Patricia Cornwell with Jamie Lee Curtis

Wednesday, September 18, 2019
7:30pm


Patricia Cornwell

in conversation with Jamie Lee Curtis 

discussing the writing life and her new thriller,
Quantum

El Portal Theatre
5269 Lankershim Blvd,
North Hollywood, CA 91601

PURCHASE TICKETS 
$30  General Admission Seat + book
$20 General Admission Seat* (available Aug 19, 10am)
*a bookseller will be on site selling books

This event sponsored in part by Amazon Publishing
 

Patricia Cornwell sold her first novel, Postmortem, in 1990 while working at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. An auspicious debut, it went on to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity Awards as well as the French Prix du Roman d’Aventure prize—the first book ever to claim all these distinctions in a single year. Growing into an international phenomenon, the Scarpetta series won Cornwell the Sherlock Award for best detective created by an American author, the Gold Dagger Award, the RBA Thriller Award, and the Medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her contributions to literary and artistic development.  Beyond the Scarpetta series, Cornwell has written the definitive nonfiction account of Jack the Ripper’s identity, cookbooks, a children’s book, a biography of Ruth Graham, and two other fictional series based on the characters Win Garano and Andy Brazil. 

Jamie Lee Curtis is an actress and author. She has appeared in many acclaimed films such as Halloween, Trading Places, True Lies, Freaky Friday and A Fish Called Wanda. Last year she reprised her role as Laurie Strode in the blockbuster 40thanniversary, Halloween, which broke records including it being the biggest opening for a movie starring a woman over 55.  She has appeared on television in the series Anything But Love, The Heidi Chronicles and Nicholas’ Gift, NCIS, New Girl and Scream Queens which earned her a seventh Golden Globe Nomination for Best Actress in a Comedy.  She is the author of 12 Bestselling Children’s Books. Me, Myselfie and I was published in 2018. She is a recovering alcoholic/addict and is an advocate for children, animals and the environment and has proudly served on the Boards of CASA and CHLA. She is an outspoken activist, an amateur photographer. Jamie has been married to Christopher Guest for 35 years and they have two adult children.

Patricia Cornwell’s Quantum delivers pulse-pounding thrills in a series featuring a brilliant and unusual new heroine, cutting-edge cybertechnology, and stakes that are astronomically high. While writing Quantum, Cornwell spent two years researching space, technology, and robotics at Captain Calli Chase’s home base, NASA’s Langley Research Center, and studied cutting-edge law enforcement and security techniques with the Secret Service, the US Air Force, NASA Protective Services, Scotland Yard, and Interpol.

On the eve of a top secret space mission, Captain Calli Chase detects a tripped alarm in the tunnels deep below a NASA research center. A NASA pilot, quantum physicist, and cybercrime investigator, Calli knows that a looming blizzard and government shutdown could provide the perfect cover for sabotage, with deadly consequences.

As it turns out, the danger is worse than she thought. A spatter of dried blood, a missing security badge, a suspicious suicide—a series of disturbing clues point to Calli’s twin sister, Carme, who’s been MIA for days.

Desperate to halt the countdown to disaster and to clear her sister’s name, Captain Chase digs deep into her vast cyber security knowledge and her painful past, probing for answers to her twin’s erratic conduct. As time is running out, she realizes that failure means catastrophe—not just for the space program but for the safety of the whole nation.

 

 

Malcolm Gladwell with Larry Wilmore

Tuesday, September 17, 2019
8pm

Presented in association with Barnes & Noble

Malcolm Gladwell
in conversation with Larry Wilmore

discussing his book,
Talking to Strangers:
What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

 

Fox Performing Arts Center
3801 Mission Inn Avenue
Riverside, CA 92501

PURCHASE TICKETS 
$55 General Admission Section Seat + signed book
$75 Premium Seating + signed book (first five rows)

— Feature on Malcolm Gladwell and his new book in the New York Times, Sep 1

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and the bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and What the Dog Saw, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers—and why they often go wrong.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is the host of the podcast Revisionist History and is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time magazine and one of the Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers. Previously, he was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business and science, and then served as the newspaper’s New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He lives in New York.

How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to each other that isn’t true?

Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

Emmy Award winner Larry Wilmorehas been a television producer, actor, comedian, and writer for more than 25 years. He can currently be heard as host of Larry Wilmore: Black on the Air on The Ringer Podcast Network. The show features Wilmore’s unique mix of humor and wit as he weighs in on the issues of the week and interviews guests in the worlds of politics, entertainment, culture, sports, and beyond.

Wilmore is perhaps best known for his role as host of Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, which debuted in January 2015 and ran for nearly two years. Off-screen, Wilmore serves as co-creator and consulting producer on HBO’s Insecure, a half-hour comedy series starring Issa Rae that details the awkward experiences and racy tribulations of a modern-day African-American woman. Wilmore also helped to launch ABC’s Black-ishas an executive producer.

Previously, Wilmore made memorable appearances as the “Senior Black Correspondent” on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and hosted his own Showtime “town hall”-style comedy specials, Larry Wilmore’s Race, Religion & Sex. He has written for In Living Color, The PJ’s (which he co-created), The Office(on which he has appeared as Mr. Brown, the diversity consultant), and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.He also served as creator, writer, and executive producer of The Bernie Mac Show, which earned him a 2002 Emmy Award for “Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series” and a 2001 Peabody Award.

In April 2016, Wilmore hosted the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington, DC. His first book, I’d Rather We Got Casinos and Other Black Thoughts, was published in January 2009.

Ticket sales are final.  No refunds.

 

Malcolm Gladwell with Brit Marling

Monday, September 16, 2019
8pm

Presented in association with Barnes & Noble


Malcolm Gladwell
in conversation with Brit Marling

discussing his book, 
Talking to Strangers:
What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

 

Frost Auditorium
4401 Elenda St,
Culver City, CA 90230

PURCHASE TICKETS 
$55 General Admission Section Seat + signed Book 
$75 Premium Seat + Book (Sold Out)

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and the bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and What the Dog Saw, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers—and why they often go wrong.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is the host of the podcast Revisionist History and is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time magazine and one of the Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers. Previously, he was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business and science, and then served as the newspaper’s New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He lives in New York.

How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to each other that isn’t true?

Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

Brit Marling is an actor, writer and producer. Most recently she was in the return of The OA on Netflix. Other credits include The Keeping Room, The Better Angels, I Origins, The East, and The Company You Keep.

Ticket sales are final.  No refunds.

 

Randall Munroe with Kyle Hill

Thursday, September 12, 2019
8pm


Randall Munroe
in conversation with Kyle Hill

discussing his book,
How To:
Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

Aratani Theatre
Japanese American Cultural & Community Center
244 S. San Pedro Street
Downtown Los Angeles, CA 90012

PURCHASE TICKETS
$75.00
 first three rows (includes book)*
$53.00 orchestra section (includes book)
$45.00 balcony section (includes book)
$20.00 balcony (on sale August 12, 10am)
* also includes Live Talks Los Angeles 10th anniversary tote bag.
 

Q&A with Entertainment Weekly about Randall Munroe’s new book, How To

The world’s most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the #1 New York Times bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer

Randall Munroe is the author of the popular webcomic xkcd and the science question-and-answer blog What If. He is author of the New York Times bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer. A former NASA roboticist, he left the agency in 2006 to draw comics on the internet full-time supporting himself through the sale of xkcd t-shirts, prints, posters, and books.  He appeared at Live Talks Los Angeles in conversation with Will Wheaton when his book, What If was published.

Kyle Hill is the science editor at Nerdist and host of the popular YouTube science show Because Science. He uses real-world math and science concepts to solve, measure, and make sense of pop culture quandaries in comics, video games, movies, and TV. His work has been published in WIREDPopular ScienceSlate and The Boston Globe, he has held writing positions at Scientific American and Discover Magazine, and has worked as a TV host/expert for Science Channel (MythBusters: The Search, How to Build Everything), Netflix (Bill Nye Saves the World), and Al Jazeera America (TechKnow). 

For any task you might want to do, there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It’s full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole.

Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you’re a baby boomer or a 90’s kid by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and powering your house by destroying the fabric of space-time. And if you want to get rid of the book once you’re done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth’s mantle, or launching it into the Sun.

