The New York Public Library Kicks Off Fall 2004/2005 Public Program Series

Maya Angelou, Christopher Hitchens, Nicholas Lemann, Andrew Solomon, Colm Tóibîn, and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, are Among Those to Appear

New York, NY, August 13, 2004 -- Among the diverse talks and programs at The New York Public Library this fall are a two-part symposium marking the centennial of Isaac Bashevis Singer, a three-lecture series by journalist Nicholas Lemann on the influence of special interest groups in America, and three talks by Dr. Harold Varmus, Nobel Laureate in Medicine, on the art and politics of science. Other programs on the schedule include a discussion between Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens and poet Maya Angelou on the life of author Jessica Mitford; a discussion in which Louis Begley, Andrew Solomon, Judith Thurman, Colm Tóibín, André Aciman, and others reflect on the influence of Proust on their work; and a presentation by Ian Buruma on the allure of dictators. Several programs will feature current fellows from the Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, among them Pankaj Mishra on the Buddha and India's philosophical tradition, Hermione Lee on Edith Wharton, and a discussion about the Cuban political leader and literary figure, José Martí.

Ticket Information:
Programs are held at The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Unless otherwise indicated, lecture tickets are $10 for the general public and $7 for Library Friends and Conservators. (Some programs have free admission, but reservations are required). Tickets may be purchased at the Library Shops in the Humanities and Social Sciences Library (Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street) and the Mid-Manhattan Library (Fifth Avenue and 40th Street), by mail, by fax to 212.642.0101, or through www.ticketweb.com. For more information about tickets, call 212.930.0855, between 1:30 and 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, or visit www.nypl.org/humanities/pep.

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Contact: Raul Ramos, Herb Scher, 212.704.8600.


Schedule

Tuesday, September 14 at 6 p.m.
APRIL FOOL'S DAY
Josip Novakovich
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum (Room 227)
Free Admission (see note below)

Josip Novakovich, a native of Croatia, moved to the United States at the age of twenty. He has published two story collections, Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters, and two collections of essays, Plum Brandy: Croatian Journeys, and Apricots from Chernobyl. His novel April Fool's Day, set in the Balkans, will be published this fall. Novakovich teaches creative writing at Pennsylvania State University and was a 2001 -- 2002 Fellow at the Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Admission is free but registration is required. Please call 212-930-0084 or send e-mail to csw@nypl.org to reserve a seat.

Tuesday, September 21 at 5:30 p.m.
HONS AND REBELS REVISITED: THE LIFE OF JESSICA MITFORD
MAYA ANGELOU AND CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: A CONVERSATION
Celeste Bartos Forum

Maya Angelou was a close friend of Jessica Mitford. Bob Truehaft, Mitford's second husband, said that theirs "was as close -- or closer -- than a blood relationship…. As sisters they went through many good and bad times together." On the occasion of the reissue of Mitford's memoir of her childhood and youth, Hons and Rebels, with a new introduction by Christopher Hitchens, Hitchens and Angelou will discuss the legacy of this fearless, funny, but finally very serious woman, whose life spanned many different worlds.

Maya Angelou is a poet, educator, actress, playwright, civil rights activist, producer, and director. She is best known for her autobiographical books, such as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes. Her books of poetry include A Brave and Startling Truth and I Shall Not Be Moved. In January 1993, at the inauguration of President Clinton, Maya Angelou read her poem "On the Pulse of Morning."

Christopher Hitchens is a journalist and political commentator. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Missionary Position, Letters to a Young Contrarian, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, and Blood, Class, and Empire. A columnist for Vanity Fair, he also contributes to The New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and The Atlantic Monthly. Mr. Hitchens wrote the introduction to Jessica Mitford's memoir, Hons and Rebels, newly reissued by New York Review of Books.

