As an internationally renowned journalist, critic, and novelist (The Rachel Papers, Money, Times Arrow to name but three), MARTIN AMIS has always turned his keen intellect and unrivaled prose loose on an astonishing range of topics—politics, sports, celebrity, America, his own life (he is the son of the novelist Kingsley Amis), and, of course, literature (especially his “twin peaks” of the art, Bellow and Nabokov). Amis has never shied away from being provocative, but he has also never been dull. Join him as, with his customary razor-sharp wit and kinetic language, he discusses his extraordinary literary life, his literary loves and hates, and his book The Rub of Time—a scintillating collection of his best nonfiction work over the past two decades— with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright AYAD AKHTAR.
**We apologize for the technical issues in this recording.**
Kwame Anthony Appiah
2019: The Lies That Bind: Identity in our Age
2019: The Lies That Bind: Identity in our Age
In his profoundly original and timely book, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, the moral philosopher KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH urges us to rethink the very nature of identity and, indeed, how identity politics in this country and around the world are in danger of tearing people apart. Gender, religion, race, nationality, class, culture—these are the categories by which we identify ourselves; yet often, in fact, they are riddled with contradictions and falsehoods and not what they seem. Join Appiah, the eminent Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University and the author of several prize-winning books, for a talk that challenges our assumptions about how identities work at both the public and private levels in the anxious, conflict- ridden twenty-first century that we call home.
Anyone who has read a book by RICK ATKINSON knows the range of gifts and moral passion he brings to the writing of history, particularly military history. As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Liberation Trilogy” about World War II, he makes battlefields come alive with riveting detail while never losing sight of the carnage involved and the cost in lives. Now, in the initial volume of a new trilogy, The British Are Coming: The War for America, he turns to the American Revolution, beginning with the battles at Lexington and Concord. Join this master historian as he shows us, with fresh and vivid urgency, just how long the odds were for American success, and what an amazing story this is.
(**to listen to the audio recording of this essay, scroll DOWN to the bottom)
We were sitting in the car at Dodger Stadium, making small talk as we awaited our vaccines. The place was bustling, orange traffic cones everywhere, keeping all of us motorists in our respective lanes. According to all reports and pictures, the previous week had been a madhouse as it ramped up to vaccinate up to 7,000 people a day, making it one of the country’s largest inoculation centers.
Of course, I grimaced looking at the photos and hearing tales from friends who had waited four to five hours for their coveted jabs of the Moderna vaccine. But a lot of the kinks had seemingly been worked out. Young volunteers, their civic pride apparent, kept the traffic moving and registered everyone as they arrived. And, post-inoculation—an efficient prick in the arm—they walked up and down the lines of cars, smiling at all of us through the windows to make sure we were OK and had no adverse reactions.
I found the whole thing moving on many levels. The speed of a vaccine in and of itself was amazing, a testament to human ingenuity and science. From lab to arm had been a matter of months. True, the original rollout had been a mess, but now it seemed to be getting on the right track. And, on a personal level, was sheer gratitude and relief. All over the country, the globe for that matter, people were desperately searching for what I had just procured.
But in swift tandem with the feeling of thankfulness and the anticipation of what a newly reopened life would feel like, there was an unmistakable sense of chagrin. I looked around at the cars (we lucky ones) and thought about all who were still unvaccinated and would be for quite a while—and more so, those without the resources to even try to get the vaccine. I had spent hours on the computer trying to secure a dose at one of the few county health sites that was offering it, pounding the desk and inventing a whole new ex-rated vocabulary until I finally nabbed one.
But inescapable was the knowledge of all those who could not do that—those who didn’t have the time or the techno-ability to score an early vaccine as my friends and I were able to do. There was something else we had: the presumption of success, the belief that with a little perseverance we would and could get that vaccine as soon as it became available to our aging age group, and underneath that presumption, of course, was privilege. We could cross the city at any given hour on any given day—and did—often venturing east and south away from our relatively safe home turf to get a precious jab in a neighborhood we rarely visited.
