The New York Public Library Podcast

Chuck Palahniuk is best known as the author of the novels Fight Club and Choke. Douglas Coupland is the author of the international bestsellers Generation A and JPod. This week on The New York Public Library Podcast, the two take to the stage at LIVE from the NYPL for a literary conversation that doubles as a social experiment.

This week, The New York Public Library Podcast welcomes Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, and activist Eve Ensler to Books at Noon, the Library’s new series of free lunchtime author talks.

This week on The New York Public Library podcast, LIVE from the NYPL welcomes three leaders of the craft beer movement. Brooklyn Brewery cofounder Steve Hindy—joined by Kim Jordan, New Belgium Brewing Company CEO, and Charlie Papazian founder of the American Homebrewers Association—recounts how craft brewers have forever changed the way the world experiences beer.

This week, The New York Public Library podcast welcomes acclaimed novelist Joyce Carol Oates to Books at Noon, the Library’s new series of free lunchtime author talks.

This week on the podcast, hear the two award-winning authors discuss poverty around the world.

This week on the New York Public Library Podcast, best-selling author and challenger of conventional wisdom Malcolm Gladwell brings his critical approach to LIVE from the NYPL as he expounds on his newest interests.

This week on the podcast, we welcome Michael Cunningham to Books at Noon, the Library's new series of free lunchtime author talks. Cunningham is the author of six novels, including A Home at the End of the World and The Hours, which was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His latest novel is The Snow Queen.

This week on the podcast, award winning author Paul Auster stops by "Books at Noon" – NYPL's weekly lunchtime author talk series – to discuss some of his latest work, pushing the boundaries of autobiography, and much more.

Today's New York Public Library podcast welcomes Sam Lipsyte to Books at Noon, the Library's new series of free lunchtime author talks. Lipsyte was a Guggenheim Fellow, is the recipient of the Believer Book Award, and is the author of five books, including most recently a collection of short stories, The Fun Parts.

Today’s New York Public Library podcast features the new Books at Noon series; a free weekly program featuring popular and acclaimed authors in the Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue. Our first guest is the political satirist and author PJ O’Rourke who has written 16 books, most recently "Baby Boom: How it Got that Way (And it Wasn’t My Fault) (And I’ll Never Do it Again)."

Wes Anderson's vivid cinematic aesthetic and idiosyncratic characters make his films both immediately recognizable and endearing. Anderson returns to LIVE to explore his passions, influences, and his newest film The Grand Budapest Hotel, in conversation with Paul Holdengräber.

LIVE closes the Fall 2013 season with a conversation between 2013 Library Lion Junot Diaz and the writer who most influenced him, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison. "I think the most sustained love of mine," Diaz has said, "the one that's carried me through all these years, is my relationship with Toni Morrison. Im telling you, I'm one of those people who's still cracking my head on many of the ideas Toni Morrison both suggested and elaborated on in her work." Witness a powerful event as Diaz comes face to face with his literary hero to celebrate her remarkable career.

A passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories.  For Rebecca Mead, that book was George Eliot's Middlemarch, which she first read as a young woman in an English coastal town, and reread regularly throughout her life. In My Life In Middlemarch, the New Yorker writer revisits her own past and Eliot's work in a new way, by leading us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch blends biography, reporting, and memoir, taking the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and bringing them into our world. Mead comes to LIVE from the NYPL to explore the enduring power of Middlemarch, and how the books we read help us read our own lives. 

James McBride opens LIVE from the NYPL's Spring 2014 season with an exploration of his latest work The Good Lord Bird - winner of the 2013 National Book Award for fiction - through words and music. The evening will feature conversation with the author and musician, as well as performances by McBride and his quintet, whose mix of spirituals and jazz renditions of classic gospel songs are inspired by the abolitionist John Brown, a key figure in this novel. With Keith Robinson on guitar, Trevor Exter on bass, Show Tyme Brooks on drums, Adam Faulk on piano, McBride on saxophone and the whole band on vocals.

Three generations of philanthropists sit down to discuss business, charity, farming, and their 40 Chances in life, moderated by Tom Brokaw. If you had the resources to accomplish something great in the world, what would you do? That's the question legendary investor Warren Buffett posed to his son in 2006, when he announced he was leaving the bulk of his fortune to philanthropy. Howard G. Buffett set out to help the most vulnerable people on earth—nearly a billion individuals who lack basic food security. And Howard has given himself a deadline: 40 years to put more than $3 billion to work on this challenge. 40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World captures Howard's journey to make a difference in the world, and the lessons learned along the way. Warren joins his son and grandson, Howard W. Buffett, to celebrate the accomplishments so far, and embrace the new challenges ahead.

Mike Tyson has defied expectations and conventional wisdom during his three decades in the public eye. Tyson, the one-time heavyweight champion of the world and a legend both in and out of the ring, joins LIVE for a conversation about his tumultuous life in the same straightforward and sincere tone seen in his new memoir, Undisputed Truth. One of the most thrilling and ferocious boxers of all time, Tyson's brilliance in the ring was often compromised by reckless behavior. Years of hard partying, violent fights, and criminal proceedings took their toll: by 2003, he hit rock bottom, a convicted felon and completely broke. Yet Tyson managed to regained his success, his dignity, and the love of his family. With his new-found happiness and stability as a father and husband, his story is an American original.