Library Talks

Historian Edna Bonhomme talks to Linda Villarosa about her latest book, A History of the World in Six Plagues.

Artist Hamid Rahmanian speaks with translator Ahmad Sadri and producer Melissa Hibbard about the Persian epic poem Shahnameh.

Cookbook Author Lisa Kyung Gross is joined by Yael Raviv and Abi Balingit to talk about her latest book, The League of Kitchens Cookbook

Kenneth Roth, the long-time head of Human Rights Watch, talks to M. Gessen about his first book, Righting Wrongs.

Eliza Clark talks to Allison Nellis about her debut short story collection, She's Always Hungry.

Historian Sarah Lewis talks to Nell Irvin Painter about her latest book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America.

Bestselling author Victoria Christopher Murray sits down with journalist Melissa Noel to discuss her latest book, Harlem Rhapsody: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Ignited the Harlem Renaissance.

In 2003, author Jennifer Finney Boylan published She's Not There, which became the first bestselling work by a transgender American and established Boylan as a go-to source for public conversation about the impact of gender on our lives. More than two decades later, her new memoir, Cleavage, returns with older and wiser eyes to examine the joys and the struggles of being transgender. In this episode of Library Talks, Boylan sits down with bestselling author Roxanne Gay to discuss her latest memoir and her hope for a future in which we all have the freedom to live joyfully as men, as women, and in the space between us.

Writer and scholar David Wright Faladé sits down with Julie Orringer to discuss his latest book, The New Internationals, a stunning historical novel that sets a coming-of-age narrative and cross-cultural romance amidst a vibrant political moment in postwar Paris.

When author and historian Martha Hodes was 12-years-old she was flying unaccompanied on a plane that was hijacked. Nearly half a century later she explores her memories of that event in her book My Hijacking, which draws on deep archival research and extensive interviews both to re-create what happened to her as a child and to understand the larger context of the world-historical event in which she unwittingly participated.