In his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Lincoln in the Bardo places the reader in a Georgetown cemetery on a rainy February night in 1862. From that seed of historical truth, the story spins into a metaphysical realm as a grief-stricken President Lincoln—one year into the Civil War—mourns the loss of his son Willie. Through a thrilling experimental form narrated by a chorus of voices, a blend of history and philosophy, a cast of characters living and dead, Saunders grapples with the timeless question: How can we continue to love when everything we love must eventually be lost? Following a dramatic reading from the book by Phil LaMarr, Saunders takes the stage to discuss this astonishing feat of imagination with award-winning author Anthony Marra, known for his transcending stories of love and war.

The eccentric fictional worlds of authors Valeria Luiselli and Guadalupe Nettel come alive on the ALOUD stage as these two leading voices in contemporary Mexican literature meet to share recent work. Luiselli, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and two-time recipient of the Los Angeles Times’ Book Prizes will share The Story of My Teeth, an imaginative odyssey through Mexico City’s art world and industrial suburbs. Guadalupe Nettel, voted one of the most important Latin American writers at the Bogotá Hay Festival, playfully illuminates human obsessions in her short fiction Natural Histories, and narrates her unconventional childhood in the autobiographical novel, The Body Where I Was Born.

Taking from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin’s new memoir This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression. In trying to sort out the root causes of her affliction, Merkin reflects on her childhood, her mother, her life as a writer, her marriage, and the birth of her child as she discusses in poignant detail various therapists, treatments, and hospitalizations for depression along the way. In an intimate conversation on her lifelong battle with depression and her search for release, Merkin is joined by Jill Soloway, the Emmy-winning creator of Transparent.

Who gets to see Shakespeare and act in his plays? Celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s extraordinary legacy, Lisa Wolpe and James Shapiro will explore the defining guidelines of performing his work today, and consider how and why Shakespeare still matters in contemporary America. Wolpe, actress, director, teacher, and producer, is the Artistic Director and founder of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, an award-winning all-female, multi-cultural theater company. James Shapiro, professor at  Columbia University, is the author of numerous books and essays on Shakespeare, including his most recent work, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. Join these two Shakespeare aficionados on an enlightening journey of what this master means to us today.

Dickens, an “agrarian ghetto,” is the fictional Los Angeles hood at the center of Paul Beatty’s scathingly satirical novel, The Sellout. It’s a book that, as poet Kevin Young writes in his perceptive New York Times review, “isn’t for the fainthearted.” Beatty — the first American novelist to win the coveted Man Booker Award — is a comic genius at the top of his game and in The Sellout, he dares to question almost every received notion about American society. Buckle your seat belts.

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and UCLA Professor Emeritus Saul Friedländer returns to memoir to recount a tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents. In Where Memory Leads: My Life, a sequel to Friedländer’s poignant first memoir, Where Memory Comes, published forty years ago and recently reissued with a new introduction from Claire Messud, he bridges the gap between the ordeals of his childhood during the German Occupation of France and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. Reflecting on the wrenching events that induced him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, Friedländer discusses this book and his life’s work with historian Steven J. Ross.

In her riveting oral history of the end of the 60s, Witness to the Revolution, Clara Bingham unveils that tumultuous time anew when America careened to the brink of a civil war at home, as it fought a long futile war abroad. For ALOUD, Bingham looks back at the local history of the non-violent draft resistance movement of men and women known as The Los Angeles Resistance. (The Los Angeles Resistance Collection is now being archived at the Los Angeles Public Library). To tell this revolutionary tale, she’s joined by David Harris, Resistance founder, and then-LA Resistance activists Winter Dellenbach and Bob Zaugh.

Writers and artists routinely reckon with anxiety and loathing as part of their creative process. Author and comedian Sara Benincasa, writer and illustrator Mari Naomi, and novelist Shanthi Sekaran, in conversation with writer and literary organizer Michelle Tea, discuss with humor and honesty the role fear has played in their work and their creative process. Be part of a larger discussion of how we learn to manage the stress of daily life.

With a brilliant blend of environmental and natural history, Dan Flores’ Coyote America traces the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the "wolf" in our backyards. The journey of the coyote to the American West and beyond isn’t just the story of an animal’s survival—it is one of the great epics of our time. Illuminating this legendary creature, Flores will be joined on stage for a conversation with playwright and chronicler of urban wildlife Melissa Cooper, who will also perform an excerpt from her play, New York City Coyote Existential.

Young children often seem especially creative and imaginative. But can we prove that scientifically? And what is it about children’s minds and brains that makes them so imaginative? Alison Gopnik, pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher and author of the new book, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children, discusses her cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn and how thinking like a child can make adults more creative too.