Wednesday, September 29 at 6:30 p.m.
SHAKESPEARE: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN HIS WORLD
Stephen Greenblatt
Celeste Bartos Forum

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. His books include Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. He is also the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare. Professor Greenblatt is the recipient of the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association, the British Council Prize in the Humanities, and the Mellon Distinguished Humanist Award, as well as numerous fellowships, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a permanent fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. His latest book, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

THE ART AND POLITICS OF SCIENCE
Harold Varmus

Dr. Varmus will give the 2004 lecture series jointly sponsored by the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and W.W. Norton & Co.

Tuesday, October 5 at 6:30 p.m.
Becoming a Scientist

Tuesday, October 12 at 6:30 p.m.
Doing Science

Tuesday, October 19 at 6:30 p.m.
Science Serving Society

All three lectures will take place in the Celeste Bartos Forum.

Harold Varmus, former Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer, has been President of Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center in New York since January, 2000. After studying literature at Amherst and Harvard, Dr. Varmus went to medical school and trained in internal medicine at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. He then worked as a U.S. Public Health Service officer at the NIH, and in 1971 joined the basic science faculty of the University of California Medical School in San Francisco, after further post-doctoral training there. In 1989 he shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine with Dr. J. Michael Bishop for their work at UCSF on cancer-causing genes and retroviruses.

During the past decade, Dr. Varmus has assumed prominent national roles in medical science -- as Director of the NIH, the government's largest science agency, from 1993 to 1999, and now as head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering -- while continuing to direct his own laboratory work. His published work includes Genes and the Biology of Cancer (with Robert Weinberg), as well as many scientific reports, textbooks, and commentaries on films, books, and scientific topics for The New York Times. Recently, he has become increasingly involved in international health and science, establishing the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria and serving on the World Health Organization's Commission on Macroeconomics and Health. He currently chairs the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science (an "open access" publisher of biomedical research), and leads the Scientific Board of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges in Global Health.

W.W. Norton & Company will publish a book based on Dr. Varmus's lectures.


Wednesday, October 13 at 6:30 p.m.
A SORT OF LIFE: GRAHAM GREENE AT 100
Pico Iyer
James Wood
Laura Miller
South Court Auditorium

A panel discussion to mark the centenary birthday of writer Graham Greene (1904-1991), author of more than fifteen novels, including Brighton Rock, Travels with My Aunt, Our Man in Havana, The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, and A Burnt-Out Case.

Pico Iyer is the author of numerous travelogues and studies of transnational culture, including The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, Video Night in Kathmandu, and The Lady and the Monk. His articles appear often in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and Conde Nast Traveler, and he has been a contributor to Time magazine since 1982. His latest book is Abandon, a novel.

James Wood is a literary critic and novelist. His books include the novel The Book Against God, and the critical collections The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel and The Broken State: Essays in Literature and Belief. A Senior Editor at The New Republic, and a contributor to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books, he currently serves as a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University.

Laura Miller (Moderator) is a Senior Writer at Salon.com, and a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review, where she often writes the "Last Word" column. She is the author of The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors.

Tuesday, October 26
LOST IN TRANSLATION? ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER BETWEEN POLAND AND AMERICA, JEWS AND GENTILES
A CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
South Court Auditorium

Session I: 4:00-6:00 p.m.
Three leading Singer scholars discuss aspects of the multiple identities of the author and his readers:

Anita Norich, Associate Professor of English and Jewish Studies, University of Michigan

David Roskies, Sol and Evelyn Henkind Professor of Yiddish Literature, The Jewish Theological Seminary

Seth Wolitz, Gale Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Session II: 6:15-7:30 p.m.
Singer's bibliographer talks about the hunt for Singer's untranslated work, and the writer often hailed as the Singer for the 21st century reads one of those finds ("The Lost Wife"), translated for the occasion.

Roberta Saltzman, Assistant Chief, Dorot Jewish Division, The New York Public Library

Faith Jones, Yiddish Bibliographer, Dorot Jewish Division, The New York Public Library

Nathan Englander, Fellow, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, The New York Public Library

Admission is free but registration is required. Please call (212) 930-0843. This program is made possible by the Library's Jacob Perlow Fund, with additional support provided by the Library of America to mark its publication of the first collected edition of Singer's short stories.

