SAL/on air Seattle Arts & Lectures

For James Tate, comedy and tragedy are inextricably linked within poetry. They appear as dual facets of ordinary life—the mundane and the extraordinary as one. As you’ll hear in this recording from February 2003, this is laugh-out-loud poetry that wanders from the baseball field to the petting zoo and back home. And yet, after the laughter, you’ll often find yourself catapulted into quiet, left to consider how this world breaks your heart again and again.

The works of Barbara Kingsolver have shaped a generation of readers. From her first novel The Bean Trees and beyond, Kingsolver’s characters speak to us, cradle our faces in their hands and exchange their hearts for ours. We were thrilled to recently welcome Kingsolver back to SAL in October of 2023 for a discussion of her Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Demon Copperhead.

When Dean Young took the stage in October of 2012 to read from his Copper Canyon Press collection, Bender, we were incredibly fortunate to bear witness to his humorous, irreverent, and fearless poetry. We were deeply saddened to hear of his passing in August 2022, and we continue to treasure his voice as it lives on in his work.

In October of 2003, Sandra Cisneros joined us for an evening 20 years after the publication of her luminous work The House on Mango Street. Now, we have the chance to listen again with reverence, 40 years after that seminal book first came into our lives, and we are reminded more than ever of the importance of spending time with work that not only gratifies us but changes our lives.

In September 2019, Malcolm Gladwell stepped on stage at Benaroya Hall as part of SAL’s Literary Arts Series to discuss his book Talking to Strangers. That night, his talk brought us into the complicated layers that underlie our most fraught and violent interactions. 

The Los Angeles Times called Talking to Strangers “a compelling, conversation-starting read.” It’s a thoughtful and nuanced meditation on how we see others, and how we see the world. Like all of Gladwell’s work, brilliant storytelling and razor sharp-observations carry us to understand the world in new ways.

In A Gentleman in Moscow, the subject of Amor Towles' 2019 SAL lecture, the ever-charming Count Rostov says, “By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”

It takes an extraordinary writer to create a thirty-year history of a Count trapped inside a Moscow hotel and make every page feel propulsive. But that’s exactly the plot of Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow—and that’s exactly the kind of writer Towles is.

Amor Towles writes books worth considering and reconsidering, that delight in every possible setting, at every possible hour. Whether he is exploring Russian history or a 1950s road trip, Towles creates rich and nuanced worlds filled with both daily joys and fascinating characters. Join us for this episode of SAL/on air, which takes us through the research process of A Gentleman in Moscow, which spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list.