Posts by Live Talks LA
Rock Bottom Remainders
Support booksellers with the Rock Bottom Remainders!
Colson Whitehead with Mary Karr
This event premieres on July 7 at 6pm PST/9pm EST
on the Live Talks Los Angeles Facebook page and also in our YouTube channel.
The event is free. RSVP below to watch the premiere.
You can purchase the book in the link below.
RSVP HERE
Buy the book in our Bookshop.org store
COLSON WHITEHEAD is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. He is also a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. In 2020, he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Nickel Boys. Colson Whitehead’s reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s and Granta. Visit his website.
MARY KARR is an award-winning poet, essayist, songwriter, and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir, The Liars’ Club, which documented her hardscrabble Texas childhood. Two more bestselling memoirs followed, Cherry, which recounted her tumultuous teens and sexual coming-of-age, and Lit, the story of her descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness–and to her astonishing resurrection. In 2015, Karr released the bestselling The Art of Memoir, in which she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and “black belt sinner,” providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre. She is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry magazine. Karr is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University. Visit her website.
“[Whitehead] is a splendidly talented writer, with more range than any other American novelist currently working—he can be funny, lyrical, satirical, earnest—whatever is needed by the work.”
—George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo
In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.
When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.
Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.
Charlie Kaufman with Jane Smiley
Charlie Kaufman
in conversation with Jane Smiley
discussing his novel,
Antkind
This event premieres on July 6 at 6pm PST/9pm EST
on the Live Talks Los Angeles Facebook page and also in our YouTube channel.
RSVP below to watch the premiere.
You can purchase the book and RSVP in the link below.
RSVP HERE/PURCHASE BOOK
**NOTE: This event was originally scheduled for July 14, and has been rescheduled. Ticket holders have been sent an email about the change.
The bold and boundlessly original debut novel from the Oscar®-winning screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York.
Charlie Kaufman is the screenwriter of films including Anomalisa; Synechdoche, New York; Adaptation; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; and Being John Malkovich. He won an Academy Award for his work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and has been nominated three additional times. He is also a three-time BAFTA winner for screenwriting, and he has been nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, among many other film honors.
Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, The Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. She is also the author of several works of nonfiction and books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. Her next novel is Perestroika in Paris and publishes in December 2020.
“To paraphrase Charlie Kaufman, it’s like a brain factory in there! This is a whopper of a book, bursting with the driest of humor, the strangest of scenarios, and the most brilliant of observations. It is wholly original, maddening, and marvelous.”—Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book
“Each page is so stuffed with invention, audacity, and hilarity, it feels like an act of defiance. Antkind is a fever dream you don’t want to be shaken awake from, a thrill ride that veers down stranger and stranger alleys until you find yourself in a reality so kaleidoscopic you will question your own sanity—or: the novel only Charlie Kaufman could pull off.”—Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette
B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film made by an enigmatic outsider—a film he’s convinced will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core. His hands on what is possibly the greatest movie ever made—a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur ninety years to complete—B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed, leaving him the sole witness to its inadvertently ephemeral genius.
All that’s left of this work of art is a single frame from which B. must somehow attempt to recall the film that just might be the last great hope of civilization. Thus begins a mind-boggling journey through the hilarious nightmarescape of a psyche as lushly Kafkaesque as it is atrophied by the relentless spew of Twitter. Desperate to impose order on an increasingly nonsensical existence, trapped in a self-imposed prison of aspirational victimhood and degeneratively inclusive language, B. scrambles to re-create the lost masterwork while attempting to keep pace with an ever-fracturing culture of “likes” and arbitrary denunciations that are simultaneously his bête noire and his raison d’être.
A searing indictment of the modern world, Antkind is a richly layered meditation on art, time, memory, identity, comedy, and the very nature of existence itself—the grain of truth at the heart of every joke.
Robbie Conal & Shepard Fairey with Jim Daichendt
This event premieres on June 16 at 6pm PST/9pm EST on the Live Talks Los Angeles Facebook page and also in our YouTube channel.
The event is free. RSVP below to watch the premiere. You can purchase a signed book then, if you wish.
REGISTER/PURCHASE BOOK
$55 includes a signed copy of the gorgeous coffee table book
signed by Robbie Conal and Jim Daichendt (Tax, S&H included)
Additional signed books can be purchased here.
Do you have a question for Robbie?
RSVP, and you will get an email asking for questions!
NOTE: If you had a ticket to the original event on June 8, we have sent you an email about the switch to a virtual event with all the details.