By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn’t just make things difficult for himself and his readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and amusing illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.

David Koepp with Andrew Kevin Walker

Wednesday, September 11, 2019
8:00pm 
  

David Koepp
in conversation with Andrew Kevin Walker

discussing the writing life and his debut novel,
Cold Storage


William Turner Gallery
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue,
Santa Monica, CA 90404 

This event is part of our Newer Voices Series.
General Admission tickets are complimentary, but we encourage you to support these newer authors and purchase their books.

 RSVP HERE  for free tickets to this event
$30 Reserved Seat + Book PURCHASE TICKETS 

An astonishing debut by the screenwriter of Jurassic Park: a wild and terrifying adventure about three strangers who must work together to contain a highly contagious, deadly organism.

David Koepp is a celebrated American screenwriter and director best known for his work on Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, Panic Room, and War of the World. His work on screen has grossed over $6 billion worldwide.

“An ultra-flammable combination of science-based horror, primal nightmare-level terror, and unrelenting action, cunningly tied together by indelible characters and a satisfyingly sly, knowing sense of humor.” — Steven Soderbergh, Academy Award-winning director of Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven

In Cold Storage, when Pentagon bioterror operative Roberto Diaz was sent to investigate a suspected biochemical attack, he found something far worse: a highly mutative organism capable of extinction-level destruction. He contained it and buried it in cold storage deep beneath a little-used military repository.

Now, after decades of festering in a forgotten sub-basement, the specimen has found its way out and is on a lethal feeding frenzy.  Only Diaz knows how to stop it.

He races across the country to help two unwitting security guards—one an ex-con, the other a single mother.  Over one harrowing night, the unlikely trio must figure out how to quarantine this horror again.  All they have is luck, fearlessness, and a mordant sense of humor.  Will that be enough to save all of humanity?

Andrew Kevin Walker is the BAFTA nominated screenwriter of Se7en, Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, Brainscan and Nerdland. 

 

Emma Donoghue with Marisa Matarazzo

Tuesday, September 10, 2019
8:00pm 
  

Emma Donoghue
in conversation with Marisa Matarazzo

discussing the writing life and her novel,
Akin


William Turner Gallery
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue,
Santa Monica, CA 90404 

PURCHASE TICKETS
$43 Reserved Section + Book
$20 General Admission Section

Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is a writer of contemporary and historical fiction whose novels include the international bestseller Room (her screen adaptation was nominated for four Oscars), Frog Music, Slammerkin, The Sealed Letter, Landing, Life Mask, Hood, and Stirfry. Her story collections are Astray, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, Kissing the Witch, and Touchy Subjects.  She also writes literary history, and plays for stage and radio. She lives in London, Ontario, with her partner and their two children.

Marisa Matarazzo is the author of Drenched: Stories of Love and Other Deliriums. Her stories have appeared in a number of literary journals, and she has a piece forthcoming in The Believer. She is an Assistant Professor in the MFA Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles and is currently at work on a novel.

Praise for Room
“Emma Donoghue’s writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tenderness. Room is a book to read in one sitting. When it’s over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days.”―Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry

In her new novel, Akin, a retired New York professor’s life is thrown into chaos when he takes a young great-nephew to the French Riviera, in hopes of uncovering his own mother’s wartime secrets.

Noah Selvaggio, a widower living on the Upper West Side, but born in the South of France is days away from his first visit back to Nice since he was a child, bringing with him a handful of puzzling photos he’s discovered from his mother’s wartime years. But he receives a call from social services: he is the closest available relative of an eleven-year-old great-nephew he’s never met, who urgently needs someone to look after him. Out of a feeling of obligation, he agrees to take Michael along on his trip.

Much has changed in this famously charming seaside mecca, still haunted by memories of the Nazi occupation. The unlikely duo, suffering from jet lag and culture shock, bicker about everything from steak frites to screen time. But Noah gradually comes to appreciate the boy’s truculent wit, and Michael’s ease with tech and sharp eye help Noah unearth troubling details about their family’s past. Both come to grasp the risks people in all eras have run for their loved ones, and find they are more akin than they knew.

Akin is a funny, heart-wrenching tale of an old man and a boy, born two generations apart, who unpick their painful story and start to write a new one together.