ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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, the 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, and it is pure WordTheatre.

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.