Library of America presents LOA LIVE Library of America

Monday, April 15—Why does the poet Robert Frost continue to beguile and intrigue readers 150 years after his birth? What is it about the four-time Pulitzer winner’s poems—deceptively simple evocations of landscape, work, village life, and love suffused with remarkable power, subtlety, and complexity—that makes them so quintessentially American?

Join former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith and Jay Parini, poet, biographer, and author of the just published Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart, for a special National Poetry Month conversation about the beauty , wisdom, and hidden depths of three beloved Frost poems that evoke different seasons and their moods: “Putting in the Seed,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers, the Boutell-Day Poetry Center at Smith College, and the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University.

--

Donate to support LOA LIVE programs: loa.org/loalive.

Wednesday, March 6—Brash, opinionated, funny, and an indefatigable champion of the vulnerable over the rich and well-connected, Jimmy Breslin brought heart and knockout prose to every column and book he wrote. From peerless coverage of the assassinations of JFK and Malcolm X to the plight of immigrants, the Mafia, and the AIDS crisis, Breslin’s instinct for a story’s untold, personal dimensions gives his writing enduring vitality and emotional power.

Join New York Times columnist Dan Barry, editor of the just-published LOA edition of Breslin’s essential writings, MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle, and NYT bestselling author Mike Lupica for a lively conversation and memorable stories about the larger-than-life New Yorker who raised deadline journalism to literary art.

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.

--
LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.

Tuesday, February 6—The story told and retold about America’s founding often excludes the Black communities that existed during the Revolution and the early republic. Black Writers of the Founding Era, a new volume from Library of America, changes that.

Inspired by the struggle for independence, Black Americans made bold, insightful contributions to debates about the meaning of the Revolution and the future of the new nation. Join James G. Basker, President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed for an eye-opening conversation about a vibrant and little-known aspect of American life and writing during a crucial formative period.

--

LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.

Wednesday, January 17, 2024—Don DeLillo is “our most necessary writer,” says his longtime editor Gerald Howard, one whose “intuitions and sentences have led him deeper into previously uncharted regions of our psyche than any other contemporary novelist.” Isn’t it time the Swedish Academy took notice?

To kick off a new year of LOA LIVE, Howard joins Mark Osteen, editor of the LOA DeLillo edition, for a freewheeling conversation about the towering legacy—and still insufficiently acknowledged genius—of the author of White Noise, Libra, and Underworld, modern masterpieces that explore, with humor and an unassailable eye for the absurd, the dreams, dangers, and delusions of modern American life.

Tuesday, December 5, 2023—To cap LOA LIVE’s fall season, a killer lineup of panelists explores classic crime fiction of the 1960s, from Donald Westlake-writing-as-Richard Stark’s taut smash-and-grab heist novel The Score to Patricia Highsmith’s eerie meta-thriller The Tremor of Forgery.

Join Geoffrey O’Brien, editor of Crime Novels of the 1960s, along with noir maven Sarah Weinman (The Real Lolita), cultural critic Gene Seymour, and poet David Lehman (The Mysterious Romance of Murder) for an arresting dive into nine astonishingly inventive novels that pulse with the energies of a turbulent, transformative decade.

--

LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.

--

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers; the Crime Writers Association; and Film Noir Foundation.

Wednesday, November 8—The expatriate literary scene in Paris that flourished around Richard Wright and James Baldwin produced brilliant writing, intellectual ferment, and bitter rivalries—all of it, and much else from that turbulent time, thrillingly explored in John A. Williams’s explosive 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am, a lost classic newly published in paperback by LOA.  

Merve Emre (The Personality Brokers), Adam Bradley (The Anthology of Rap; One Day It’ll All Make Sense), and William Maxwell (F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature) join LOA LIVE to explore this panoramic novel of Black American life in the era of segregation, civil rights, and paranoiac Cold War politics—Bradley enlists it in “the new Black canon”—and what it can tell us about the anxious world Williams moved in and our own politically unsettled moment. Library of America president and publisher Max Rudin moderates.

--

LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Visit loa.org/loalive to donate.