Free Library Podcast

Here Comes the Sun, Nicole Dennis-Benn's debut novel about a young Jamaican struggling to protect her sister and village as she experiences feelings for another woman, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, among other honors. Her new novel, Patsy, follows an undocumented Jamaican immigrant's travails in Brooklyn.

Rebecca Makkai's books include The Borrower, Music for Wartime, and The Hundred-Year House, which won a Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association. Her stories have appeared in Harper's, Tin House, and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications. Shortlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal, Makkai's latest novel interweaves fine art, the tragedy of the 1980s and '90s AIDS crisis, and the tumult of the contemporary world.

(recorded 6/6/2019)

In his bestselling L.A. Quartet mysteries and the Underworld USA trilogy, James Ellroy ''has vigorously redefined the well-shadowed turf of contemporary crime fiction'' (Atlanta Journal Constitution). He is also the author of the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy of novels, several collections of short stories and essays, and a memoir about his mother's 1958 still-unsolved murder. In This Storm, the second installment in the Second L.A. Quartet, Ellroy hammers out a sordid story of corrupt cops, war profiteers, Japanese internment, and fascism during the darkest days of World War II. 

(recorded 6/4/2019)

In conversation with nos. 1 bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand

James Patterson holds the Guinness World Record for the most number-one New York Times bestsellers, and his books have sold more than 375 million copies worldwide. A tireless champion of the power of books and reading, Patterson created a new children's book imprint, JIMMY Patterson, whose mission is to foster lifelong reading habits. He has donated more than 1 million books to students and soldiers and funds more than four hundred James Patterson Teacher Education Scholarships. In Unsolved, a steely FBI agent struggles to find the pattern in a string of seemingly unrelated murders.

(recorded 6/3/2019)

Rick Atkinson won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for An Army at Dawn, the first volume in his Liberation trilogy, a ''densely researched but supremely readable'' (New York Times Book Review) history of the Allied victory in World War II. His other bestselling books include The Day of Battle, The Long Gray Line, In the Company of Soldiers, and Crusade. A longtime reporter at the Washington Post, Atkinson has garnered two Pulitzer Prizes, a George Polk Award, and the Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. Recounting the chaotic first 21 months of the Revolutionary War, The British Are Coming is the first in a three-volume account of America's fight for independence.

(recorded 5/30/2019)

In conversation with Jason Freeman, producer and editor of author events

John Waters's transgressive movies include Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, and Cecil B. Demented. He is also the author of Shock Value, Crackpot, Role Models, Make Trouble, and 2014's Carsick, in which-armed with his trademark loud suits, wit, and pencil-thin mustache-Waters mingled with America's denizens as he hitchhiked to the West Coast. In his new book, the ''Pope of Trash'' offers lessons on failing upward, developing wide-ranging cultural and sartorial tastes, loving without emotional peril, and cheating death itself.

(recorded 5/23/2019)

One of Newsweek's ''150 Women Who Shake the World'' and the Guardian's ''Top 100 Women,'' Tony Award–winning playwright Eve Ensler is a performer, activist, and author. Her phenomenon The Vagina Monologues has been published in nearly 50 languages and adapted as an HBO film. She is the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls; One Billion Rising, a global action to end gender-based violence; and co-founder of the City of Joy, an institution for survivors of violence in the Congo. The Apology is a transformative imagined apology from her father.

(recorded 5/22/2019)

A staff writer at The New Yorker for more than three decades, Adam Gopnik is the author of Paris to the Moon, The Table Comes First, and At the Strangers' Gate, an ''elegant'' memoir of his 1980s move to a peculiar New York that ''effortlessly weaves in the city's cultural history'' (New York Times). A three-time recipient of the National Magazine Award and a winner of the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting, Gopnik was decorated with the French Republic's medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. An answer to dogmatic attacks on liberalism and its adherents, A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto about the great historical moral success of this philosophy and its necessity in an age of calcifying autocracy.

(recorded 5/21/2019)

A ''clever and insightful inspector of the American scene'' (Wall Street Journal), David Brooks has written an op-ed column for The New York Times since 2003. A former editor and columnist at The Weekly Standard, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic Monthly, he frequently appears on PBS NewsHour, Meet the Press, and NPR's All Things Considered. His books include the bestselling Bobos in Paradise, The Social Animal, and The Road to Character, a look at the mélange of traits that can lead to the path of substantive living. In The Second Mountain, Brooks posits that those who embrace lives of deeper commitment and service to others find greater fulfillment.

Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Endowed Lecture

(recorded 5/16/2019)

''Masterful. . . . A devastating debut novel'' (The Washington Post), Tommy Orange's There There has been lauded as a new American treasure by some of the country's greatest writers and esteemed publications. A New York Times bestseller and one of its 10 Best Books of the Year, it follows the convergence of 12 unforgettable Native American characters living in Oakland, California, building to a shocking but inexorable conclusion. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, Orange teaches in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner is the author of The Flamethrowers, a ''white-hot ember of a book'' (Los Angeles Times) that traces the jagged trajectory of a young woman through the 1970s New York art scene, and Telex from Cuba, in which two American children in a gilded rural enclave sense the impending Castro revolution. In The Mars Room, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Kushner tells the ''tough, prismatic'' yet ''surprisingly luminous'' (Wall Street Journal) story of a young woman at the outset of a double life sentence in a California prison.

(recorded 5/15/2019)

George Packer won the 2013 National Book Award for The Unwinding, a biographical examination of the seismic shifts in economics and politics over the past three decades that have brought the United States to the brink. A longtime New Yorker staff writer possessed of a ''far more coherent worldview than most reporters'' (The New York Times Book Review), he was honored with two Overseas Press Club awards in 2003 for his coverage of the war in Iraq and his reporting on the civil war in Sierra Leone. His books include the bestselling The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Blood of the Liberals, winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. In Our Man, Packer charts the rise and fall of diplomat Richard Holbrooke, the brilliant but self-absorbed architect of the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the Balkan wars.

Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture

(recorded 5/14/2019)