Media Archive

An Evening with
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer

In the wake of an historic summer of groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions, Justice Stephen Breyer returned to ALOUD to discuss…

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Returning to ALOUD after receiving the 2012 Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award for his distinguished commitment to libraries and…

God in Pain:
Inversions of Apocalypse

Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek, renowned Slovenian critical theorist, and Boris Gunjević, a Croatian theologian, dissect and reconstruct three major faith-based systems of…

Perfidia: A Novel

James Ellroy

Ellroy, one of America’s greatest living crime writers, draws on the history of Los Angeles in his newest novel, Perfidia.…

Destiny and Desire: A Novel

Carlos Fuentes

One of literature’s masters offers a wild, riveting saga that explores passion, magic and corruption in modern Mexico, mixing ancient…

To Live and Dine in L.A.:
Menus and the Making of the Modern City

Cynthia Hawkins, Ricardo Diaz

ALOUD gathers for a multimedia tour of the library's menu collection, paired with a conversation on the city's food past…

The Further Adventures of Mr. Cilantro Man

Tom Lutz

Juan Felipe Herrera grew up the son of Mexican immigrants in the migrant fields of California, and became the first…

The Bricks That Built the Houses

Kate Tempest, Neelanjana Banerjee

The Bricks That Built the Houses explores a cross-section of contemporary urban life with a powerful moral microscope, giving us…

Revolution 2.0:
The Power of the People is Greater Than the People in Power

Wael Ghonim, Reza Aslan

Wael Ghonim was a little-known 30-year-old Google exec when he launched a Facebook campaign to protest the death of an…

Two Novelists on Memory, Identity, and Place

Percival Everett, Steve Erickson

From a hippie commune in Denver to a city in Ethiopia, these two acclaimed Los Angeles novelists go to great…