This session explores how race, or more specifically how being nonwhite in America, has formed the identities and lives of our three memoirists. Sejal Shah, in her meditative memoir in essays, This Is One Way to Dance, explores how we are all marked by culture, language, family, and place. In her moving memoir, Say I’m Dead, E. Dolores Johnson tell…

Bởi Boston Book Festival

Secrets: almost every family has them. The three memoirists in this audio session will talk about the secrets and mysteries that haunt their lives. Helen Fremont, in The Escape Artist, explores the psychological fallout stemming from her parents’ refusal to acknowledge that they were survivors of the Holocaust. In The Book of Atlantis Black, poet B…

A novelist and essayist, a computer scientist, and a scholar of human development discuss their lives and intellectual development. Claire Messud is the beloved author of many works of fiction and criticism. In Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, she examines her lived life and her literary life--which are bound together inex…

We live at a time when sex is no longer taboo to talk about (or have), when repression is banished, and no one has issues. Or not. Turns out, there are still powerful unspoken norms, cultural expectations, and widespread confusion about sex. Let’s talk about it with Lauren Holmes, author of a much-lauded and multiple star-reviewed debut story colle…

As the memoir continues its reign, it has also continued to surprise and captivate us, raising provocative questions about truth, memory, and the different ways we tell the story of ourselves. Novelist Heidi Julavits’s collection of personal essays, The Folded Clock, blends memoir and journal, with wry, minutely-observed meditations on friendship, …

Join the conversation about black political and social activism with leading scholars of the subject. Jason Sokol, author of All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston To Brooklyn, specializes in politics, race, and civil rights. Laurence Ralph, author of Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago, studies how police abuse,…

There are more possible definitions of “masculinity” than ever before—but does that make the journey from boyhood to manhood easier, or just more confusing? In their recent novels, these four authors for teens offer their own fictional road maps to becoming a man. Award-winning novelist Andrew Smith takes a bittersweet look at senior year in Stand-…

What is the secret to making a hit song? In Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain, Alan Light, a former writer at Rolling Stone, looks at how Prince’s song, album, and movie became a musical juggernaut since audiences first heard the song in 1984. Walter Holland’s Phish’s A Live One examines the cultural context for the band’s ground…

In Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America, Wil Haygood, author of The Butler, delivers the definitive biography of the man who, as a lawyer, won a string of landmark Supreme Court cases that dismantled Jim Crow and later became a towering figure on the Court himself. As a lawyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was of…

This year’s American Institute of Architects Gold Medal winner, Moshe Safdie, has devoted a lifetime to the issue of dense urbanism beginning with Habitat, his low-rise, high-density housing complex introduced at the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair. Today, megascale projects seem to defy human scale, but Safdie believes architects can create the conditi…

We invite you to serve on the jury in the sensational trial of Abraham for the attempted murder of his son, Isaac. Alan Dershowitz, author of Abraham: The World’s First (But Certainly Not Last) Jewish Lawyer and no stranger to complex cases and celebrity clients, argues for the defense. Biblical scholar Harvey Cox, author of How to Read the Bible, …

Irish-born author Colum McCann’s novels are known for a stunning use of language, empathic power in describing loss and grief, and an almost cathartic effect on readers. His National Book Award–winning novel Let the Great World Spin is considered an American masterpiece. McCann’s latest, Thirteen Ways of Looking, includes four pieces of short ficti…

In Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, surgeon and New Yorker staff writer Atul Gawande confronts head-on an inconvenient truth: we are all going to die, and even modern medicine can’t change that, at least not yet. Gawande takes a hard and honest look at the end-of-life experience and the ways in which suffering is often prolonged.…

Whether she’s writing about mad cow disease, Victorian-era sorceresses, or marooned beauty pageant contestants, Printz Award–winning novelist Libba Bray consistently melds smart writing, powerful themes, and genuine wit in her books for teen readers. Bray’s latest novel, Lair of Dreams, continues the dramatic story begun in her bestseller The Divin…