ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

What does it mean to devote yourself to helping others? Larissa MacFarquhar, a staff writer for The New Yorker, follows the joys and defeats of people living lives of extreme ethical commitment in her new book, Strangers Drowning. Jessica Jackley, co-founder of the revolutionary micro-lending site Kiva, in her book, Clay Water Brick, explores the triumphs and difficulties of using entrepreneurship to change the world. Sharing inspiring—and sometimes unsettling—stories of do-gooders from around the world, MacFarquhar and Jackley will challenge us to think about what we value most, and why.

The award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia delivers an exhilarating new novel about the creative partnership of marriage, and the yoke joining love, art, and power. Framed in Greek mythology and told from the opposing perspectives of husband and wife, Fates and Furies digs beneath the surface of a “good” marriage and vividly explores the duplicitous nature of a loving, yet surprisingly complicated relationship over the course of 24 years. One of the most talented writers of her generation, Groff visits ALOUD to discuss her dazzling literary masterpiece that will stir both the mind and the heart.

Over the past three decades, the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of three previous memoirs, Mary Karr has elevated the art of the deeply personal genre to become one of the most influential memoirists working today. In her newest work, Karr pulls back the curtain on her craft. The rare, brilliant practitioner who is also a distinguished teacher, Karr breaks down key elements from her favorite memoirs and reflects on the challenges of transforming memories for the page. Reserve your seat at ALOUD for a master class with a master craftsman.

In the wake of a historic summer of groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions, Justice Stephen Breyer returns to ALOUD to discuss the ever-evolving influences on America’s highest court. In his latest book, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities, Justice Breyer considers the great legal challenges facing our increasingly globalized and interdependent world. From sweeping national security policy to the use of online sites like Airbnb for international commerce, judicial awareness is no longer contained within America’s borders. Hear from one of today’s most pragmatic legal luminaries on how the world beyond our national frontiers is steering American law and how this expansion is drawing American jurists into a new role of "constitutional diplomats." Co-presented with The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

Returning to ALOUD after receiving the 2012 Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award for his distinguished commitment to libraries and literature, Rushdie shares his newest work of fiction. Inspired by the traditional "wonder tales" of the East and set in a strange near-future New York City, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. Satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption, Rushdie’s novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today’s world. Discussing this work with Héctor Tobar, one of L.A.’s most respected voices, Rushdie takes the stage for a magical evening of storytelling.

From Africa to the Americas, the south to the north, cities to suburbs, opera to jazz, gospel to be-bop, and "shadows to fire"—discover Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, Hughes’ response to the riots at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival. Emmy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman, originally commissioned by Carnegie Hall to create the first vocal performance of Hughes’ poem, created an orchestral composition with plural voices including Hughes’, projected images, and recorded selections drawn from a dozen musical traditions, in an epic tapestry evoking the turbulent flux of American cultural life. This special presentation of Ask Your Mama, adapted for the ALOUD stage, features Karpman and soprano Janai Brugger, and marks the release of a new recording of the orchestral work.

Leslie Jamison’s critically acclaimed The Empathy Exams confronts our personal and cultural urgency to feel. In The Unspeakable, Los Angeles Times opinion columnist Meghan Daum defiantly pushes back against the false sentimentality and shrink-wrapped platitudes that surround so much of the contemporary American experience. With piercing insight and wit, hear from two of today’s most thought-provoking and intimately honest essayists grappling with the modern complexities of being human.

The L.A. food scene is as trendy, tweeted, pop-upped, and profit-busting as it’s ever been, and yet more people are going hungry at a greater rate than perhaps any other moment in the city’s history. As the USDA has declared, Los Angeles is the nation’s “epicenter of hunger,” where the phrase “food insecurity”—lacking reliable access to nutritious and safe food—has become as much a part of the local vernacular for activists and organizers as sunshine and traffic. In a special collaboration with the Library Foundation to rediscover the Los Angeles Public Library’s vast archive, USC professor Josh Kun uses the Library’s menu collection to explore the shaping of Los Angeles. With vintage menus as our guides, join Kun for a conversation about the struggles and triumphs of contemporary food activism with urban gardener Ron Finley, the Healthy School Food Coalition’s Elizabeth Medrano and Community Services Unlimited Inc.’s Neelam Sharma.

"Love, Los Angeles" is a letter in progress—a series of notes, fragments, reflections and odes—written by two native daughters navigating the quickly-changing landscape of contemporary Los Angeles. Through photographs and texts, journalist and essayist Lynell George and writer Marisela Norte have tunneled on foot from Boyle Heights to Venice and the Miracle Mile to Arcadia, crisscrossing time, place, dreams, and memory. Share in these in-the-moment observations of hope, grit, faith and longing as they are presented for the first time on stage, and eavesdrop on this intimate look into the heart of our city.

With all of its American idioms, virtues, and contradictions, what is it about Walt Whitman’s epic verse "Song of Myself" that so deeply resonates across other cultures and languages? In 2013, Christopher Merrill, the director of the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa, launched "Every Atom," a multimedia project to collectively translate the poem in 15 languages, working with fellow poets and translators Luis Alberto Ambroggio and Sholeh Wolpé. Join us for a spirited evening of poetry and music, featuring a performance by internationally renowned musician Sahba Motallebi, as these collaborators explore how Whitman’s radical poetic vision lives and breathes in English, Persian, and Spanish.