Two former military officers and award-winning authors, ELLIOT ACKERMAN and ADMIRAL JAMES STAVRIDIS, have together written 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. It is a chillingly authentic geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the United States and China in the South China Sea in 2034—and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration. They will be in conversation with former CBS News Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief CHRISTOPHER ISHAM about fact and fiction, war and peace, nationalism, leadership, and much else.

Read more about Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis here.

With India much in the news in the last months, there is no better time to read MEENAKSHI AHAMED’s new book, A Matter of Trust, a history of India-U.S. Relations from Truman to Trump. A journalist who was born in Calcutta and divides her time between the two countries, Ahamed draws on newly declassified documents, memoirs, and interviews with officials involved in the events to give us a compelling and detailed history, but also deft and humanizing portraits of the leaders and diplomats who managed the relationship. She will talk about the two countries she calls home, about the personalities and prejudices of people like Prime Minister Nehru and President Truman (the owner, she tells us, of 96 pairs of shoes, including 21 pairs of slippers), and why personal chemistry—or lack thereof—between leaders dictates history.

Read more about Meenakshi Ahamed here.

ISABEL ALLENDE’s vibrant and original voice has been an essential part of the literary landscape since the 1982 publication of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. More than 25 acclaimed books have followed, bringing her to this most recent, The Soul of a Woman, a wise and witty memoir/manifesto for our time. “When I say that I was a feminist in kindergarten, I am not exaggerating,” she begins the book, writing about her lifelong determination to be liberated in all ways, personal and professional. In a wide-ranging conversation with the PBS NewsHour’s JEFFREY BROWN, Allende will talk about the soul of a woman, about her work, her marriages, and about how to live a passionate life.

Read more about Isabel Allende here.

At the second inauguration of President Obama on January 21, 2013, RICHARD BLANCO stirred the country with his words as he spoke of our shared narratives and dreams. He was the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history—the first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role. The poem he recited on that day, as well as those included in his latest stunning collection, How to Love a Country, speak to the heart of what it means to be part of the American story—one he reminds us is full of terrible pain and prejudice as well as progress and hope. Blanco’s new poems about the Pulse nightclub massacre, about a lynching, about the pull on an immigrant’s heart, are full of a luminous melancholy. “Like thirst, like hunger, we ache with the need to save ourselves, and our country from itself,” he writes in “Como Tu/Like You/Like Me.” Come hear him read and talk about the art and calling of the poet in today’s world.

Read more about Richard Blanco here.

Even after her childhood home in New Orleans was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, author and journalist SARAH BROOM found herself drawn to it with every nerve ending. In her evocative and moving memoir, The Yellow House—winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction—she reconstructs from memory the shotgun house her mother Ivory Mae bought in 1961 where she raised Sarah and 11 other children. Join Broom on a literal and emotional tour—not just of the house and its large family but also of the city of New Orleans itself, with all the myths surrounding it and with all its racial and economic inequalities. She will contemplate the questions at the heart of her memoir: Who possesses the rights to the story of a place? Is geography destiny? How can a house continue to haunt you even after it has disappeared from the earth? After her talk, Broom will be joined by SVWC Board Director MITCHELL KAPLAN.

Read more about Sarah Broom here.

Of all the Americans stunned by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, none felt the shock more acutely than Japanese American men of draft age. Overwhelmed by a tsunami of prejudice, forced from their homes, incarcerated with their families in bleak concentration camps, they were initially prohibited from serving their country as other Americans were doing. Yet before the end of the war, thousands of them would emerge among the nation’s most decorated heroes, both on battlefields and in courtrooms. Join DANIEL JAMES BROWN, author of the #1 New York Times best seller The Boys in the Boat, and TOM IKEDA, Executive Director of the Densho Project, for a lively discussion of the extraordinary accomplishments of these Nisei warriors. And an exploration of what their story tells us about an epidemic of anti-Asian prejudice in our country today.

Read more about Daniel James Brown and Tom Ikeda here.

Join novelist and screenwriter LEA CARPENTER for a talk that has grown out of the class she teaches at Columbia Law School about trying to bring the power of traditional Aristotelian principles of drama to that more practical, worldly, and yet urgent endeavor: the practice of law. Carpenter urges students to learn and lean into tools of traditional narrative structure when it comes to the writing of essential legal documents—those usually dry opening statements, sentencing memos, closing arguments, etc. Calling on material as diverse as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective, Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network and even a poem by Billy Collins, and incorporating theories of story from Malcolm Gladwell, Ava DuVernay, and Erroll Morris, Carpenter offers a unique and truly new way to tell legal stories that call on the very oldest way to tell any story: dramatically.

Read more about Lea Carpenter here.

WILLIAM D. COHAN is a former senior investment banker and the author of three riveting books about the companies, executives, bankers, traders, and lawyers who rule America’s financial system. Join him to understand what is happening on Wall Street today. SPACs? Bitcoin? NFTs? Meme stocks? Sports-team-owning hedge funders? The Fed partying like it’s 1999? Tesla worth more than all the other car companies combined? Cohan will dish, debunk, and demystify the gossip, greed, and good times that have been raging on Wall Street at the same time that the COVID-19 pandemic has been decimating our country, our economy, and small- and medium-sized businesses everywhere.

Read more about William D. Cohan here.

For many American citizens, the recent years—and indeed, the recent election— have raised alarm bells about the very structural underpinnings of our democracy, something many of us took for granted, assuming constitutional and legal protections were always in place. It is fair to say that recent events have shaken our faith. Join two of the country’s most respected authorities on democracy, LARRY DIAMOND of the Hoover Institution and Harvard Law Professor NOAH FELDMAN, as they dissect the constitutional stress test our revered founding document has endured, the safeguards we thought were in there—but are they?—and the weaknesses of our electoral system that need repairing to keep our system of participatory democracy alive and strong.

In a trend both alarming and saddening, we have been witnessing an erosion of freedom around the world in recent years. From Poland to Turkey, from the Philippines to Hungary, the despots have been emboldened to jail their enemies, restrict free speech, and shackle the media just as Russia and China have become more assertive and repressive. No one has written and spoken about this dark turn with more informed passion than LARRY DIAMOND, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and one of the country’s leading scholars of democracy. As he does in his compelling book Ill Winds, Diamond is always wrestling with the hard questions: How do we confront Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping? How can we support activists, dissidents, and independent media struggling for freedom? What steps can we take to make the internet safe for liberal democracy? Diamond will share his answers with us and explain why he believes American leadership is required more than ever to stem the tide of tyranny.

Read more about Larry Diamond here.

Join the wonderful, funny, gifted FIROOZEH DUMAS for a spirited session on how to write that memoir you have been trying to get down on paper—or on the laptop. Dumas is the author of Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America, Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of a Global Citizen, and the semi-autobiographical novel It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel. Everyone has a story. Come learn how to tell yours.

Read more about Firoozeh Dumas here.

Join NOAH FELDMAN, one of America’s most renowned Constitutional scholars, in a groundbreaking discussion of how President Abraham Lincoln broke decisively with major constitutional precedents during the Civil War, effectively rewriting the Constitution’s place in the American system. Before the Civil War, the Constitution was best understood as a compromise pact—a rough and ready deal between states that allowed the Union to form and function, and that protected slavery notwithstanding its immorality. After Lincoln, the Constitution came to be seen as a sacred text—a transcendent statement of the nation’s highest ideals. Feldman will illuminate Lincoln’s constitutional choices and how he made them—and place Lincoln in the rich context of thinking of the time, from African American abolitionists to Lincoln’s Republican rivals and Secessionist ideologues.

Read more about Noah Feldman here.

As is her wont, New York Times reporter SHERI FINK went directly to the heart of the coronavirus story, chronicling the deadly virus that has ravaged lives and economies around the world. Her reporting from West Africa during the Ebola crisis (for which she and her New York Times colleagues won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize) and her extraordinary book, Five Days at Memorial, about a hospital in post-Katrina New Orleans, remind us why the best kind of firsthand reporting is truly an essential public service. Over the past year, as COVID-19 swept the globe, Fink reported from more than two dozen hospitals around the country and outside of it, highlighting the impacted families—their lives, their losses, and the unequal effect of the pandemic. Currently at work on a book called Surge, she will share with us what she saw, how you earn people’s trust, and what it takes to be a reporter on the front lines of a global epidemic.

Read more about Sheri Fink here.

People and their problems, not problems and their people—this is the challenge at the core of TAYARI JONES’s moving novel, An American Marriage. What happens when a social justice issue collides with the lives of a newlywed couple? And how does a writer balance the urgency of the issue with the urgency of a love story? The book has received much attention, including winning the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction, but Tayari Jones has not been an overnight success. An American Marriage is the result of a two-decades-long career. The author of three previous novels, she will share her journey—the uphill struggles and the surprising interventions. This is a story about finding your voice and staying true to it. After her remarks, Jones will be in conversation with interviewer and WYNC radio host ALISON STEWART.

Read more about Tayari Jones here.

Tensions during the Yalta Conference in February 1945 threatened to tear apart the wartime alliance among Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin just as victory was close at hand. Join author CATHERINE GRACE KATZ for the dramatic story of the three young women—Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill, and Kathleen Harriman—who were chosen by their fathers to travel with them to Yalta, each bound by fierce family loyalty, political savvy, and intertwined romances that powerfully colored these crucial days. (Kathleen was the daughter of Averell Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and the original developer of Sun Valley.) Situated in the political maelstrom that marked the transition to a post-war world, this is a remarkable account of fathers and daughters whose relationships were tested and strengthened by the history they witnessed and the future they crafted together.

Read more about Catherine Grace Katz here.

Over his long career, JOHN LITHGOW has given us indelible performances in films and television and on the stage, an acting arc that has taken him from Shakespeare to sitcoms to serial killers. His range has been stunning—from the goofy Dick Solomon in 3rd Rock from the Sun to his unforgettable and moving portrayal of Winston Churchill in The Crown, with a raging, heartbreaking King Lear on the Delacorte Stage in Central Park in between. The author of the acclaimed memoir, Drama: An Actor’s Education, Lithgow will talk with his friend, the PBS NewsHour’s JEFFREY BROWN, about his acting life, about how he prepares to play a historical figure, and about the similarities and differences between drama and comedy. Prepare to laugh and marvel.

Read more about John Lithgow here.

Why does one of our most respected and versatile actors turn to writing poetry—make that witty satirical verse? That is the question for JOHN LITHGOW. He has captivated audiences and critics with his work in film, television, and theater earning Emmys and Tonys and Screen Actors Guild Awards. Now he has become the irreverent bard for our times with his books of political humor, Dumpty and Trumpty and Dumpty Wanted a Crown, with another, A Confederacy of Dumptys, coming in the fall. He will tell us why he took this turn and why he loves rhyming about scoundrels—known and unknown—and share poems from the trilogy. Questions welcome, laughter required.

Read more about John Lithgow here.

One might say that SUSAN ORLEAN has devoted her entire literary career to one simple—and yet not so simple—philosophical idea: “An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain.” Again and again in her celebrated New Yorker profiles and in books such as The Library Book and The Orchid Thief, she has shown herself to be a master of description at once slangy and poetic, possessing a flawless ear for dialogue, and deadpan-whimsical humor. And, most important, Orlean has shown a sensitivity to the darker currents that run through some of her subjects’ lives. Join one of our most vividly curious chroniclers of American life as Orlean tells tales large and small, short and tall, about the most ordinary extraordinary folks she has ever met and explains why she feels she has the best job in the world.

