Los Angeles Literature Events 3/20/17 –3/26/17
The Idiot at ALOUD Reading Series, Central Library
Join us to hear author and New Yorker staff writer
, in conversation with author Steve Hely, read from and discuss her delightfully refreshing coming-of-age story, The Idiot. Batuman is also the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, and this debut novel begins in 1995, when email is new and Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. The author discusses this off-kilter journey into adulthood and her recent reporting from Turkey with Steve Hely, comedic author, TV writer and co-host of the podcast The Great Debates.
FREE / Reservations recommended.
The reading and Q&A starts at 7:15 pm; stand-by seating at 7 pm.
Where: Mark Taper Auditorium, Central Library
Date: Monday the 20th
Time: 7 pm
Address: 630 W. 5th St., Los Angeles, CA 90071
Website: http://www.lapl.org/whats-on/events/the-idiot-a-novel/
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Between 2004 and 2015, I was the curator and host of the Rhapsodomancy Reading Series in Los Angeles. For the first two years I shared this role with Andrea Quaid, until she moved away; after that, I counted on my romantic partner-turned-roadie and the loyal audience members I had to keep the series afloat.
Ocean Vuong at ALOUD Reading Series, Central Library 
In honor of Black History month (a few days late, I know), I am highlighting many of the powerful African American authors of Los Angeles literature. Their voices tap into a Los Angeles rarely portrayed, much less portrayed honestly. Nonetheless they tape in to an essential Los Angeles of a good, strong community struggling to survive among the racist realities of the LAPD and redlining that relegated most of them to the South Central/Watts neighborhoods of Los Angeles. In their writing you can hear the ancestral griot, telling their collective stories, as Kamau Kaaood has done for decades with his spoken word poetry. You can experience their witnessing that such writers as Michael Datcher in his Memoir Raising Fences does, when he first moves with his family from Indiana to South Central Los Angeles in 1977 at 10. Here he witnesses and experiences police brutality against Blacks. He was “returning from Gaffey Street Pool” with his cousin Jeff and two friends. “A white man leaped out [of the cop car], clutching a gun in both hands, arms stretched out forward and stiff…he had to squat down to line up the bridge of my nose.”
LAMBDA LIT FEST Los Angeles to be held at Various Locations, March 6-12, All Week (see below)
