filmmak...

December 15, 2021—Acclaimed bestselling SF and fantasy writer Connie Willis, editor of the just-released Library of America anthology American Christmas Stories, joins LOA Live for a merrily unconventional yuletide conversation about the uniquely American literature inspired by this most magical time of the year. With Jamaican-born speculative novelist Nalo Hopkinson, whose story caps the collecti...

November 22, 2021—Before her landmark book Silent Spring catalyzed the modern environmental movement, Rachel Carson was internationally celebrated as a “poet of the sea” for a trilogy of prescient books about the world’s oceans—their beauty, fragility, and immense consequence for life on earth. Writer, biologist, and activist Sandra Steingraber, editor of a new LOA edition, joins us for an online...

October 28, 2021—In a remarkable ten-year career cut short by death from tuberculosis at twenty-eight, Stephen Crane ushered American literature into the twentieth century. Novelist, poet, and screenwriter Paul Auster, author of the riveting new Crane biography Burning Boy, joins Library of America for a conversation about the singular life story and even more singular genius behind the stories, s...

October 6, 2021 — Winner of the National Book Award, the Newbery Medal, and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, Virginia Hamilton (1934–2002) wove Black folktales and narratives of African American life and history into a body of work that forever changed American children’s writing and made her its most honored writer. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden joins award-winning children’s book auth...

July 14, 2021—Elizabeth Spencer’s The Light in the Piazza is an exceptionally beautiful and memorable work in the literature of Americans abroad — in this case in Florence, aglow in summer light, shadowed by a family secret. Her 1960 novella inspired in turn a great twenty-first century American musical, the Tony Award-winning adaptation by acclaimed composer Adam Guettel and playwright Craig Luca...

June 17, 2021—Like their counterparts in English Romantic poetry and elsewhere, American poets and writers have been fascinated by birds, compelled by their beauty, their strangeness, their mysterious, fleeting presence. From the colonial period to the present they have sought to evoke the ways birds enchant us, connect us with nature’s wonder, fragility, and sometimes savagery, and offer moments...

May 19, 2021 — An iconic voice in contemporary American writing, Joan Didion through her novels and literary nonfiction reimagined the way stories are told. In the process, this “articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time,” in Joyce Carol Oates’ words, has become an inescapable influence on writers who have followed her. Award-winning essayist and poet David L. Ulin...