Over the past 35 years, Robbie Conal has made more than 100 street posters satirizing politicians of all stripes, televangelists, the news and entertainment media, and global capitalists. He began making satirical oil portraits of politicians and bureaucrats, turning them into street posters. He developed an irregular guerrilla army of volunteers who helped him poster the streets of major cities around the country. With his unique brand of humor and insight, he has also taken on heavier subjects like censorship, war, social injustice, and environmental issues. Not to be understood too quickly, Conal recently began applying his wit on celebratory portraits of his personal heroes Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Greta Thunberg, Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, and Maya Angelou.
His work has been featured on “CBS This Morning,” in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Vanity Fair, Rollingstone, and People magazines. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant, a Getty Individual Artist Grant and a Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Individual Artist’s Grant (COLA).
Conal’s work has been collected by—and featured in exhibitions at—The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the San Jose Museum of Art. He has also been a cartoon character on The Simpsons. His art was featured in the 2015 Venice Biennale and an international street art exhibit in Vienna, Austria. His most recent solo exhibit, Cabinet of Horrorsfeatured Donald Trump and his close cohorts, at Track 16 DTLA Gallery (2018).
His books include Art Attack: The Midnight Politics of a Guerrilla Poster Artist, Artburn, and Not Your Typical Political Animal, with his wife Deborah Ross.
Shepard Fairey is an American contemporary street artist, graphic designer, activist, and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration from Rhode Island School of Design in 1992. While a student there in 1989, he created the “Andre the Giant has a Posse” sticker that transformed into the OBEY GIANT art campaign, with imagery that has changed the way people see art and the urban landscape. He is known for his Barack Obama “Hope” poster, which he created in support of the 2008 presidential campaign. Fairey’s stickers, guerilla street art presence, and more than 100 large scale public murals are recognizable worldwide. His work is in the collections of several museums, including the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
James Daichendt, EdD, serves as Dean of the Colleges and Professor of Art History at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. He is the author of several books including Robbie Conal: Streetwise: 35 Year of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art The Urban Canvas: Street Art Around the World; Kenny Scharf: In Absence of Myth; Shepard Fairey Inc., Artist/Professional/Vandal; Stay Up! Los Angeles Street Art; Artist Scholar: Reflections on Writing and Research , and Artist-Teacher: A Philosophy for Creating and Teaching (Intellect Ltd, 2010). He is an art critic and journalist for KCET’s Artbound. In addition, he is the Chief Editor of the academic journal Visual Inquiry: Learning and Teaching Art. Jim holds a doctorate from Columbia University and graduate degrees from Harvard and Boston Universities.
Robbie Conal: Streetwise 35 Years of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art features every image in Robbie Conal’s storied poster campaigns — gnarled, gut retching, and emotionally laden — and is the definitive history of “America’s foremost street artist” (Washington Post). A foreword by Shepard Fairey sets the scene. Conal’s satirical posters of political figures are given richer context as his life story is insightfully joined with art criticism by expert Daichendt. Today honored by museums and arts organizations around the world, Conal hit high speed during the Reagan administration in 1986, when he began turning his grotesque portraits into street posters. We see Conal’s life come together at a critical moment to attack issues of censorship, war, social injustice, and the environment.
Michael Lewis with Larry Wilmore
This event premieres on June 15 at 6pm PST/9pm EST on the Live Talks Los Angeles Facebook page and also in our YouTube channel.
The event is free to register and watch.
REGISTER
We welcome Michael Lewis back to our stage. His bestsellers include The Fifth Risk, The Undoing Project, Flash Boys, The Big Short, The Blind Side, Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, Boomerang, The New New Thing and Panic, among others. Michael Lewis previously appeared with Malcolm Gladwell at Live Talks Los Angeles discussing his book, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt. Watch the video. We also hosted him for his book The Undoing Project where he was interviewed by Mindy Kaling. Watch the video. He also interviewed Walter Isaacson for his book on Leonardo da Vinci. Watch the video.
Emmy Award winner Larry Wilmore has 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-ish as an executive producer.
“Fascinating―and at times harrowing…. Lewis tells an important and timely story, one that all of us who pay for, care about, and want government to work should hear.”
– NPR
What are the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works?
“The election happened,” remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. “And then there was radio silence.” Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them.
Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders. In Agriculture the funding of vital programs like food stamps and school lunches is being slashed. The Commerce Department may not have enough staff to conduct the 2020 Census properly. Over at Energy, where international nuclear risk is managed, it’s not clear there will be enough inspectors to track and locate black market uranium before terrorists do.
Willful ignorance plays a role in these looming disasters. If your ambition is to maximize short-term gains without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing those costs. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is upside to ignorance, and downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.
If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system―those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. Michael Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night.
Michael Lewis with Larry Wilmore
Michael Lewis in conversation with Larry Wilmore
discussing his book, “The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy”