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Robin Coste Lewis discusses Voyage of the Sable Venus, and Evie Shockley discusses semiautomatic at the 2018 L.A. Times Festival of Music.
FROM THE PUBLISHER (Voyage of the Sable Venus):
Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles that desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art.
Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, Voyage is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story?
Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire—how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.
FROM THE PUBLISHER (semiautomatic):
Art can't shield our bodies or stabilize the earth's climate, but Evie Shockley's semiautomatic insists that it can feed the spirit and reawaken the imagination. The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life—not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomatic culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future. Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refuge Lives at the 2018 L.A. Times Festival of Books.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
In January 2017, Donald Trump signed an executive order stopping entry to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries and dramatically cutting the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the United States each year. The American people spoke up, with protests, marches, donations, and lawsuits that quickly overturned the order. But the refugee caps remained.
In The Displaced, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers to explore and illuminate the refugee experience. Featuring original essays by a collection of writers from around the world, The Displaced is an indictment of closing our doors, and a powerful look at what it means to be forced to leave home and find a place of refuge. 
As dozens of migrants from Central America remain camped out at the U.S.-Mexico border attempting to seek asylum in the United States, we spend the hour with two of the nation’s most celebrated writers, both refugees themselves. Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1971. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, he and his family fled to the United States. He is the author of three books, including “The Sympathizer,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, and he teaches at the University of Southern California. He is also the editor of a new collection titled “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.” We are also joined by the Chilean-American writer Ariel Dorfman, who has been described as one of the greatest Latin American novelists. Forty-five years ago, he fled Chile after a U.S.-backed coup displaced President Salvador Allende. Dorfman had served as Allende’s cultural adviser from 1970 to 1973. Living in exile, he became one of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s most vocal critics, as well as a celebrated playwright and novelist. Dorfman, who teaches at Duke University, has just published a new novel, “Darwin’s Ghosts,” and a new collection of essays titled “Homeland Security Ate My Speech.” He also contributed an essay to “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.” 
Sven-Eric Liedman—author of a major new Marx biography, “A World to Win:The Life and Works of Karl Marx”—in conversation with Adam Tooze and Clara Mattei.
Filmed at Verso Books in Brooklyn, on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Marx, May 5, 2018.
Sven-Eric Liedman, Professor Emeritus of the History of Ideas at the University of Gothenburg, has been reading and writing about Karl Marx for over fifty years. He is the author of “A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx”: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2711...
Adam Tooze holds the Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute. He is currently at work on a history of the global financial crisis 2008-2018, which will appear in time for the anniversary in September 2018. He has written and reviewed for the Financial Times, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and others.
Clara Mattei is Assistant Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research. 
Melissa Broder talks with Laia Garcia about Melissa’s new book The Pisces. After penning several wonderful poetry collections, Melissa Broder is turning her attention to the world of fiction.
Lucy has been busy working on her dissertation for the past nine years when her relationship with her boyfriend abruptly blows up and causes her to fall apart. Her sister convinces her to visit her place and dog-sit for the summer to get her away from her problems for a while. Lucy attempts to adjust to the change of scenery, taking in the gorgeous house on Venice Beach, but can’t seem to piece together her broken heart, not even with the help of her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder excursions, not even in Dominic the foxhound's easy affection.
Everything changes when Lucy becomes enamored by a swimmer whose handsomeness is almost otherworldly. The two start courting and it looks as though Lucy's life is cheering up, that is until she finds out the guy she's falling for is a merman.
A wonderful mixture of realism and fantasy, pairing hilarious frankness with pulse-racing eroticism, THE PISCES is a story about falling into obsessive love with a merman: a figure of Sirenic fantasy whose very existence pushes Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and meaning in the one life we have. 
Former US Border Patrol agent and award-winning writer, Francisco Cantú is joined by the best-selling author of McMafia, Misha Glenny to celebrate the release of his debut memoir of his time on the Mexican border, The Line Becomes A River.
Francisco Cantú was a US Border Patrol agent from 2008 to 2012 working at the crossroads of remote drug routes and smuggling corridors. The job was to track people across a vast terrain, through blistering days and frigid nights. He detained the exhausted, the parched, and hauled in the bodies from where they had fallen. But as a third-generation Mexican-American, Francisco found that the line he was duty-bound to defend began to dissolve. Haunted by nightmares even after leaving the patrol, he found himself drawn back by friendship and plunged into a final confrontation with a world he believed he had escaped.
For this unique and timely event Francisco is joined by author, journalist and veteran broadcaster Misha Glenny taking us beyond one man’s experience of these sprawling borderlands to reveal truths about life, wherever it is lived, on either side of any arbitrary line. 
Questlove (Ahmir Thompson) discusses is latest book, "Creative Quest".
About Questlove:
Drummer, DJ, producer, culinary entrepreneur, New York Times best-selling author, and bandleader of The Roots - Questlove, is the unmistakable heartbeat of Philadelphia’s most influential hip-hop group. He is the Musical Director for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where his beloved Roots crew serves as house band. Beyond that, this 4-time GRAMMY Award winning musician's indisputable reputation has landed him musical directing positions with everyone from D'Angelo to Eminem to Jay-Z. Questlove has also released two books including the New York Times bestseller Mo’ Meta Blues and Soul Train: The Music, Dance and Style of a Generation. One of his latest endeavors includes scoring Chris Rock’s film, Top Five, and also working as the music supervisor. He also recently produced the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Hamilton, alongside Alex Lacamoire, Bill Sherman, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tarik "Black Thought" Trotter. He will also serve as the Executive Music Producer and Composer on the A&E Mini Series “Roots.” 
Author and journalist Nomi Prins shines a light on the dark conspiracies and unsavory connections within the halls of power along with journalist Rich Benjamin.
The 2008 financial crisis started a chain reaction that boosted the influence of central bankers and caused a massive shift in the world order. Central banks and institutions are overstepping the boundaries of their mandates and directing the flow of money without any restrictions. Meanwhile, the cozy relationship between private and central banking ensures boundless manipulation with government support.
Nomi Prins is a journalist, speaker, respected TV and radio commentator, and former Wall Street executive. The author of six books, including All the Presidents' Bankers, Other People's Money, and It Takes a Pillage, her writing has been featured in the New York Times, Fortune, Mother Jones, Guardian, and Nation, among others. She was a member of Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) Federal Reserve Reform Advisory Council, and is on the advisory board of the whistle-blowing organization ExposeFacts.
Rich Benjamin is an American cultural critic, anthropologist, and author, best known for the non-fiction book Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America. 
Michelle Dean discusses Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion with co-host Jeffrey Brown at the 2018 L.A. Times Festival of Books.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
The ten brilliant women who are the focus of Sharp came from different backgrounds and had vastly divergent political and artistic opinions. But they all made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of America and ultimately changed the course of the twentieth century, in spite of the men who often undervalued or dismissed their work.
These ten women—Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm—are united by what Dean calls “sharpness,” the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit. Sharp is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties at night gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books. It is also a passionate portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their writing in a climate where women were treated with extreme condescension by the male-dominated cultural establishment.
Mixing biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharpis a celebration of this group of extraordinary women, an engaging introduction to their works, and a testament to how anyone who feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer, and, perhaps, change the world.
