Aloud @ Los Angeles Public Library

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—how do they recover some facsimile of normalcy? MacArthur award-winning author David Finkel discusses the struggling veterans chronicled in his deeply affecting book, Thank You for Your Service with Skip Rizzo, Director for Medical Virtual Reality at the Institute for Creative Technologies at USC—who has pioneered the use of virtual reality-based exposure therapy to treat veterans suffering from PTSD.*Presented in association with The L.A. Odyssey Project*Click here to see photos from the program!

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 her upcoming poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus, which lyrically catalogs representations of the black figure in the fine arts, with Claudia Rankine—a poet whose incendiary new book, Citizen: An American Lyric—is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our often named “post-racial” society.*Click here to see photos from the program!

Co-presented with the Consulate General of PolandIt’s been twenty-five years since the ultimate victory of the Solidarity movement in Poland, a revolution that ultimately led to the fall of communism. Adam Michnik, a Solidarity activist jailed by the Polish communist regime for his dissident activities, and now among Poland’s most prominent public figures, discusses the legacy of that revolution with Yasmine El Rashidi, a young intrepid Cairo-based journalist whose essays and articles on the (unfinished) Egyptian revolution were nominated for an Amnesty International Media Award. Can a velvet revolution offer any useful lessons to a bloody one?*Click here to see photos from the program!

In this master work by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Héctor Tobar tells the miraculous and emotionally textured account of the thirty-three Chilean miners who were trapped beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking sixty-nine days. Join us to hear this astounding account of the personal histories that brought “Los 33” to the mine and the spiritual elements that surrounded their work in the deep down dark. *Click here to see photos from the program!

In his thrilling new biography, Lahr—longtime New Yorker theater critic--gives intimate access to the life and mind of Williams- shedding new light on his warring family, his lobotomized sister, his sexuality, and his misreported death. In the sensational saga of Williams’ rise and fall, Lahr captures his tempestuous public persona and backstage life where Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan and others had scintillating walk-on parts. Maupin joins Lahr for a fascinating conversation about one of the most brilliant playwrights of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation’s sense of itself.

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 Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey offers a playful and fragmented remix of Odysseus’s long journey home. Told from the perspective of a minor player in the Trojan War, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles adds new dimension to the Greek heroes. Together at ALOUD for the first time, these young authors discuss the hubris and heart it takes to rewrite a classic with a fresh and contemporary voice.*Presented in association with The L.A. Odyssey Project*Click here to see photos from the program!

Co-presented with Ambulante CaliforniaTwo filmmakers share and discuss excerpts from their new documentaries that illuminate indigenous stories rarely seen on film. Bering: Balance and Resistance, by Lourdes Grobet—one of Mexico’s most renowned photographers—lyrically reflects on an Inuit community’s search for new values while struggling to reconcile the past. In Indian 101, filmmaker Julianna Brannum focuses on lessons taught by her great aunt LaDonna Harris, the Comanche activist who helped negotiate the return of sacred ground to the Taos Pueblo Indians. Far apart geographically, these two communities are irrevocably linked as they navigate their contemporary history. Both films will screen in Los Angeles in their entirety as part of the first edition of Ambulante California's Documentary Film Festival. *Click here to see photos from the program!

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, reverberating in the elders’ stories and the near-constant wash of violence. Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward writes powerfully about the poverty of her Mississippi childhood and the pressures it brought on men and women, revealing disadvantages that bred a certain kind of tragedy. In this conversation, two accomplished storytellers take the stage to discuss their memoirs that pay homage to the troubled past of the South with emotional honesty and moments of stark poetry. *Click here to see photos from the program!

For forty years, Heyday Books has been publishing California's stories--stories no one else has told--from native peoples and newly arrived immigrants, stories about the delicate Calliope hummingbirds and 14,000 foot peaks, to the explorations of California's most original thinkers, poets, and visual artists. Bancroft's new book describes an organization run on passion and devoted to beauty. Malcolm's friend and colleague, Vincent Medina, a member of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Area, will join the discussion.*Click here to see photos from the program!

From one of our finest literary interpreters of science and nature comes an optimistic manifesto on the earth-shaking changes now affecting every part of our lives, and those of our fellow creatures. Through her compelling and meditative prose, Ackerman reminds us how the human and natural worlds coexist, coadapt and interactively thrive.*Click here to see photos from the program!

Ellroy, one of America’s greatest living crime writers, draws on the history of Los Angeles in his newest novel, Perfidia. Together with Kirn, author of a recent riveting take on a Los Angeles cold case, Ellroy uncovers a corrupt city under the shadow of Pearl Harbor, where the investigation of a hellish murder of a Japanese family throws together and rips apart four driven souls.*Click here to see photos from the program!

