Aloud @ Los Angeles Public Library

The acclaimed poet and columnist for The Nation discusses her new book of essays dealing with sex, death, ex-lovers, politics, motherhood, aging, and learning to drive.

From one of this country's most original voices comes a masterful new novel about a young Mexican-American who falls in love while sweeping the decks of an apartment building named The Flowers. In the midst of exploding racial violence, he must decide what he values and what he can do about it.

The author of the national bestseller The Omnivore's Dilemma returns with a manifesto for our times: what to eat, what not to eat, and how to think about health.

The author of Reservation Road sets his mesmerizing new novel in 1959 Japan when Haruko, a non-aristocratic woman, marries the Crown Prince and enters the sealed-off and mysterious Japanese monarchy.

The author's mother, Susan Sontag, died of a particularly acute form of leukemia in 2004. \"This,\" he writes, \"is a book of questions about what we know and, perhaps more importantly, what we can take in when confronted by the death of a loved one.\"

The award-winning historian offers a new intellectual biography of the twentieth century's greatest experimental physicist, whose revolutionary discoveries included the orbital structure of the atom.

Drawing on more than 6,000 pages of Leonardo's surviving notebooks, Capra reveals Leonardo-whose studies ranged from the flight patterns of birds to the mechanics of light-as the unacknowledged \"father of science.\"

Key voices in the development of downtown Los Angeles discuss their visions for the future.

In his explosive new book, Kennedy--a Harvard law scholar--shows how current fears of \"selling out\" are expressed in thought and practice and clarifies the effect they have on individuals and on American society as a whole.

Frum-former speechwriter for President Bush-argues that Republicans, like the Democrats before them, have been the victims of their own success. He outlines a fresh vision of a GOP that can rebuild the conservative majority and elect the next Republican president.

What if you could harness the power of the free market to solve the problems of poverty, hunger, and inequality? To some, it sounds impossible. But the Nobel Peace Prizewinner who invented micro-credit is doing exactly that. Yunus's \"Next Big Idea\" offers a pioneering model for nothing less than a new, more humane form of capitalism.

In her unconventional biography, Freeman illuminates the psyche and mystery of Chandler and his relationship with his much older wife as well as the City of Angels, to which Chandler's work is forever wed.

Slaves harvest cocoa in Ivory Coast, make charcoal used to produce steel in Brazil, weave carpets in India. The list goes on. Bales recounts his 15-year journey in search of real world solutions to ending slavery. Bales will introduce special guest Maria Suarez, an immigrant victim of sex trafficking.

Known also as an essayist, translator, and activist on behalf of poetry, literacy, and the environment, the former United States Poet Laureate (1995-1997) is a poet of great eloquence, clarity, and force. About Hass's work, poet Stanley Kunitz wrote, \"Reading a poem by Robert Hass is like stepping into the ocean when the temperature of the water is not much different from that of the air. You scarcely know, until you feel the undertow tug at you, that you have entered into another element.\"

The longtime New Yorker writer--who once spent an evening with Jackie Onassis, smoking cigarettes and talking about men--culls from 20 years of probing and delightful cultural critiques of fashion, its personages, trends and history, to celebrate the lasting significance of its ephemeral qualities.

Two writers discuss their experiences writing at the historic MacDowell Colony then read from work begun or completed there. www.macdowellcolony.org

The New Yorker cartoonist who can explain phenomena such as \"The Museum of One's Kitchen\" (including the Refrigerator Door Gallery and the Cabinet of Many Teas) recently collaborated with Steve Martin on The Alphabet from A to Y With Bonus Letter Z.

On March 5, 2007, a car bomb exploded on Mutanabbi Street, the lively center of Baghdad bookselling, filled with bookstores, cafes, and book stalls. 30 people were killed; more than 100 were wounded. Join poets and writers to memorialize this wounding of Baghdad's literary and intellectual heart.

In the 2003 National Book Award judges' citation for his New Selected Poems, Kinnell was called \"America's preeminent visionary,\" with work in 12 collections that, \"greets each new age with rapture and abundance ... [and] sets him at the table with his mentors: Rilke, Whitman and Frost.\"

In this new novel by the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting, an émigré Chinese writer opens a restaurant in Atlanta in a daunting attempt to find his voice as a poet, support his family, and realize the American Dream.