ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

Bechdel follows her best-selling graphic memoir, Fun Home, with a second tale of filial sleuthing-this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, amateur actor, and also a woman, unhappily married to a gay man. Bechdel's quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf leads through psychoanalysis and Dr. Seuss to a truce that will move all adult children of gifted mothers.

Upon her mother's passing, Williams inherited three shelves of journals. Not only was it a shock that her mother kept journals, but it was also a shock to see what the journals contained-pages and pages of blank pages. In fifty-four chapters that unfold like a series of yoga poses, each with its own logic and beauty, Williams-author of the iconic memoir Refuge-creates a soaring meditation on the mystery of her mother's empty journals, always asking, \"What does it mean to have a voice?\"

Javier Sicilia, Mexican poet-turned-activist and leader of Mexico's Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, is turning personal horror into hope for himself and his country. After the death of his son at the hands of drug traffickers last year, Sicilia swapped his pen for protest, pushing to stop the bloodshed. Leading the fight with a radiant intellect and deep faith, this TIME Magazine Protester of the Year speaks on the power of words as an instrument for peace, recognizing that responsibility lies on both sides of the border.

Slavoj Zizek, renowned Slovenian critical theorist, dissects and reconstructs three major faith-based systems of belief in the world today, showing how each faith understands humanity and divinity-and how the differences between the faiths may be far stranger than they at first seem.

Smart, comical, and sensible, this children's book-follow-up to the widely successful Go the F*** to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, offers kids the opportunity to recognize their tactics, giggle at their own mischievousness, and empathize with their parents' struggles, while providing both kids and parents common ground to talk about one of the most stressful aspects of parenting.

Smith takes us on a trip-mind-blowing and humorous-deep into the international underground where super-high-grade marijuana is developed, produced, sold, and entered into the Super Bowl of the marijuana world, Amsterdam's Cannabis Cup. Moving between California, the hub of the legalization and decriminalization debate, and the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, Smith infiltrates a world where science, nature, and the sometimes criminal intersect.

Two celebrated poets read from their most recent work and discuss how Los Angeles has influenced their writing, how some influences overlap and others diverge. Born in Watts, Wanda Coleman witnessed Simon Rodia working on the Towers firsthand. Coleman's work is often concerned with the outsider, both in terms of race and poverty in California. Lewis MacAdams is a poet, journalist, filmmaker, and activist who has written on topics ranging from cultural history to the environment. Known as the Los Angeles River's most influential advocate, he co-founded the Friends of the LA River (FoLAR) and dubbed it \"a forty year art work.\"

Using film clips and text in a detailed play-by-play of Harpo Marx's physical movements, Koestenbaum celebrates the astonishing range of Harpo's body-- its kinks, sexual multiplicities, somnolence, Jewishness, \"cute\" pathos, and more. Holding up a mirror to Marx's 13 films, Koestenbaum takes a sharp look at American culture and mythology and the intimacies of how we communicate without words.

Lelyveld, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, offers an intricate portrait of Gandhi's conflicted mission. After shaping his philosophy of nonviolent resistance during his time in South Africa, Gandhi promoted these social values back in his native India. Although India quickly revered the \"Great Soul,\" Gandhi's following only contributed a small part to the social transformation he imagined. In this new biography, Lelyveld brings us closer to one of history's most remarkable self-creations and one of the twentieth century's most inspiring figures.

From the best-selling author of How We Decide comes a revelatory look at the new science of creativity. Why did Elizabethan England experience a creative explosion? What can we learn from Bob Dylan's writing habits and the drug addiction of poets? How did Pixar redesign its office space for maximum creativity? How can you embrace your own creative side and make your community more vibrant? Join us for a discussion into the deep inventiveness of the human mind, and its essential role in our increasingly complex world.