Driving home from Dodger Stadium on a damp, grey morning, I looked out the window at my city, a city I love, a city not always easy to love—and a city of such disparities. There were so many out there hurting. L.A. had become Surge Central, disproportionately affecting the communities of color, the people who worked in the supermarkets, restaurants, and warehouses—and who often travel across town, east to west, to clean the houses and tend the children and the seniors in the more affluent sections of this city. The choreography of inequality.
Such inequality is everywhere, but in Los Angeles, things always seem more outsized and dramatic, the poorer, denser neighborhoods—those with the least access to health care and, indeed, to early vaccines—but a freeway ride away from the houses of the rich and sometimes famous. Never more apparent than now, a land of extremes―some of us feeling so grateful while so many others are grieving.
Joanne Freeman
2019: Hamilton: The Man, The Myth and the Musical
2019: Alexander Hamilton: The Man, The Myth and the Musical
Before we all became obsessed with Hamilton, courtesy of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s groundbreaking musical, JOANNE FREEMAN was fascinated by the man she calls the most impulsive and difficult of the Founding Fathers. Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, Freeman was in high school when she first discovered his writings—and his influence—going on to become one of the country’s foremost Hamilton scholars. Featured in the PBS documentary about Broadway’s Hamilton, she will tell us about the man behind the myth, someone who could be prone to rigid and reactionary views, but who was ultimately driven, she argues, by fear for the very survival of the new nation.
Join National Book Award-winner TERRANCE HAYES, author of the collections How to be Drawn and Lighthead, among others, for a reading of his beautiful, compelling, electric poetry. As fellow poet Cornelius Eady has said of Hayes, “First you’ll marvel at his skill, his near-perfect pitch, his disarming humor, his brilliant turns of phrase. Then you’ll notice the grace, the tenderness, the unblinking truth-telling just beneath his lines, the open and generous way he takes in our world.”
2019: The Case Against Intelligent Design: True Stories from Florida
Called “America’s finest satirical novelist,” CARL HIAASEN has made a literary sport out of writing about the odd folks and crazy happenings in South Florida, his home turf. He has written, as he himself describes it, “the first (and possibly only) novel ever written about sex, murder and corruption on the professional bass fishing tour.” Join this longtime columnist for The Miami Herald—where his column at one time or another has ticked off “just about everybody in South Florida, including his own bosses”—for a deep dive into the bizarro world of his favorite state.
Recent years have brought deeply disturbing developments around the globe. In the face of global disarray, American public sentiment increasingly leans toward withdrawal. However, the world remains full of dangerous actors who, left unchecked, possess the desire and ability to make things worse. In his passionate and nuanced book, The Jungle Grows Back, ROBERT KAGAN argues that the tendency to withdraw and to focus on our foreign policy failures misunderstands the essential role America has played for decades in keeping the world’s worst instability in check. He will talk about his book and about the role of the United States in upholding the liberal world order.
Francis Lam
2019: Why I Talk to Americans About Food
2019: Why I Talk to Americans About Food
When he was a young writer for Gourmet magazine, FRANCIS LAM—now the host of American Public Media’s award- winning radio show The Splendid Table—told stories about how chefs become obsessed with cooking omelets; about being a bumbling intern at a superb restaurant; and about spending a cross-country train ride in the café car. But over time, Lam began to believe that food writing must be about more than deliciousness and obsessions. True food stories are always about people, about longing, identity, belonging, politics, and the complicated life of emotions. Lam will recall some of the people he’s met, talked to, and argued with, and tell us how he came to realize something fundamental not just about himself, but about the universality of hunger.
Mitch Landrieu
2019: E Pluribus Unum
2019: E Pluribus Unum: How a Divided America Can Win the Future by Finding Common Ground
An inspiring, no-nonsense leader and social justice champion, MITCH LANDRIEU stepped up at a time when New Orleans was struggling. Mayor from 2010 to 2018, he shares stories about this once-descending city and his efforts to put NOLA on the map as a great American comeback story. It is a story of people coming together across the lines that typically divide us to find common ground. Using one of our nation’s founding mottos, E Pluribus Unum, as a rallying cry, Landrieu also discusses his recent experiences in helping chart a path forward for the country in today’s environment in which we find ourselves divided by race, class, and politics.
