Literary Arts is proud to present an evening with acclaimed author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates in celebration of his first novel, The Water Dancer (coming September 24). Coates will be in conversation with bestselling author Renée Watson. Tickets will go on sale July 16 at 1:00 p.m. [Buy Tickets Here] Tickets start at $15. Each $85/65-level tickets includes a pre-signed copy of The Water Dancer, Coates’ latest book (coming September 24). In this boldly imagined work of magic and adventure, Coates offers a bracingly original vision of the world of slavery. Driven by the author’s bold imagination and striking ability to bring readers deep into the interior lives of his brilliantly rendered characters, The Water Dancer is the story of America’s oldest struggle—the struggle to tell…
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Literary Arts is proud to present an evening with Margaret Atwood, acclaimed novelist, poet, literary critic, and activist. Join us as we celebrate the publication of The Testaments, Atwood’s hugely anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, coming September 10, 2019. Atwood will be in conversation with award-winning journalist and Oregon author Omar El Akkad. The appearance of Atwood’s acclaimed dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, and the current Emmy-award winning television series based on the novel, have created a cultural phenomenon. Interviewed live on stage by Omar El Akkad, the conversation will span the length of Atwood’s remarkable career, her diverse range of works, and why she has returned to her seminal story, 34 years later. Join us for an unmissable and intimate evening…
Comments closedSusan Steinberg’s first novel, Machine (Graywolf), is a dazzling and innovative leap forward for a writer whose most recent book, Spectacle, gained her a rapturous following. Machine revolves around a group of teenagers – both locals and wealthy out-of-towners – during a single summer at the shore. Steinberg captures the pressures and demands of this world in a voice that effortlessly slides from collective to singular, as one girl recounts a night on which another girl drowned. Hoping to assuage her guilt and evade a similar fate, she pieces together the details of this tragedy, as well as the breakdown of her own family, and learns that no one, not even she, is blameless. A daring stylist, Steinberg contrasts semicolon-studded sentences with short lines that…
Comments closedIn small-town Michigan, Abby Graven leads a solitary life. Once a bright student on the cusp of a promising art career, she now languishes in her childhood home, trudging to and from her job as a supermarket cashier. Each day she is taunted from the magazine racks by the success of her former best friend, Elise, a rising Hollywood starlet whose life in pictures Abby obsessively scrapbooks. At night Abby escapes through the films of her favorite director, Auguste Perren, a cult figure known for his creative institute, the Rhizome. Inspired by Perren, Abby draws fantastical storyboards based on her often premonitory dreams, a visionary gift she keeps hidden. When Abby encounters Elise again at their high school reunion, she is surprised and warmed that…
Comments closedElla is flat broke: wasting away on bodega coffee, barely making rent, seducing the occasional strange man who might buy her dinner. Unexpectedly, an Upper East Side couple named Lonnie and James rescues her from her empty bank account, offering her a job as a nanny and ushering her into their moneyed world. Ella’s days are now spent tending to the baby in their elegant brownstone or on extravagant excursions with the family. Both women are just 26 – but unlike Ella, Lonnie has a doting husband and son, unmistakable artistic talent, and old family money. Ella is mesmerized by Lonnie’s girlish affection and disregard for the normal boundaries of friendship and marriage. Convinced there must be a secret behind Lonnie’s seemingly effortless life, Ella…
Comments closedThe white power movement in America wants a revolution. Returning to a country ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of Vietnam veterans and disgruntled civilians who shared their virulent anti-communism and potent sense of betrayal concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. The command structure of their covert movement gave women a prominent place. They operated with discipline, made tragic headlines in Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City, and are resurgent under President Trump. Based on a decade of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard) tells the story of American paramilitarism and the…
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