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.

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Wednesday, October 25—For more than sixty years, in such works as Funnyhouse of a Negro and Ohio State Murders, Adrienne Kennedy has bewitched audiences with plays that transform stages into dreamscapes, actors into ghosts, and personal history into myth. One of only five living writers in the Library of America series, Kennedy “never [takes] a straight path from one event to another if a more beautiful route is available,” says actor Natalie Portman.

Join Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Margo Jefferson, Obie-winning playwright and screenwriter Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Yale professor Marc Robinson, editor of the new Library of America edition of Kennedy’s collected writings, for a conversation about one of the American theater’s most haunting and irreducible voices.

Thursday, September 21—In the hundred years since The Great Gatsby was published, American society and culture have been utterly transformed. Why then do readers and writers continue to turn to this luminous novel of money, class, 1920s glamour, and reckless love to find the elusive key to the meaning of America? What is the secret of its astonishing staying power?

To kick off the Fall 2023 season of LOA LIVE, join Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Wesley Morris (The New York Times) and National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee (Pachinko) for a conversation with LOA Fitzgerald editor James L. W. West III. What do the immortal figures of Nick Carraway, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, Jordan Baker, and Jay Gatsby have to tell us about what changes and what remains the same in the American experience?

Wednesday, July 19—In The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, and other visionary works melding science fiction, horror, fantasy, and high literature, Ray Bradbury electrified readers and inspired generations of genre-bending younger writers. Acclaimed authors Connie Willis and Kelly Link join LOA Bradbury editor Jonathan R. Eller and SF expert Gary K. Wolfe for a conversation about this American original’s towering legacy.

“Ray Bradbury never cared about the science, only about the people, which was why the stories worked so well.”—Neil Gaiman

Wednesday, June 21—Best-selling author Kate Bolick joins LOA LIVE to discuss one of the most gifted American writers of the mid–twentieth century. Nancy Hale, winner of ten O. Henry Awards and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, explored women and children’s inner lives in luminous and deeply felt work far ahead of its time. Two new LOA paperbacks restore these lost classics: Where the Light Falls: Selected Stories of Nancy Hale and the best-selling 1942 novel The Prodigal Women, whose uncompromising portrayal of women’s shifting roles, open sexuality, and ambivalence toward motherhood pries open what Bolick in her introduction calls “the gap between what liberation looks like, and what it actually is.”

Wednesday, May 17—Charles Portis’s novels and stories, with their deadpan style, unforgettable characters, and rollicking plots of pursuit, obsession, absurdity, and intrigue, have a passionate following among readers and fellow writers. “His fiction,” Roy Blount, Jr., has said, “is the funniest I know.” To celebrate publication of LOA’s long-awaited collected edition of the author of True Grit, join Blount, Roz Chast, Ian Frazier, Mary Roach, Paul Theroux, Ed Park, Calvin Trillin, and Jay Jennings for an all-star tribute to the novelist whose work has been called “one of the great pure pleasures—both visceral and cerebral—available in modern American literature.”

Thursday, April 20—An unparalleled master of the short story, Bernard Malamud ranks among America’s greatest mythmakers and illuminators of the human heart, blending humor and truth in works that, to quote Saul Bellow, “discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York.” To mark publication of the third and final volume of LOA’s Malamud edition, join biographer and editor Philip Davis and acclaimed writers Tobias Wolff and Nicole Krauss for a master class in “The Magic Barrel,” one of Malamud’s most brilliant and beloved tales.

Wednesday, March 15, 2023—From Pulp Era pioneers to the radical innovators of the 1960s and ’70s, visionary women writers have been a transformative force in American science fiction. For Women’s History Month, acclaimed SF authors Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Pamela Sargent, and Sheree Renée Thomas join Lisa Yaszek, editor of LOA’s The Future Is Female!, for a conversation about the writers who smashed the genre’s gender barrier to create worlds and works that remain revolutionary.

Wednesday, February 15, 2023—Frederick Douglass’s first recorded speech, “I Have Come to Tell You Something About Slavery,” inaugurated a five-decade career as the fiery, eloquent champion of abolition and emancipation, equal rights and human dignity. Join David W. Blight, Douglass’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and editor of a revelatory new LOA collection, for an exploration of the genius of an extraordinary man who escaped slavery to become one of the greatest orators and writers in American history.

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers and Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Wednesday, January 18, 2023—One of the most popular works ever written about the Civil War, Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac Trilogy is a masterpiece of historical storytelling and a groundbreaking work of scholarship. Join distinguished historians Gary W. Gallagher, editor of LOA’s new one-volume edition, and Harold Holzer for a conversation about how Catton’s democratic focus on the experiences of soldiers—in the heat of battle and in the quieter moments of everyday army life—transformed Civil War history and still enthralls.

We thank our promotional partners: Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), American Historical Association (AHA), National Council for History Education (NCHE), and University of Virginia.