Weaving history, journalism, and memoir, the author of The Accidental Asian and founder of Citizen University explores the parallel rise of China and the Chinese American—how Chinese immigrants have exceled despite racism and xenophobia, and how they reconcile competing beliefs about what constitutes success, virtue, and belonging in a time of deep flux. From Confucius to the Constitution, Liu discusses his new collection of personal essays that provide insight into the evolving Chinese American dream.*Click here to see photos from the program!

Has the Internet ruined everything or is it our savior? boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, skewers misunderstandings and anxieties about the online lives of teens often voiced by teachers and parents in her eye-opening new book. Integrating a decade’s worth of interviews with teens, boyd injects nuances and complexity into the discussion of how they are trying to carve out a space of their own, as their lives are increasingly mediated through services like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Anyone interested in the impact of emerging technologies on society, culture, and commerce in the years to come will want to catch this conversation.*Click here to see photos from the program!

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’s capital as his home—a city which stands defiantly apart from so many of the social ills and violence wracking Mexico. Yet as the narco war rages on and with the restoration to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico City’s special apartness seems threatened. In setting out to understand the menacing challenges the city now faces, Goldman delivers a poetic and philosophical chronicle that explores a remarkable and often misunderstood metropolis.*Click here to see photos from the program!

In their groundbreaking book Zoobiquity, cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and science writer Kathryn Bowers describe how they arrived at a pan-species approach to medicine. Animals do indeed get diseases ranging from brain tumors and heart attacks to anxiety and eating disorders, just like we do—and the authors explore how animal and human commonality can be used to diagnose, treat, and heal patients of all species. In her illuminating new book, Animal Madness, Laurel Braitman chronicles her parallel discoveries of what nonhuman animals can teach us about mental illness and recovery. Join us to hear what we can learn from a blind elephant, compulsive parrots, depressed gorillas, and a cow with anger management issues.*Click here to see photos from the program!

“Dear ONE,” illuminates the lives of ordinary queer Americans as recounted through letters written between 1953 and 1967, to L.A.’s ONE Magazine, the first openly gay and lesbian periodical in the United States. Looking for love, friendship, advice or understanding, readers wrote of loneliness and longing, of joy and fulfillment, and of their daily lives, hidden from history. This dramatic reading is adapted and directed by Zsa Zsa Gershick from material from ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC.

The work of British writer Geoff Dyer is frequently classified as “unclassifiable;” his writing is wildly eclectic, yet gorgeously coherent. His new book, Another Great Day at Sea—about life on an American aircraft carrier—is at the same time a travelogue, unerring social observation, and honed comedy. Zona, his meditation on the film Stalker, by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, was supposed to be a book about tennis; his book about D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, is essentially about not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence; and Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It is definitely not a self-help book. Rodman and Dyer will attempt to account for the “singular restlessness” of Dyer’s writing, while happily digressing on other subjects. *Click here to see photos from the program!

For decades, celebrated fiction author Denis Johnson (Jesus’ Son and Tree of Smoke) has been writing some of the most adventurous plays in modern American theater, with a major trilogy focused on the Cassandra family, a clan so star-crossed that several members are incarcerated, institutionalized or in and out of rehab. The epistolary “The Starlight on Idaho” finds the youngest son, Cass, sobering up in a clinic housed in what was once a hot-sheet motel on Idaho Street, the Starlight. While he’s there he writes screeds, pleas and confessions to members of his family, his AA sponsor, his grade school love and Satan. In this unique adaptation, addressor and addressee voice the letters together. Literature as only Denis Johnson can create it, “The Starlight on Idaho” is not quite a story, not quite a play, it is pure WordTheatre. *Click here to see photos from the program! 

New novels from Michelle Huneven (Off Course) and Mona Simpson (Casebook) both deal with love and its moral varieties, from quite different perspectives. As their characters variously struggle to forge lasting connections, they evoke issues long familiar to the psychoanalyst. Is it possible to separate out the strands of fantasy and projection, family patterning, and primal need from adult love? What makes highly intelligent, thoughtful people so thoroughly lose their way in love’s enchantment? Joining the authors to discuss love’s tangled and complex morality is eminent psychoanalyst and theorist Dr. Christopher Bollas.Click here to see photos from the program!

Edward St. Aubyn’s five-volume series of semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels are one of the most acclaimed fiction cycles in English literature. Michael Silverblatt talks with St. Aubyn about his first novel since completing his series, hailed for its satirizing of the English aristocracy. In Lost for Words, St. Aubyn employs his lethal dose of humor in a send-up of England’s premier literary prize and its controversial, eco-disastrous sponsor. St. Aubyn’s acid pen skewers the competing authors as well as the judges and corporate, political and media interests that influence such prizes.*Click here to see photos from the program!