Thomas Beller has been getting over J. D. Salinger his entire life. For his new book, J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, he trailed his subject from Park Avenue to his final refuge, barnstorming across New England to visit various Salinger shrines, interviewing just about everyone alive who ever knew Salinger. He’s joined by two... More

David Grossman reads from Falling Out of Time and talks with John Burnham Schwartz. “He may be the most gifted writer I’ve ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence... More

Readings by Edna O’Brien and Edward St. Aubyn followed by a Q&A. Introduced by Carl Bernstein and Patrick McGrath. Edna O’Brien’s new memoir is Country Girl. She “has made of her memories something of both precision and depth, a book that, letting us see her as she was, jumps with an all-consuming curiosity from one... More

Adam Phillips, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Freud, is joined by novelist and critic Daphne Merkin for a discussion of Phillips’ strikingly original new biography of the father of psychoanalysis, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst. More

It’s as hard to introduce writers as it is to make movies about them. Here’s what they do: they sit and write things. Not exactly lives crammed with event. I can say this: Tracy Smith won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for her collection Life on Mars. She teaches at Princeton and lives in Brooklyn, which... More

“I’m told that poetry is obliged to be mystical, magical, musical and lyrical,” began Ms. Angelou on our stage the evening of December 9, 1971. “And I believe that the great poetry in the United States is the poetry that came out of and still comes out of the black experience.” More

Join Cassandra Clare for the exclusive book launch for The City of Heavenly Fire! Shadowhunters and demons square off for the final showdown in the spellbinding finale of the bestselling series The Mortal Instruments. Special guests include authors Josh Lewis, Maureen Johnson, David Levithan, Holly Block, and Kelly Link. More

Acclaimed English poet Mark Ford, introduced by critic Helen Vendler, reads from his Selected Poems, a diverse compilation that celebrates the mythic in the everyday. John Ashbery, who began his career as a young winner of our Discovery Poetry Contest, returns to read from Quick Question, his latest collection of shrewd and playful poems. He... More

Lydia Davis won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. Her new collection of stories is Can’t and Won’t. “Few writers now working make the words on the page matter more,” wrote Jonathan Franzen. Jean Echenoz won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt for I’m Gone. His new novel is 1914. “Again and again we pause to... More

Nobel Prize-winner Derek Walcott continues our celebration of National Poetry Month with a reading from his newly-published The Poetry of Derek Walcott, 1948-2013, which draws from every stage of the poet’s storied career. Across sixty-five years, Walcott has grappled with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the riddle... More

To mark the occasion of Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, scholar James Shapiro discusses his new anthology, Shakespeare in America, which, as he writes in the introduction, is also “a history of America itself, not the straightforward narrative found in textbooks, but rather one that runs parallel to the conventional story of the nation, a more sharp-edged... More

Posted on Apr 18, 2014
When I was sixteen I saw my brother act in a summer-stock production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and was hooked on Stoppard. When I got home I picked up a copy of Hamlet, which wasn’t taught in my high school. Encountering the two plays in that order left... More