Pamela Paul: “By the book” live at MBF

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion and five novels. In Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love (Penguin Random House), she confronts a staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test: her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her. Inheritance is a book about the extraordinary time in which we live, a time in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. Ruth Franklin, in The New York Times Book Review, found Inheritance "Profound... The true drama of Inheritance is not Shapiro’s discovery of her father’s identity but the meaning she makes of it [...]Shapiro’s account is beautifully written and deeply moving — it brought me to tears more than once."

Ibram X. Kendi is a New York Times bestselling author and the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. A professor of history and international relations and a frequent public speaker, Kendi is a columnist at The Atlantic. He is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and The Black Campus Movement, which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize. He is the author of How to Be an Antiracist (One World). In this book, Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. How to Be an Antiracist is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society. Time magazine writes of How to Be an Anti-racist, “Groundbreaking . . . How to Be an Antiracist punctures the myths of a post-racial America, examining what racism really is—and what we should do about it.”

Pamela Paul is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and oversees books coverage at The New York Times, which she joined in 2011 as the children's books editor. She is also author and editor of five books. Paul and Maria Russo’s How to Raise a Reader (Workman Publishing Company) combines clear, practical advice with inspiration, wisdom, tips, and curated reading lists to show how to instill the joy and time-stopping pleasure of reading. The book is divided into four sections, from baby (Even newborns benefit from the experience of hearing stories) through teen,  each illustrated by a different artist, and offers something useful on every page, whether it’s how to develop rituals around reading, build a family library, or ways to engage a reluctant reader. A fifth section, “More Books to Love: By Theme and Reading Level,” is full of expert recommendations. Throughout, the authors debunk common myths, assuage parental fears, and deliver invaluable lessons in a positive and easy-to-act-on way.

T.C. Boyle has published fourteen novels and ten collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his novel World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger for The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, as well as the 2014 Henry David Thoreau award for excellence in nature writing. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His most recent novel, Outside Looking In (Ecco) is a provocative exploration of the first scientific and recreational forays into LSD and its mind-altering possibilities. A coterie of grad students at Harvard are drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology Ph.D. student and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers, and instead turns into a free-wheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living. Is LSD a belief system? Does it allow you to see God? Can the Loneys’ marriage—or any marriage, for that matter—survive the chaotic and sometimes orgiastic use of psychedelic drugs? Wry, witty, and wise, Outside Looking In is an utterly engaging and occasionally trippy look at the nature of reality, identity, and consciousness, as well as our seemingly infinite capacities for creativity, re-invention, and self-discovery.

Thomas Mallon is the author of ten novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, and Watergate. Fellow Travelers has been made into a contemporary opera that is regularly performed throughout the United States. Mallon is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, and in 2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Set during the tumultuous middle of the George W. Bush years—amid the twin catastrophes of the Iraq insurgency and Hurricane Katrina— Landfall (Pantheon) brings Thomas Mallon's cavalcade of contemporary American politics, which began with Watergate and continue with Finale, to a vivid and emotional climax. The president at the novel's center possesses a personality whose high-speed alternations between charm and petulance, resoluteness and self-pity, continually energize and mystify the panoply of characters around him. The story is deepened and driven by a love affair between two West Texans, Ross Weatherall and Allison O'Connor, whose destinies have been affixed to Bush's since they were teenagers in the 1970s. The true believer and the skeptic who end up exchanging ideological places in a romantic and political drama that unfolds in locations from New Orleans to Baghdad and during the parties, press conferences, and state funerals of Washington, D.C.