Library Talks

Josephine Quinn sits down with award-winning poet Ken Chen to discuss her book How the World Made the West. Quinn's book poses a bold challenge to “civilizational thinking” on the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern West in everything from the law codes of Babylon, Assyrian irrigation, and the Phoenician art of sail to Indian literature, Arabic scholarship, and the metalworking riders of the Steppe.

Jean Strouse sits down with Pulitzer Prize–winner Hernan Diaz to discuss her latest book Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers. Strouse's account illuminates a period of tumultuous social change that saw the declining fortunes of the British aristocracy, the dramatic rise of new wealth on both sides of the Atlantic, and the birth of the modern art market.

In her new biography, The Elements of Marie Curie, Dava Sobel explores not just on Curie’s legendary genius, but the 45 women who worked in her lab—from Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium, to Curie’s elder daughter, Irène, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Sobel chronicles Curie’s remarkable life of discovery alongside the lives of the women who followed down the trail she blazed. Sobel discusses her new book with science journalist Angela Saini.

Daniel Saldaña París speaks with Chloé Cooper Jones about his latest book Planes Flying over a Monster, which explores the cities where París has lived, each one home to a new iteration of himself. These now diverging, now coalescing selves raise questions: Where can we find authenticity? How do we construct the stories that define us? What if our formative memories are closer to fiction than truth?