October 6, 2021 — Winner of the National Book Award, the Newbery Medal, and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, Virginia Hamilton (1934–2002) wove Black folktales and narratives of African American life and history into a body of work that forever changed American children’s writing and made her its most honored writer.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden joins award-winning children’s book author and memoirist Jacqueline Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming) for a conversation about Hamilton’s life and wildly inventive novels, newly collected in a Library of America volume edited by Hamilton biographer Julie K. Rubini.

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Virginia Hamilton and the Transformation of American Children's Literature

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.”

Kate Bolick is the best-selling author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, and coauthor of March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women. She teaches writing at Yale University.

Rediscover the Pathbreaking Fiction of Nancy Hale

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.

A Celebration of Ray Bradbury

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?

The Mysterious Greatness of Gatsby

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.

The Startling Theater of Adrienne Kennedy

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.

Black Writers in Paris, the FBI, and a Lost 1960s Classic: Rediscovering The Man Who Cried I Am

To cap LOA LIVE’s fall season, a killer lineup of panelists explores classic crime fiction of the 1960s, from Donald Westlake-writing-as-Richard Stark’s taut smash-and-grab heist novel The Score to Patricia Highsmith’s eerie meta-thriller The Tremor of Forgery.

Join Geoffrey O’Brien, editor of Crime Novels of the 1960s, along with noir maven Sarah Weinman (The Real Lolita), cultural critic Gene Seymour, and poet David Lehman (The Mysterious Romance of Murder) for an arresting dive into nine astonishingly inventive novels that pulse with the energies of a turbulent, transformative decade.

I’m Dreaming of a Noir Christmas: Classic Crime Thrillers of the 1960s

Don DeLillo is “our most necessary writer,” says his longtime editor Gerald Howard, one whose “intuitions and sentences have led him deeper into previously uncharted regions of our psyche than any other contemporary novelist.” Isn’t it time the Swedish Academy took notice?

To kick off a new year of LOA LIVE, Howard joins Mark Osteen, editor of the LOA DeLillo edition, for a freewheeling conversation about the towering legacy—and still insufficiently acknowledged genius—of the author of White Noise, Libra, and Underworld, modern masterpieces that explore, with humor and an unassailable eye for the absurd, the dreams, dangers, and delusions of modern American life.

Why Don DeLillo Deserves the Nobel

The story told and retold about America’s founding often excludes the Black communities that existed during the Revolution and the early republic. Black Writers of the Founding Era, a new volume from Library of America, changes that.

Inspired by the struggle for independence, Black Americans made bold, insightful contributions to debates about the meaning of the Revolution and the future of the new nation. Join James G. Basker, President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed for an eye-opening conversation about a vibrant and little-known aspect of American life and writing during a crucial formative period.

Black Writers of the Founding Era

Brash, opinionated, funny, and an indefatigable champion of the vulnerable over the rich and well-connected, Jimmy Breslin brought heart and knockout prose to every column and book he wrote. From peerless coverage of the assassinations of JFK and Malcolm X to the plight of immigrants, the Mafia, and the AIDS crisis, Breslin’s instinct for a story’s untold, personal dimensions gives his writing enduring vitality and emotional power.

Join New York Times columnist Dan Barry, editor of the just-published LOA edition of Breslin’s essential writings, MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle, and NYT bestselling author Mike Lupica for a lively conversation and memorable stories about the larger-than-life New Yorker who raised deadline journalism to literary art.

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.

Deadline Artist: The Genius of Jimmy Breslin

Why does the poet Robert Frost continue to beguile and intrigue readers 150 years after his birth? What is it about the four-time Pulitzer winner’s poems—deceptively simple evocations of landscape, work, village life, and love suffused with remarkable power, subtlety, and complexity—that makes them so quintessentially American?

Join former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith and Jay Parini, poet, biographer, and author of the just published Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart, for a special National Poetry Month conversation about the beauty , wisdom, and hidden depths of three beloved Frost poems that evoke different seasons and their moods: “Putting in the Seed,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers, the Boutell-Day Poetry Center at Smith College, and the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University.
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Robert Frost: Our Poet for All Seasons

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Virginia Hamilton and the Transformation of American Children's Literature

Library of America

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