March 30, 2021—The Western, with its tales of adventure, honor, and violence set against the magnificent landscapes of the frontier, has had an enduring hold on the American imagination. In this freewheeling conversation inspired by LOA series volumes The Western: Four Classic Novels of the 1940s & 50s and Elmore Leonard: Westerns, four film critics with a literary bent—Terrence Rafferty, Gene Seymour, Imogen Sara Smith, and former LOA Editor in Chief Geoffrey O’Brien—recommend and discuss their favorite Western books and films and what they tell us about American history, culture, and character.

Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, Film Forum, Old Cowtown Museum, True West, Western Writers of America / Roundup Magazine, and the Writers Guild Foundation.

March 18, 2021—Feminist writer-activists of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s sparked a diverse, visionary, and revolutionary movement for freedom and social justice that fifty years later is as relevant and urgent as it’s ever been. Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore, editors of Library of America’s revelatory new Women’s Liberation! anthology, lead an inter-generational conversation about the living questions at the heart of the book: What is this tradition and what is its legacy for today? What unfulfilled possibilities need to be recovered, witnessed, and passed on in the time of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter?

Featuring Women’s Liberation! anthology editors Alix Kates Shulman (Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen) and Honor Moore (Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury) with Barbara Smith (The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom), Margo Jefferson (Negroland: A Memoir), and Jennifer Baumgardner (editor, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future).

Presented in partnership with the Center for American Studies at Columbia University and the Center for Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society

Additional promotional partners: Women’s Review of Books, Dottir Press, Women’s March, Veteran Feminists of America

March 3, 2021 — Published to a mixed reception in 1974, James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk has undergone a marked critical reappraisal in recent years, aided in part by its inclusion in the 2015 Library of America volume James Baldwin: Later Novels and by the Barry Jenkins film adaptation in 2018.

In the latest installment of the LOA Live series “Reading James Baldwin Now,” Literary Hub staff writer and Catapult Contributing Editor Gabrielle Bellot discusses why she believes Beale Street, which centers on an act of police misconduct but is also a Black love story, deserves to be read as Baldwin’s masterpiece—a major work that speaks directly to present-day concerns.

Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

February 18, 2021 — One hundred years ago Langston Hughes published his now-famous first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In the decades that followed, as both a longtime resident of Harlem and a cosmopolitan world traveler, Hughes wrote of Black life in masterful, deceptively simple poems and prose that made him one of the most popular and influential writers of the twentieth century.

Brent Hayes Edwards, Director of the Schomburg Center’s Scholars-in-Residence Program and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, joins Rafia Zafar, Professor of English and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and editor of Library of America’s two-volume collection of Harlem Renaissance novels, for a conversation about Hughes’s greatness and his centrality for American literature and the culture of the global African diaspora. The program also features readings of Hughes’s work by poets Kevin Young and Tyehimba Jess and bluesman Billy Branch.

Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers; the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research; Washington University in St. Louis; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and Columbia University

January 27, 2021 — The past year has been a historic stress test for American democracy. Where do we stand now? What can our tradition of political writings tell us about what lies ahead? New Yorker writer and Columbia University Professor of Journalism Nicholas Lemann, editor of Library of America’s new anthology American Democracy: 21 Historic Answers to 5 Urgent Questions, leads a conversation on the controversies and flashpoints that will shape the future course of our democratic experiment. Featuring Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed and Professor of Political Science and Chair of Constitutional Studies at Notre Dame University; Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne; Nicole Hemmer, author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics; and Michele Moody-Adams, Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia.

Presented in partnership with the Center for American Studies at Columbia University

Andrew Blauner, editor of the LOA anthology The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life, joins four distinguished contributors to the collection for a seventieth anniversary conversation reflecting on the deeper truths of Schulz’s deceptively simple strip and its impact on their lives and art and on the broader culture.

Presented in partnership with Peanuts Worldwide and the Charles M. Schulz Museum

December 2, 2020 — Ernest Hemingway, one of the towering presences in American literature, is published this season in the Library of America and explored in a forthcoming PBS documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick airing in Spring 2021. Novick joins co-producer Sarah Botstein and Robert W. Trogdon, editor of LOA’s Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918-1926, for a sneak preview of the film and a conversation about Hemingway’s literary genius, his complexity, and his controversial legacy.

Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers and the Hemingway Society

October 29, 2020 — Known to millions for her classic story “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson took the American gothic tradition of Poe, Hawthorne, and Lovecraft and brought it down to earth in novels and stories that brilliantly plumbed the dark underside of the conformist postwar decades. Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, editor of Library of America’s Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s and 50s, joins novelist and literary critic Francine Prose and playwright John Guare for a pre-Halloween conversation about one of our most haunting writers.

Presented in partnership with the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers

October 13, 2020 — In his Pulitzer Prize–winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), Richard Hofstadter explored the persistent strains of irrationality and conspiratorial thinking in American culture and their threat to our democratic politics. How can Hofstadter help us make sense of 2020, a year when fringe conspiracy theories moved into the political and media mainstream? Acclaimed scholars Sean Wilentz, editor of LOA’s authoritative Richard Hofstadter edition, Eric Foner, Arlie Hochschild, and Ira Katznelson discuss Hofstadter’s work as a touchstone for navigating a polarized and unstable political climate.

Presented in partnership with the Center for American Studies at Columbia University and the American Historical Association

September 23, 2020 — In 1965, at a critical juncture in the Civil Rights Movement, James Baldwin’s essay “The White Man’s Guilt" unmasked the myths and lies that sustain racial injustice in America. We’re at a parallel moment now, writes Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. in his new book Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own. In this LOA Live webinar Glaude, Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton, explores the contemporary resonances of Baldwin’s powerful and prophetic piece.

Presented in partnership with The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers, and The New Republic