ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

In Connelly’s newest courtroom drama, lawyer Mickey Haller defends a murder case in which the murder victim was his very own former client, a prostitute he thought he’d rescued and put on the straight and narrow path. Haller is forced to find justice for both of his clients, living and dead. As he faces the "gods of guilt," he must struggle with personal demons for a shot at his own redemption. Connelly discusses the mysteries of crime writing with Miles Corwin, acclaimed author, and former crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

As an activist lawyer and leading member of the African National Congress, Albie Sachs lost his right arm and the sight in one eye when his car was bombed by agents of South Africa’s security forces in 1988. After recuperating in London, he returned to South Africa and played a key role in drafting its democratic constitution. Nelson Mandela appointed him a judge in the new constitutional court, where Sachs made a number of landmark rulings, including recognizing gay marriage. Sachs, a man with a remarkable ability to extract positive emotions from wounding events, shares with us South Africa’s experience in healing divided societies.

Roy Choi, border-crossing chef and co-founder of the Kogi BBQ taco truck, pays homage to the city that he loves in this memoir, a tale of his journey from childhood afternoons at his parents’ Korean restaurant, to pizza-fueled studying at the Culinary Institute of America, to becoming one of America’s most acclaimed chefs. Join us as Choi takes a break from the kitchen to talk about his new book, L.A. Son, a flavorful love letter to Los Angeles.

Hailed as the creator of war reportage comics, Joe Sacco uses darkly funny short-form comics to recount conflicts, including his latest book The Great War, an illustrated panorama of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Gene Luen Yang, the author of the acclaimed graphic novel American Born Chinese, brings clear-eyed storytelling and magical realism to tell parallel stories of two young people caught up on opposite sides of China’s violent Boxer Rebellion in his new work, Boxers and Saints. Join these two daring writers for a conversation on how the graphic novel and graphic non-fiction —rising from the frontlines of popular culture—can serve our understanding of history.

What happens when formerly estranged peoples look at their entwined history together? After attending a Zen Peacemaker retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2000, Steinman embarked on a decade-long exploration—into her own family’s history in a small Polish town—as well as an immersion in the exhilarating and discomforting, sometimes surreal, yet ultimately healing process of Polish-Jewish reconciliation taking place in today’s democratic Poland.

In her new collection of selected stories, Taraghi—one of Iran’s best-known and most critically acclaimed authors—draws on her childhood experiences in Tehran, adult exile in Paris, and subsequent returns to post-revolution Tehran. Her stories are, as Azar Nafisi writes, “filled with passion, curiosity, empathy, as well as mischief—definitely mischief.” Listen in as Taraghi shares from The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons, made fully accessible to the English-speaking audience for the first time.

The National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges in his new book. From families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, and schizophrenia, to children who are prodigies or transgender—Solomon illuminates the universal experiences of difference and the triumph of love.

Weisman offers a long-awaited follow-up to The World Without Us, his brilliant thought experiment that considered how the Earth could heal if relieved of humanity’s constant pressures. Now, after traveling to more than 20 countries to ask four questions that experts agreed were probably the most important on Earth—he explores the complexity of calculating how many humans this planet can hold without capsizing.

Seven years after the publication of the extraordinary novel After This, the National Book Award-winning author returns with Someone, a transformative novel about childhood, adolescence, motherhood, and old age, deftly stitched together by McDermott’s lyrical voice. McDermott takes the stage to discuss this masterful portrait of the 20th-century Irish-American family.

How was our understanding of whales transformed from grotesque monsters, useful only as wallowing kegs of fat, to playful friends of humanity and bellwethers of environmental devastation? Burnett, a historian of science and energetic polymath, offers a sweeping history of how science, politics, and simple human wonder have transformed our way of seeing these behemoths from below.