2019: Pachinko: How a Historical Novel about Koreans in Japan Captivated the World
Every now and again a book comes out of nowhere and captures the imaginations of readers (and critics) because it speaks to a moment of time in an uncanny and moving way. Such is the case of MIN JIN LEE’s 2017 novel Pachinko, which was ultimately translated into 29 languages. The story of four generations of a poor immigrant Korean family trying to make new lives in twentieth-century Japan, the book touches on big themes— immigration, identity, homesickness, discrimination—not in a grand way, but through the characters. Lee, who is Korean- American, will talk with JEFFREY BROWN of the PBS NewsHour about where the idea came from, about all the interviews and research she did for the book, and about its amazing global reception.
2019: Reporting in the Age of President Donald Trump
2019: Reporting in the Age of President Donald Trump
These are complicated times to be a journalist. No one knows this better than MARK LEIBOVICH, the Chief National Correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. In his book, This Town, he wittily dissected the symbiotic relationship between the politicians and the press in the nation’s capital. Then came the election of Donald Trump and that relationship took on a kind of enlivening animosity. So how does it feel to be a reporter on the ground now? Should the rest of us be cynical about the media or optimistic? Leibovich will tell us what it’s like to be in the center of the D.C. storm and talk about the perils and pleasures, the difficulties and responsibilities, of the profession he practices with such skill and infectious glee.
2014: My Country, My Story, with Congressman John Lewis
Legendary civil rights activist and longtime U.S. congressman from Georgia, JOHN LEWIS shares his remarkable journey from an Alabama sharecropper’s farm to a seat in Congress, a journey that he chronicles in his recently released graphic novel, March. One of the “Big Six” African-American leaders of the 1960s civil rights movement, Lewis has lived a life that might be regarded as a moral through line of our times. His is the voice that bridges the years between the nonviolent social justice campaigns of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the political ascension of President Barack Obama. In this talk, Lewis discusses where he has been and what he has seen, what weighs on his heart and what gives him hope.
Barry Lopez
2019: Horizon: Barry Lopez in the World
2019: Horizon: Barry Lopez in the World
For decades, award-winning environmental writer and journalist BARRY LOPEZ has been one of our most revered literary voices about the joys and the consequences of human inhabitation of the earth. Thirty years after receiving the National Book Award for his seminal book Arctic Dreams, Lopez returns with the career-defining work Horizon, in which he immerses us in six far-flung regions of the world as he ponders humanity’s long history of quests, explorations and exploitations of nature. In conversation with ANDREW PROCTOR, Executive Director of Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon, Lopez describes his very personal search for purpose in a fractured world, taking us nearly from pole to pole—from modern megacities to some of the most remote regions on the earth—and across decades of lived experience.
JULIE LYTHCOTT-HAIMS’ first book, How to Raise an Adult, took on the harm of helicopter parenting and turned her into a prominent cultural commentator. Now, in Real American, a luminous memoir that is both poetic and piercing (and sometimes funny), she writes about her struggles with identity and race, laying bare her own wounds and the wounds of the country. The beloved, high-achieving child of a white mother and a black father, she fought to find her place, not sure where she belonged. From her efforts to tame her hair to her conflicted feelings about the skin color of her own children, she writes about race in a wholly original and nuanced way, enumerating the slights that accrue even in an outwardly blessed life like hers. Her self-acceptance is hard-won—and thrilling—and she tells us how she finally achieved it.
Come hear IMBOLO MBUE talk about the books that helped shape her as a writer. In her beguiling debut novel, Behold the Dreamers, winner of the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award, she tells the story of a young Cameroonian couple starting a new life in New York just as the Great Recession arrives. She writes with wit and tenderness not only about these struggling immigrants, but also about the family of the Lehman Brothers executive who hires them, in a book The New York Times called “savage and compassionate in all the right places.” Mbue says that empathy is at the base of her drive to be a writer, a quality she learned from the books of Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, Andrew Solomon and others. She will talk about their work, and her own, in a conversation with JEFFREY BROWN of the PBS NewsHour.
2019: The Ninth Hour: Alice McDermott on her Most Recent Novel
In many of her novels, the writer ALICE MCDERMOTT has given us the world of Irish Catholic Americans—their place in America, their faith and longings, their secrets and shame. She returns to those themes in her most recent book, The Ninth Hour, yet it seems wholly original territory—both bleak and lovely, hopeful and melancholy. She begins in a Brooklyn tenement in the early twentieth century and you can feel the time and place in every detail. She will talk about the novel and about the interplay of historical research and the unfettered imagination in its creation.
How do you make a story about the Greek gods feel so completely alive and feel so relevant? That is the gift of MADELINE MILLER in her novel Circe. It is the story of the bewitching goddess known in The Odyssey for transforming Odysseus’s men into pigs, before helping him on his journey home. Banished by Zeus to an island, Miller’s Circe finds strength in her art and her solitude, even as she longs for connection. The author in effect claims Circe back from ancient mythology and breathes new life into her as a strong, passionate and, yes, sometimes angry woman, one who speaks very much to our times. Miller will talk about the book, her research for it, and her enduring goal of adapting classical texts to modern forms.
2019: Democracies in Retreat, Dictatorships on the Move
Around the globe, the populists and autocrats seem to be increasing their grip. To talk about the disturbing trends and destructive alliances are friends and former diplomatic colleagues VICTORIA NULAND and STROBE TALBOTT. Nuland served under Republican and Democratic administrations as Assistant Secretary of European and Eurasian Affairs and envoy to NATO, rising to the rank of Career Ambassador, the highest in the United States Foreign Service. Talbott was the Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration, then headed the Brookings Institution for 16 years. The two talk about the current difficulties plaguing the Atlantic Community and U.S. diplomacy while Russia is pursuing predatory policies towards the West and collaborating with China.
Naomi Shihab Nye
2019: “Tell My Story:” The Power of Poetry
2019: “Tell My Story:” The Power of Poetry
The award-winning poet NAOMI SHIHAB NYE is known for her luminous, inspirational spirit both on the page and off. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her extensive travels, Nye writes from her deep concern with the world’s troubling issues and deep empathy for people around the globe. She reads recent poems, by herself and others, that speak not only to her passionate engagement with the world around her, but also to the power of poetry itself to address and ameliorate what ails us. We can imagine no more fitting or resonant voice to carry with us from the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference than hers.
Tommy Orange
2019: The Original Voice of Tommy Orange
2019: The Original Voice of Tommy Orange
The word went around. It bounced from reader to reader, critic to critic, on the internet and in book reviews. A stunning new voice had been raised, one full of originality and outrage, profanity and humor. That voice belongs to TOMMY ORANGE, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and winner of the 2018 Pen/Hemingway Award for his debut novel, There There. If you want to understand your country, its aches and wounds and urban core—specifically the Native Americans’ struggle to make lives here—then read it you must. In conversation with ANDREW PROCTOR, Executive Director of Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon, Tommy Orange will talk about his book, its indelible characters, and about his own literary path and passions.
Tommy Orange, Danzy Senna, Vendela Vida
2019: Why Novels Matter
2019: Why Novels Matter
Join three celebrated American novelists as they talk about their work, their passion for the form, and their commitment to telling the truth in fiction. TOMMY ORANGE is the author of There There, a propulsive, wholly original story of urban Native Americans that won the 2018 Pen/Hemingway Award, among many honors. DANZY SENNA is the author of five books of fiction and nonfiction, including her most recent, New People, a sharp-eyed take on race and class in today’s America. VENDELA VIDA has written four novels, her most recent being The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, a literary thriller deemed by critics to be her best. Despite the overt differences in their work, their books share an underlying theme, that of identity. They will talk about that and about why novels matter in our turbulent, current events-obsessed times.
