Aloud @ Los Angeles Public Library

Harvey, a poetic and passionate mystic and writer, suggests that what unites all religions \"is a truth that the service of God is putting love into action.\" He discusses his dramatic life conversion from mysticism to mystic activism with the Rector of Pasadena's All Saint's Church-known for its focus on social justice initiatives.

Filmmakers Jessum and Joseph explore the meaning and value of inter-faith dialogue with selected representatives of the more than 40 devotional communities in Los Angeles profiled in their award-winning new documentary.

In his new Novel, Luka and the Fire of Life, written for his youngest son, Rushdie explores the relationships between fathers and sons, life and death, the real and the imagined, freedom and authority. Join us for an evening with one of the world's most celebrated authors.

In a groundbreaking new account, Rowley describes the remarkable courage and lack of convention-private and public-that kept FDR and Eleanor together.

Balakian's new collection of poems explore the aftermath of 9/11 through layered perspectives of myth, history, and personal memory; a panoramic work of contemporary witness in a new age of American uncertainty.

Turner's poems reflect his experiences as a soldier--seven years in the US Army, including a year as infantry team leader in Iraq--with penetrating lyric power and compassion.

A Pulitzer-Prize willing biographer boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the queen from her own hazy legend, subtly and originally probing classical sources to yield a fresh, thrilling account of a remarkable woman.

This long-awaited work, assembled by Reza Aslan, features literature from countries as diverse as Morocco and Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, many presented in English for the first time. Celebrate this landmark publication with a stellar cast who will read from a diverse selection of authors- from Khalil Gibran to Naguib Mahfouz, from Orhan Pamuk to the grand dame of Urdu fiction, Ismat Chughtai.

The acclaimed historian offers a love story, an intimate account of the life of a major artist, and an exercise in self-revelation, based on thirty-three years of marriage.

The author of the bestseller The History of Love offers a soaring novel about a stolen desk that contains the secrets, and becomes the obsession of the lives it passes through.

A land of palm trees and movie stars, sunshine and glamour, Los Angeles inhabits a place of the mind as much as it does a physical geographic space. Often imagined of as a kind of paradise, the actual reality of the city is far more complex. Join us for cartographic history of the City of Angels from the colonial era to the present, with Creason, author and LAPL map librarian and Waldie, cultural critic and author of Holy Land.

Danticat, the acclaimed Haitian-American novelist, tells the stories of artists who create despite, or because of, the horrors that drove them from their homelands and that continue to haunt them.

What is Latino literature? Who writes it? Who reads it? Explore a rich literary tradition of five centuries of writing from two continents and 10 countries, from letters to the Spanish crown, to U.S. urbanites who grow up speaking Spanglish. Join this national conversation about the contribution of Latino writing to American culture.

One of the most gifted and best known Native American writers today offers this highly original self-portrait, steeped in Native American storytelling traditions, that weaves together family/personal memoir with an accounting of the creatures and landscapes that inform her vision of the world.

The New Yorker music critic leads an audio tour of several hundred years of music history, from Renaissance lute songs to Led Zeppelin, showing how certain motifs of celebration and lament recur in many different contexts and cultures.

O'Neill, a former barrister and PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of the novel Netherland has written a brilliant inquiry propelled by the unexplained incarcerations of both his grandfathers (one Irish, one Turkish) during the Second World War.

Set among the mid-forties denizens of Manhattan's SoHo-the new novel by the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Hours takes a deep look at the meaning of beauty and the place of love in our lives.

Appiah, a leading philosopher (\"America's Socrates\") and a professor at Princeton University, demonstrates that honor is the driving force in the struggle against man's inhumanity to man.

What causes a child to grow up gay or straight or bisexual? Neuroscientist LeVay summarizes where the quest for a biological explanation of sexual orientation stands today, taking us on a tour of laboratories that specialize in genetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology and more.

Join us for a mind-boggling multi-media tour through the early days of an institution whose alumni left their fingerprints all over popular culture: Animal House, Caddyshack, Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, SCTV, Spinal Tap, In Living Color, Ren & Stimpy, and The Simpsons. Long before there was The Onion and Comedy Central, there was the National Lampoon.