Tue, 29 May 2018
Kevin Young, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and New Yorker poetry editor, recently published a new collection of poems titled "Brown: Poems." From James Brown to John Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed., Young meditates on all things "brown" and the ways culture shaped his personal experience growing up in Kansas. Joining him to discuss the book was Claudia Rankine, professor of poetry at Yale University and the author of "Citizen: An American Lyric." Rankine asks Young about his childhood memories, musical influences, and pop culture that makes us dance and think at the same time. |
Thu, 24 May 2018
Literary icon and friend of The New York Public Library, Tom Wolfe passed away last week at the age of 88. Wolfe became a Library Lion in 1981, and is the author of many books, including The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff. Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was first released in 1968, chronicling American counterculture. Half a century later, TASCHEN released an abridgment of the text, with photographs and ephemera from the era. Wolfe's last appearance at the Library was this conversation with Paul Holdengräber, which included readings of Wolfe's work by actor René Auberjonois. |
Tue, 22 May 2018
Masha Gessen’s book The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia is the winner of the Library’s 2018 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. A defining account of Russia’s post-Soviet era, it asks how the country’s prospects for democracy disappeared under the rule of Vladimir Putin. Taking on a novelistic approach, Gessen wove together the stories of four protagonists born in the last decade of the Soviet Union, earning last year’s National Book Award for Nonfiction. Gessen is a staff writer for The New Yorker and has also been a contributor to The New York Review of Books and the author of several books.
|
Tue, 15 May 2018
Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” is one of Zora Neale Hurston’s most important works of non-fiction that has never been published until today. Hurston recorded the story in Alabama in the late 1920s. It's a collection of interviews with a man named Kossola, also known as Cudjo Lewis, one of the last known living survivors of the Atlantic slave trade. To discuss the book's history and Hurston's legacy, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture welcomed Dr. Cheryl Sterling, Director of the Black Studies Program at City College of New York, to moderate a conversation featring: Hurston scholar and editor of Barracoon, Deborah G. Plant; founder of book club Well-Read Black Girl, Glory Edim; and Dr. Sylviane Diouf, an award-winning author and historian of the African Diaspora. |
Tue, 8 May 2018
Madeline Miller's first novel, The Song of Achilles, transformed The Iliad from a vast impersonal epic into an intimate and poignant love story. Now Miller turns her mind to Homer's other great work, and one of mythology's most riveting figures, in Circe. It's the retelling of The Odyssey in which a fierce young woman is at the center. Madeline Miller discusses her writing process, witchcraft, and why this story resonates today with classicist and translator Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English. |
Tue, 1 May 2018
Joshua Green's Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising, was one of the first books to shed light on the Trump campaign and Bannon's influence on their way to the White House. A finalist for NYPL's 2018 Helen Berstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, Green stopped by the Library to talk about what it was like to interview the President, what actually motivates his former Chief Strategist and how getting kicked out of the White House doesn't necessarily mean you're out for good. |