Episodes
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Bestselling author Victoria Christopher Murray sits down with journalist Melissa Noel to discuss her latest book, Harlem Rhapsody: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Ignited the Harlem Renaissance.
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In 2003, author Jennifer Finney Boylan published She’s Not There, which became the first bestselling work by a transgender American and established Boylan as a go-to source for public conversation about the impact of gender on our lives. More than two decades later, her new memoir, Cleavage, returns with older and wiser eyes to examine the joys and the struggles of being transgender.
In this episode of Library Talks, Boylan sits down with bestselling author Roxanne Gay to discuss her latest memoir and her hope for a future in which we all have the freedom to live joyfully as men, as women, and in the space between us.
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Missing episodes?
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Writer and scholar David Wright Faladé sits down with Julie Orringer to discuss his latest book, The New Internationals, a stunning historical novel that sets a coming-of-age narrative and cross-cultural romance amidst a vibrant political moment in postwar Paris.
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When author and historian Martha Hodes was 12-years-old she was flying unaccompanied on a plane that was hijacked. Nearly half a century later she explores her memories of that event in her book My Hijacking, which draws on deep archival research and extensive interviews both to re-create what happened to her as a child and to understand the larger context of the world-historical event in which she unwittingly participated.
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New York State Poet Laureate Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, playwright, educator, and cultural activist. Her most recent book The Beloved Community was released in 2023. Here she is in conversation with Brent Hayes Edwards, professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University.
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Join author and professor Deondra Rose as she discusses her new book The Power of Black Excellence: HBCUs and the Fight for American Democracy with activist Angelo Pinto.
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Caoilinn Hughes joins fellow author Brandon Taylor to discuss her latest book, The Alternatives, a story of four brilliant Irish sisters, orphaned in childhood, who scramble to reconnect when the oldest disappears into the Irish countryside.
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Josephine Quinn sits down with award-winning poet Ken Chen to discuss her book How the World Made the West. Quinn's book poses a bold challenge to “civilizational thinking” on the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern West in everything from the law codes of Babylon, Assyrian irrigation, and the Phoenician art of sail to Indian literature, Arabic scholarship, and the metalworking riders of the Steppe.
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Jean Strouse sits down with Pulitzer Prize–winner Hernan Diaz to discuss her latest book Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers. Strouse's account illuminates a period of tumultuous social change that saw the declining fortunes of the British aristocracy, the dramatic rise of new wealth on both sides of the Atlantic, and the birth of the modern art market.
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In her new biography, The Elements of Marie Curie, Dava Sobel explores not just on Curie’s legendary genius, but the 45 women who worked in her lab—from Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium, to Curie’s elder daughter, Irène, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Sobel chronicles Curie’s remarkable life of discovery alongside the lives of the women who followed down the trail she blazed. Sobel discusses her new book with science journalist Angela Saini.
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Daniel Saldaña París speaks with Chloé Cooper Jones about his latest book Planes Flying over a Monster, which explores the cities where París has lived, each one home to a new iteration of himself. These now diverging, now coalescing selves raise questions: Where can we find authenticity? How do we construct the stories that define us? What if our formative memories are closer to fiction than truth?
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Dive into the Library’s collections for true tales of crime and chicanery from some of the city’s most outstanding lawbreakers. Beloved actors and performers read stories mined from the Library’s collections about the words and deeds of New Yorkers who lived on either side of the letter of the law.
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Beloved artist and author Maira Kalman sits down with author Rumaan Alam to discuss her new collection of illustrations, Still Life with Remorse, her most autobiographical and intimate work to date.
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Celebrating The Joy of Connections, the last book of beloved icon (and long-time New Yorker) Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Co-authors Allison Gilbert and Pierre Lehu are joined by Dr. Ruth's children, Dr. Miriam Westheimer and Dr. Joel Westheimer, in a conversation moderated by WABC-TV's Bill Ritter.
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Glory Edim, the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, discusses her new memoir, Gather Me, an ode to the power reading has had on her life and to books’ ability to help us understand ourselves.
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Clara Bingham discusses her new book, The Movement, the first oral history of the decade that built the modern feminist movement.
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Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the beloved marine biologist and policy expert imagines an inspiring landscape of possible climate futures.
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The U.S. Poet Laureate and Caldecott honoree Illustrator discuss their transcendent picture book featuring a poem that will travel into space aboard NASA’s Europa Clipper.
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Author Richard Powers discusses his latest novel, Playground, which intertwines tales of technology, race, friendships, and the environment.
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Not all evangelical churches fit the stereotypes. In their latest books, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Eliza Griswold and the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, Hahrie Han, bear witness to two churches who break the mold. In Circle of Hope, Griswold chronicles the ravaging and ultimately destructive results to a group of progressive-leaning Philadelphia evangelicals who attempt a racial reckoning. In Undivided, Han follows four members of a conservative Midwest church whose lives are radically altered for the better by a six-week program designed to tackle racial injustice among their ranks.
Griswold and Han discuss their books with journalist Andrea Elliott and examine how their stories shed light on the complexity of contemporary American evangelism.
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