Library Talks

In her new book, "Good and Mad" Rebecca Traister uncovers the history of women's anger in American politics—from the suffragettes to #MeToo. She argues that this collective fury is often the hidden force that drives political change, but rarely has it ever been hailed as fundamentally transformative or patriotic. To discuss her book and what it says about our current political state, Traister was...

When famed fashion and society photographer Bill Cunningham died in 2016, he left behind not only an incredible archive of  New York Times  columns and photographs, but two identical copies of a secret memoir that he apparently hoped someone would find. His family discovered the book, which Cunningham himself titled  Fashion Climbing . The Library celebrated its release with the book's editor,  Ch...

The world's leading philanthropists are constantly working to "make the world a better place," leading passionate campaigns against everything from climate change to poverty that had once been the province of governments. Journalist Anand Giridharadas asks whether those rich and powerful people who have most benefitted from "our highly inequitable status quo" are in fact the best candidates to tak...

Vladimin Nabokov's "Lolita" is one of the most widely-read classics of twentieth century; however, few are familiar with the true story of an eleven-year-old-girl named Sally Horner, whose story bears an eerie resemblance to that of Nabokov's Dolores Hayes. In  "The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World,"  author Sarah Weinman traces the connections b...

Tim Gunn is the Emmy Award-winning former producer of "Project Runway," where for 16 seasons he mentored contestants with charm and care. But when he isn't busy making it work, chances are he has his nose in a book. In a live conversation series presented in collaboration with the National Book Foundation, Gunn spoke about some of the most powerful books in his life, the reads that have stayed wit...

Before the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016, there was The Up Stairs Lounge fire. Author Robert Fieseler sets the largely overlooked tragedy of the Up Stairs Lounge arson that killed 32 people in its rightful historical place with "Tinderbox:The Untold Story of The Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation ." The 1973 mass murder dragged a closeted, blue-collar gay community into the na...

Carlo Rovelli is an   Italian theoretical physicist. In his new book, The Order of Time,   Rovelli asks "Why do we remember the past and not the future…What ties time to our nature as persons, to our subjectivity?" Rovelli is the head of the Quantum Gravity group at the Centre de Physique Théorique of Aix-Marseille University and has devoted his life's work to understanding what time might truly b...

Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad's most recent book, Two Daughters: A Father, his Daughters, and their Journey into the Syrian Jihad , is a heart-pounding thriller tracing the radicalization of two teenage girls. In 2013, the two Somali youth abandoned their family and their adopted home in Oslo to travel into Syria and become part of a jihadist movement. As soon as they disappeared, their fath...

For as far back as she can remember, writer Porochista Khakpour has been sick. She was recently diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease and has written her first memoir about her illness, Sick . Khakpour sat down with one of her literary heroes Eileen Myles for a conversation about her experience with the disease and how it has affected her as a writer, activist, and lover of New York City. Khakpou...

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins stopped by the Library earlier this Spring to read some of his work, share a few tips on the creative process, and land a few jokes. He sat down with Paul Holdengräber for a conversation about their favorite writers and his career, from the back pages of Rolling Stone magazine to the Library of Congress. Plus, Collins reads some of his recent work. The best...

Earlier this spring, our friends from The World in Words Podcast recorded a live show at NYPL's very own Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library . The podcast, hosted by  is about languages and the people who speak them. For this special episode, hosts Nina Porzucki and Patrick Cox shared stories about the history of Braille, why whale calls go viral like pop songs, and the difficulties o...

Roxane Gay's latest book, "Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture,"  is a collection of first-person essays that directly tackle rape, sexual assault and harassment. With writer and organizer, Aja Monet, Gay discusses how their stories fit into the national conversation about sexual assault, the pitfalls of the #MeToo Movement, the pressure to "perform one's trauma," and the complex work that...

Twenty years after   Arundhati Roy   won the Booker Prize for   " The God of Smal l Things ,"   she returned to writing fiction in 2017 with her novel " The Ministry of Utmost Happiness ." The book was hailed for its ability to juggle "the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation." Roy spoke with  Viet Thanh Nguyen , whose novel " The Sympathizer...

New York Public Library President Anthony Marx brings together political analysts from the right and left to ask what the future holds for American democracy and for democracies around the world. Peter Beinart is a contributing editor at "The Atlantic" and associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York. Jonah Goldberg is a senior fellow at the American E...

Bernstein Book Award finalist, "Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-first Century" tells the stories of a growing population of "workampers"—retirement-age Americans who live and work on the road full-time, taking seasonal jobs and living out of RVs, vans, and travel trailers. Author Jessica Bruder found that the best way to get to know her nomadic subjects was to join them. In a secondhand...

Playwrights Tarell Alvin McCraney and Donja R. Love stopped by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture earlier this spring. McCraney is the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of "Moonlight" and a MacArthur Fellow. Love is an award-winning playwright, poet, and filmmaker from Philadelphia. In a conversation with NYU professor of theatre, Michael D. Dinwiddie , they discussed Black joy, t...

Until recently,  George Saunders    was best known for his short stories and essays. Then his first novel,  Lincoln in the Bardo , won the 2017 Man Booker Prize . Saunders spoke with Paul Holdengräber about the book as well as the broader arc of his life and career, covering everything from comedy to fathers to Buddhism to reporting on Trump rallies.

Before there was Rikers Island, there was Blackwell's—today known as Roosevelt Island. Historian Stacy Horn's newest book Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York  is the first in-depth look at its dark past. In addition to a penitentiary, the small strip of land housed an almshouse, mental institution, and a number of hospitals for the poor—which, as one can imagin...

Kevin Young, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and New Yorker poetry editor, recently published a new collection of poems titled "Brown: Poems." From James Brown to John Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed., Young meditates on all things "brown" and the ways culture shaped his personal experience growing up in Kansas. Joining him to discuss the book was Claudia Rankine, pr...

Literary icon and friend of The New York Public Library, Tom Wolfe passed away last week at the age of 88. Wolfe became a  Library Lion  in 1981, and is the author of many books , including  The Bonfire of the Vanities  and The Right Stuff. Wolfe's  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test  was first released in 1968, chronicling American counterculture. Half a century later, TASCHEN released an abridgment...

Masha Gessen's book The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia  is the winner of the Library's 2018 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. A defining account of Russia's post-Soviet era, it asks how the country's prospects for democracy disappeared under the rule of Vladimir Putin. Taking on a novelistic approach, Gessen wove together the stories of four protagon...

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"  is one of Zora Neale Hurston's most important works of non-fiction that has never been published until today. Hurston recorded the story in Alabama in the late 1920s. It's a collection of interviews with a man named Kossola, also known as Cudjo Lewis, one of the last known living survivors of the Atlantic slave trade. To discuss the book's history an...

Madeline Miller's first novel,  The Song of Achilles , transformed  The Iliad  from a vast impersonal epic into an intimate and poignant love story. Now Miller turns her mind to Homer's other great work, and one of mythology's most riveting figures, in  Circe . It ' s the retelling of The Odyssey in which a fierce young woman is at the center. Madeline Miller discusses her writing process, witchcr...

Joshua Green's Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising , was one of the first books to shed light on the Trump campaign and Bannon's influence on their way to the White House. A finalist for NYPL's 2018 Helen Berstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, Green stopped by the Library to talk about what it was like to interview the President, what actually motiv...

Last December, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3–2 to repeal net neutrality—which left many people wondering "why should we be concerned about the repeal and what can be done about it?" Library President Tony Marx convened a panel of experts to help shed light on the issue including: Susan Crawford,  Professor at Harvard Law School and member of Mayor Bill de Blasio's Broadband Task Fo...