Kurt Andersen is host and co-creator of the Peabody Award-winning public radio program Studio 360 and New York Times bestselling author. As an editor, he co-founded Spy, Inside.com, and Very Short List and served as editorial director of Colors and editor-in-chief of New York. He has been a cultural columnist for The New Yorker and Time, as well as Time’s architecture and design critic. He comes to Live Talks Los Angeles to discuss his new novel, True Believers with Lawrence O’Donnell.

Internationally acclaimed Chef Marcus Samuelsson won the second season of Top Chef Masters on Bravo. He is the youngest chef to ever achieve two three-star reviews from The New York Times and he has been honored by the James Beard Foundation on multiple occasion. He is the author of several award-winning cookbooks and the forthcoming memoir, Yes! Chef.

“A few years ago, Bruce Springsteen told us we weren’t bad, but not to try to get any better otherwise we’d just be another lousy band. After 20 years, we still meet his stringent requirements. For instance, while we all know what ‘stringent’ means, none of us have yet mastered an F chord.” — Stephen King

On Irving’s upcoming novel….“This tender exploration of nascent desire, of love and loss, manages to be sweeping, brilliant, political, provocative, tragic, and funny—it is precisely the kind of astonishing alchemy we associate with a John Irving novel. .. It is Irving at his most daring, at his most ambitious. It is America and American writing, both at their very best.”
—Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone and My Own Country

Christopher Buckley is author of fifteen books, which have translated into sixteen languages. They include: Steaming To Bamboola, The White House Mess, Wet Work, God Is My Broker, Little Green Men, No Way To Treat a First Lady, Florence of Arabia, Boomsday, Supreme Courtship, Losing Mum And Pup: A Memoir and Thank You For Smoking, which was made into a movie in 2005.

Emmy and Peabody Award-winning Frank Deford is senior contributing writer at Sports Illustrated. A weekly commentator for NPR’s “Morning Edition,” — where he recently he read his fifteenth-hundred commentary — he is also a regular correspondent on the HBO show “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.

Oscar Hijuelos is the international bestselling author of eight novels, including Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, for which he became the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He visits Live Talks to talk about his memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes — about the people and places that inspired his novels.

Join us for an evening with Garry Marshall — a creative force in Hollywood for more than 50 years. He has excelled as a writer, producer, director, and actor. Among his credits, in TV & Film – Happy Days, Mork & Mindy, and Laverne & Shirley; Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride, Beaches, The Other Sister, and The Princess Diaries.

Join us for a lively discussion about the impact of the modern era of connectedness on our ability to think, create, and participate in the world. An event inspired by Pico Iyer’s recent piece in the New York Times extolling the virtues of peace and quiet. … Iyer has yet to own a cell phone!

Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Gregg Allman comes to Live Talks to share his story — the triumphs and tragedies. A gifted natural interpreter of the blues, his soulful and distinctive voice is one of the defining sounds in the history of American music. At this year’s 54th Annual Grammy Awards, the Allman Brothers Band was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award.