Read more about Susan Orlean here.

Call it a global haunting what DELIA OWENS’s novel, Where the Crawdads Sing, has done to millions of readers. Deeply felt and beautifully written, it is the story of Kya, an abandoned girl who survives on her own in the wild marshlands of coastal North Carolina, her loneliness as palpable as her resilience and her affinity for the natural world. And oh that world Owens conjures—the gulls and egrets, the grasses and waterways, the squalls and sunsets. Finally drawn out of her solitude by the prospect of human connection, Kya becomes part of a murder mystery and a love story. Owens, a wildlife scientist and award-winning nature writer, will talk about her inspiration for the book and the issues it raises about male violence and female survival, the beauty and fragility of the earth, and the marshlands her heroine so loves. She will also share her thoughts and excitement about the upcoming major motion picture.

Read more about Delia Owens here.

We have been living through tumultuous, divisive, and heartbreaking days. The past year, 2020, seemed to bring the country to its knees, exposing all the racial, economic, and ideological fault lines. In writing his new book, GEORGE PACKER, one of our foremost thinkers about the state of America, set out to answer two fundamental questions: How did we get here, and how do we find our way back? He wanted to explore what he calls our common American identity and enduring passion for equality. Join Packer for a discussion of what he found on his journey, what surprised him, what made him despair, and, finally, what gives him hope for this country that he so clearly loves.

Read more about George Packer here.

To call JULIA PHILLIPS’s ambitious and globally praised debut novel, Disappearing Earth, a thriller is to capture its emotional, psychological, and political acuity. To call it thrilling is perhaps more apt. One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia, two young sisters go missing. Their disappearance haunts the book and the women we meet in the ensuing chapters. The author gives us not just these characters’ stories, but indeed the feel of living in an unstable post-Soviet Russia with all its secrets, suspicions, and prejudices. Phillips will tell us how she handled such a complex narrative, where she began, how much research she did, and how she knew what the ending would be—the one we readers tensely wait for with each turn of the page.

Read more about Julia Phillips here.

After their decision not to have a biological child, author SARAH SENTILLES and her husband Eric decided to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system’s goal is the child’s reunification with the birth family, they opened their home to a flurry of social workers who questioned them, evaluated them, and ultimately prepared them to welcome a child into their lives—even if it meant, most likely, having to give the child back. After years of starts and stops, and endless navigation of the complexities and injustices of the foster care system, Sarah and Eric finally brought home a three-day-old baby girl named Coco. Join Sentilles to hear the deeply moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newborn—about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin.

Read more about Sarah Sentilles here.

Writing about climate change can be challenging, especially if the desire is to raise serious alarm but offer some solutions and hope. No one has done that better than DAVID WALLACE-WELLS, whose recent book, The Uninhabitable Earth, has been called “this generation’s Silent Spring.” He alerts us to the human effects on our planet, the ways that environmental damage is transforming nature, influencing global politics, threatening capitalism and, indeed, human progress. But—as the author will explain—his book is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. Guiding us forward, Wallace-Wells will also lay out some of the dramatic actions we could take to build a livable, prosperous world in the age of global warming.

Read more about David Wallace-Wells here.

Long regarded as one of our finest short-story writers, TOBIAS WOLFF is equally renowned for his memoirs, This Boy’s Life and In Pharoah’s Army, and he is now in the process of finishing a novel. A beloved professor at Stanford University, he is also—as he so memorably demonstrates in Ken Burns’ Hemingway documentary—a profound reader of other writers’ works and lives. Novelist JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ sits down with Wolff to discuss life, literature, craft, and the neverending mysteries and revelations that come from spending one’s time inhabiting the minds of others.

Read more about Tobias Wolff here.

Join LAWRENCE WRIGHT, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, for an unprecedented, momentous account of COVID-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it. From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Wright will share the story of COVID-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic.

Read more about Lawrence Wright here.