Tuesday, October 26 at 6 p.m.
APPROPRIATING THE LITERARY PAST
Maureen Howard
Rick Moody
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum (Room 227)
Free Admission (see note below)

Maureen Howard and Rick Moody will discuss their recent work and the ways in which they have drawn on 19th-century literary forbears. How does Hawthorne inform Moody's autobiographical pilgrimage in The Black Veil? Why does Melville occupy center stage in Howard's The Silver Screen? Do uses of the past free the imagination in contemporary American writing? Where does appropriation end and originality begin?

Maureen Howard, a 2003-2004 Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, has published eight novels, including Bridgeport Bus and Natural History. Her new novel, The Silver Screen, is the third in a series set during each of the fours seasons. She has received a number of literary awards, and teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

Rick Moody is a prize-winning writer of fiction and memoir whose work has been published all over the world. Among his best-known books are Purple America, The Ice Storm, and, most recently, The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions (2002). Moody is on the board of Yaddo and is a co-founder of the Young Lions Book Award at The New York Public Library.

Admission is free but registration is required. Please call 212-930-0084 or send e-mail to csw@nypl.org to reserve a seat.

Wednesday, October 27 at 6:30 p.m.
JUSTICE AT DACHAU: DEMOCRACY ON TRIAL
Joshua Greene
South Court Auditorium

Joshua M. Greene is a historian and Emmy Award-winning producer of documentary films. He is the author of Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, which was adapted as a feature film for PBS, and Justice at Dachau: The Trials of an American Prosecutor. In this slide- and film-illustrated lecture he will talk about the largest yet least-known war crimes trials in history and of the precedents they set for tribunals in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. Joshua Green's talk is the Perlow Lecture, which annually explores themes represented in the holdings of The New York Public Library's Dorot Jewish Division. The program has been made possible by a generous grant from the Perlow Fund.

Wednesday, November 3 at 6:30 p.m.
THE PROUST PROJECT: A DISCUSSION WITH LATTER-DAY DISCIPLES, ADMIRERS AND SHAMELESS IMITATORS, WITH READINGS OF PROUST BY SELECTED ACTORS
Celeste Bartos Forum

Louis Begley's books, including Wartime Lies, About Schmidt, Schmidt Delivered, and Shipwreck, have been translated into fifteen languages. He has been honored with the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award, the Irish Times -- Aer Lingus Book Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger (all for Wartime Lies); the Jeanette-Schocken-Preis (Bremerhavener Bürgerpreis für Literatur); and the American Academy of Letters Award in Literature. Mr. Begley is a Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres and a past president and board member of PEN American Center.

Wayne Koestenbaum is Professor of English at CUNY Graduate Center. His books of criticism and biography include Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon, and The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He has also written three books of poetry, including Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems.

Andrew Solomon is an author and journalist whose books include the novel The Stone Boat and the acclaimed nonfiction work The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, an examination of mental illness that garnered the National Book Award in 2001. Mr. Solomon contributes to The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, and is a Fellow of Berkeley College, Yale University.

Judith Thurman's celebrated works of biography include Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, and the National Book Award-winning Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker.

Colm Tóibín, a past Fellow of The Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, is a writer whose works include the novels The South, The Heather Blazing, and The Blackwater Lightship, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. He is also the author of several nonfiction books, including Bad Blood, Homage to Barcelona, and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe. His most recent novel, The Master, was published last spring by Scribner.

André Aciman (Moderator) teaches Comparative Literature at The CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir, and False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Commentary, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. He is a past Fellow of the Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Tuesday, November 9 at 6 p.m.
FACTS AND FICTIONS
Sheila Kohler
Amy Hempel
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum (Room 227)
Free Admission (see note below)

Sheila Kohler and Amy Hempel will talk about the ways in which writers use and transform their own lives in fiction, often altering facts to create imaginative truth.

