ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

Rachel Cusk is an international literary superstar. Her most recent trilogy–Outline, Transit, and Kudos–draws its hero, Faye, through a collage of vignettes. Through tales told by the people Faye encounters–an airline companion, a disgruntled neighbor, and a fellow writer, among others–Faye’s own haunting past is stealthily revealed, making for an artful and hypnotic reading experience. “After her controversial memoirs of motherhood and marriage, the writer has a new design for fiction,” writes Judith Thurman in the New Yorker in a profile titled “Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel.” Now, the UK-based writer brings the work that has captivated the writing (and reading) community to Los Angeles for a rare Stateside reading and conversation.

On the heels of one of last year’s boldest, most celebrated novels, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, join us to hear from Ottessa Moshfegh for a celebration of a new edition of her groundbreaking debut novella, McGlue. Set in Salem, Massachusetts, 1851—the same year as the publication of Moby Dick—McGlue follows the foggy recollections of a hard-drinking seafarer who may or may not have killed his best friend. Discussing her sharply observational body of work that illuminates the exhilaratingly dark psychologies of wayward characters, Moshfegh will share the stage with Amanda Stern, the author of Little Panic, a fiercely funny new memoir on anxiety.

As the Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Joel Simon spends his time taking action on behalf of journalists who are targeted, attacked, imprisoned, or killed. He is an expert on how countries around the world handle the kidnapping of their nationals, including how they analyze and respond to intelligence and provide support for the hostage families. At a time when journalists are in greater danger than ever before, Simon’s newest book draws on his extensive experience interviewing former hostages, their families, employers, and policy makers to lay out a new approach to hostage negotiation. He is joined onstage by Sewell Chan, deputy managing editor at the Los Angeles Times, as well as Federico Motka, an Italian aid worker who spent a year as a hostage of Isis in Syria.

What might Marilyn Monroe, Cesar Chavez, Susan Sontag, and Albert Einstein have to say about Los Angeles? Their diary entries, along with those of other actors, musicians, activists, cartographers, students, geologists, cooks, merchants, journalists, politicians, composers, and many more—provide a kaleidoscopic view of Los Angeles over the past four centuries from the Spanish missionary expeditions of the 16 century to the present day. Book editor, critic, and Los Angeles native David Kipen has scoured the archives of libraries, historical societies, and private estates to assemble a remarkably eclectic story of life in his beloved Los Angeles. Join us for a special staged reading of these first-person accounts—representing a range of experiences and voices as diverse as Los Angeles itself.

Bestselling author Reyna Grande’s newest memoir, A Dream Called Home , offers an inspiring account of one woman’s quest to find her place in America as a first-generation Latina university student and then pursue her dream of writing. Award-winning writer Jean Guerrero’s Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir tries to locate the border between truth and fantasy as she explores her troubled father’s life as an immigrant battling with self-destructive behavior. Octavio Solis, one of the most prominent Latino playwrights in America, turns to nonfiction in Retablos: Stories From a Life Lived Along the Border, a new collection of stories about growing up brown at the U.S./Mexico border. At this most urgent time of family separation through borders, join us for a unique evening of storytelling as we welcome these three fierce voices to share from their work that breaks down the walls of the immigrant experience.

The Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur-winning photojournalist and New York Times bestselling author Lynsey Addario has captured audiences with her highly compelling and beautifully harrowing photographs from war zones across the globe. With her uncanny ability to emotionally connect with her subjects and to personalize even the most remote corners and unimaginable circumstances, Addario offers a stunning new selection of work from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa that documents life in Afghanistan under the Taliban, the stark truth of sub-Saharan Africa, and the daily reality of women in the Middle East. Of Love and War weaves Addario’s dramatic photographs with revelatory essays from fellow journalists such as Dexter Filkins, Suzy Hansen, and Lydia Polgreen, as well as her own letters, emails, and journal entries to illuminate the conflict facing people around the world today. Discussing this new book with an interlocutor, Addario will share images that capture a profound sense of humanity on the battlefield—and her own quest as a photojournalist to document injustice.

Who do you think you are? What do you think you are? These questions of gender, religion, race, nationality, class, culture, and all our polarizing, contradictory natures permeate Kwame Anthony Appiah’s newest book. In The Lies That Bind, Appiah, the author of the Ethicist column for the New York Times, challenges our assumptions of identities—or rather mistaken identities. Njideka Akunyili Crosby, a MacArthur Award-winning Nigerian born visual artist who lives in Los Angeles, meshes painting, printmaking, photography, and collage to create large-scale mixed media works bursting with multinational perspectives. Speaking with the Hammer Museum’s Erin Christovale about 21st century identity politics and the appropriation of culture, Appiah and Crosby will share from their own work to consider how our collective identities shape—and can bring together—our divisive world.

Join us for a special program on the 25th anniversary of the reopening of the Los Angeles Central Library that brings home the inspiring story of how Central Library rose from the ashes after the catastrophic fire of April 29, 1986. In a new book by New Yorker staff writer and author of seven books, including Rin Tin Tin and The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean offers a profoundly moving cultural history of the Los Angeles Public Library and its critical civic role since its inception in 1872. Reexamining the unsolved mystery of the biggest library fire in American history that destroyed or damaged more than one million books, Orlean investigates if someone purposefully set fire to the Library—and if so, who? Through this behind-the-scenes look at the Los Angeles Public Library system, Orlean weaves her life-long love of books and reading with the fascinating legacy of libraries across the world. In a conversation with author and Library Foundation Board Member Attica Locke and a surprise librarian guest, Orleans shares from The Library Book—a testament to the importance of all libraries and an homage to a beloved institution that remains a vital part of the heart, mind, and soul of our community today.

Technology has made possible new forms of transnational investigative journalism and fueled the rise of new digital media organizations in the US and around the world. Yet more journalists are imprisoned around the world than at any time in recent history; censorship is on the rise; and government-run disinformation campaigns are undermining public understanding and fueling distrust in the media. Two leading figures in global journalism help make sense of this confusing and contradictory environment, and discuss how their organizations find unique opportunities to make an impact within this challenging and ever-changing landscape. Gerard Ryle is the director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which collaborates teams of journalists to pursue groundbreaking investigations, like the Panama Papers. Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which fights for press freedom and the rights of journalists in the United States and around the world. Co-presented with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

"Édouard Louis uses literature as a weapon," says a recent New York Times profile of the internationally bestselling French author. Louis, whose highly acclaimed first autobiographical novel, The End of Eddy, confronts both the institution of discrimination as he experienced it first-hand, growing up in a small town in Northern France where he was bullied and forced to conceal his homosexuality and as well, the violence perpetrated on his hardscrabble community by an indifferent state. Now in his second book, the writer delivers another unsparing examination of survival—this time, the story of his own rape and near murder by a stranger on Christmas Eve in 2012. In History of Violence, Louis copes with his post-traumatic stress disorder as he moves seamlessly and hypnotically between past and present, between his own voice and the voice of an imagined narrator, to understand how such violence could occur. In a conversation with poet Steve Reigns, the City of West Hollywood’s first Poet Laureate, Louis examines his own complicated search for justice in a political system that marginalizes its citizens through class inequities and leaves entire communities vulnerable, powerless and feeling neglected.