ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

Rosen, novelist and New York Times contributor, sets out to explore birdwatching's centrality--historical and literary, spiritual and scientific--to a culture torn between the desire both to conquer and to conserve.

Millner, a young African-American woman, grew up in predominantly Hispanic and working class San Jose and went on to Harvard. In her memoir she tours the landscapes of possibility carved by race, class and culture for young Americans.

From a great American realist-the author of Clockers and co-writer of The Wire-an X-ray of the streets of New York City in the age of no \"broken windows\" and \"quality of life\" police squads.

In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture was first created in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. Join us for a discussion of the lost world of comic books, their creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority.

In her new novel, the author of the now classic The Good Mother and While I Was Gone brings emotional power to her most transfixing themes: the meaning of loyalty, history, forgiveness and grace.

Drawing on 35 years of reporting-through wars, revolutions and uprisings-one of America's most prescient journalists offers an insightful reckoning of the changes wracking the Middle East and their impact on its and America's future.

Seeking a place where his deafness would be irrelevant, Josh Swiller volunteered for the Peace Corps and spent two years in a remote and impoverished village in Zambia. His hilarious and harrowing memoir recounts what he found there.

Iran, as any civilization, is defined most thoroughly by the stories it spawns. Join us for a candid conversation between novelist Gina Nahai (Caspian Rain) and Robert Scheer (editor-in-chief, Truthdig.com and host of KCRW's Left, Right and Center) about faith, modernism, and the emotional ties that bind the people of Iran and America.

The prize-winning novelist (Il Postino)-for whom "neither life nor literature outside politics" is imaginable-sets his exuberant love story against the backdrop of the new Chile, free from the Pinochet dictatorship but prey to the perils of globalization.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author reveals the powerful legacy of the incomparable humanitarian who lost his life in a terrorist attack on UN Headquarters in Iraq in 2003.