Miriam Pawel
2019: The Browns of California
2019: The Browns of California
In her very readable and evocative book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist MIRIAM PAWEL gives us a dual narrative: the story of the Golden State and the history of the Brown family, notably the two governors, Pat and Jerry, who helped guide California in the last half of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first. What a rich story it is: The Gold Rush, the Free Speech Movement, the rise of Silicon Valley—she conveys it all, not as a recitation of events, but rather through beguiling, detail-rich portraits of the two very different men who led it, the garrulous father and the more cerebral son, and also of the women in the family. Joining Pawel to share her personal reflections and memories is KATHLEEN BROWN, former California State Treasurer and an integral part of the Brown dynasty.
2019: A Hollywood Writer Divulges the Secret(s) of His Craft
If you want to know how to be a successful writer in Hollywood, here’s the hot tip: every story that makes it to the screen more or less adheres to the same three-act formula, be it a gritty crime procedural or a cartoon about pigs. Such is the wisdom of SIMON RICH, the creator and showrunner of the comedic TV series Man Seeking Woman and Miracle Workers. Join him in a witty dissection of two seemingly disparate films, Home Alone and The Fly. What does a heartwarming Christmas comedy about an eight-year-old boy have in common with a violent science fiction thriller about a deformed mutant? Everything!
We think we know Winston Churchill. There have been countless books, movies and documentaries. But British historian ANDREW ROBERTS’ recent biography makes the man come alive as never before. In a book that’s been called “the best single-volume biography of Churchill yet written,” Roberts traces the arc of Churchill’s life from boyhood through military service to leadership of his country in its darkest days. With prodigious, original research and deep insight, Roberts gives us a revelatory, multi-dimensional portrait. His Churchill is ambitious, witty, emotional, stubborn and gifted with a sense of his own destiny. Roberts talks about the man and his life, and about the unique passions of the biographer.
Come hear three young authors talk about their novels, about keeping the faith and keeping their heads down while they were struggling to write (and then publish) their first works of fiction. They come from very different worlds: EMILY RUSKOVICH, raised in the Idaho panhandle on Hoodoo Mountain, is the author of the novel, Idaho, a haunting and mysterious love story; BRANDO SKYHORSE’s novel The Madonnas of Echo Park, winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award, braids together the captivating stories of eight Mexican-American residents of the Los Angeles neighborhood where the author grew up; and MADHURI VIJAY, born in Bangalore, India, follows a privileged and restless young Indian woman on her odyssey into the strife-ridden mountains of Kashmir in the much-praised first novel, The Far Field. The three will talk about their books, their writing lives, and about what’s ahead.
2019: The Red Daughter: The Remarkable Life of Stalin’s Daughter
In his sixth novel, The Red Daughter, JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ imaginatively inhabits the life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926-2011), the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, who, in his three decades as the tyrannical ruler of the Soviet Union, was responsible for the deaths of more than twenty million people. Fourteen years after her father’s death, at the height of the Cold War, Svetlana became the most important Soviet citizen ever to defect to the West, arriving in New York to throngs of reporters and a nation hungry to hear her story. By her side was a young lawyer sent by the CIA to smuggle her into America. That lawyer was John Burnham Schwartz’s father. Drawing upon private papers and years of extensive research, Schwartz will recreate for us the story of an extraordinary, troubled woman’s search for a new life and a place to belong.
2019: The End of Secrets: Family History in the Age of Bioethics
In the spring of 2016, DANI SHAPIRO, the author of four memoirs, received the stunning news through a genealogy website that her father was not her biological father. Her newest memoir, Inheritance, captures her urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years. It caused her to rethink everything she knew about herself, her roots, her family, the ground underneath her. Shapiro talks with author and physician ABRAHAM VERGHESE about living in a time in which science and technology are uncovering long-held secrets and about the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.
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