Sheila Kohler, a 2003-2004 Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, is the author of five novels and three collections of short stories. She won an O. Henry Award for her first published story, in 1988, and her work has appeared in translation all over the world. Her new novel, Crossways, is based on the murder of her sister in South Africa.

Amy Hempel has published three collections of short stories and co-edited a book of poetry written in the voices of authors' dogs. Her work, like Sheila Kohler's, has been widely published abroad, and her next book, The Dog of the House, will appear in the spring of 2005.

Admission is free but registration is required. Please call 212-930-0084 or send e-mail to csw@nypl.org to reserve a seat.

Tuesday, November 9 at 6:30 p.m.
WHEN CANDY WAS BANNED: HOW THE OLYMPIA PRESS THWARTED LITERARY CENSORSHIP
South Court Auditorium
Free Admission

A discussion of transatlantic literary freedom in the 1950s and the subversive tactics of the Olympia Press, led by some of the most controversial publishers, translators and authors of the day.

Richard Seaver (moderator) is the co-founder of Arcade Publishing. An esteemed translator of French literature, he served as the Parisian publisher of Beckett and Genet, and has also translated numerous works by Marguerite Duras, Eugene Ionesco, and the Marquis de Sade, among others. Before founding Arcade, Mr. Seaver was Editor-in-Chief at Grove Press and Penguin USA.

Iris Owens wrote numerous wildly popular and regularly banned erotic novels for the "Traveller's Companion" series of Olympia Press under the pseudonym "Harriet Daimler."

Leon Friedman served as the attorney for publisher Maurice Girodias's lawyer throughout the 1960s. He is currently of counsel to Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Laura Frost is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Yale University, and the author of Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism.

Nile Southern is the author of The CANDY Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel, CANDY. The son of author and screenwriter Terry Southern, he serves as co-Trustee of the Terry Southern Literary Trust.


Wednesday, November 16 at 6:30 p.m.
DICTATORS: THEIR ALLURE AND THEIR FUTURE
Ian Buruma
Celeste Bartos Forum

Ian Buruma is Henry R. Luce Professor in Human Rights, Democracy, and Journalism at Bard College and a faculty member of the Human Rights Program at Bard. A distinguished freelance writer and journalist, Buruma writes regularly for The Financial Times, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. Among his acclaimed works of non-fiction are Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing, God's Dust: A Modern Asian Journey, Behind the Mask, and The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. He has also written a novel, Playing the Game, as well as the introduction for The New York Review of Books edition of René Leys by Victor Segalen. His most recent book is Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, which he co-authored with Avishai Margalit.

Mr. Buruma's talk is this year's Robert B. Silvers Lecture. This annual lecture series was created by Max Palevsky in recognition of the work of Robert B. Silvers as co-editor of The New York Review of Books, which he co-founded in 1963. The series features contemporary writers, scholars, artists, business people, and others whose fields correspond to the broad range of Mr. Silvers's interests in literature, the arts, politics, economics, history, and the sciences.

Tuesday, November 30 at 6 p.m.
JOSÉ MARTÍ IN NEW YORK
Esther Allen
Francisco Goldman
Lisandro Perez
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum (Room 227)

Three distinguished experts will discuss José Martí, the legendary Cuban political leader and literary figure who lived in New York's vibrant Cuban community for fifteen years in the late 19th century.

Esther Allen translates from both Spanish and French; her works include The Selected Writings of José Martí and, most recently, Alma Guillermoprieto's memoir, Dancing with Cuba. She chairs the PEN Translation Committee.

Francisco Goldman is the author of The Ordinary Seaman and The Long Night of White Chickens, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His new novel, The Divine Husband, follows the youthful José Martí from Central America to New York. Goldman was a 2000-2001 Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Lisandro Perez is a professor of Sociology, the Director of the International Migration Initiative, and the founder and former Director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University in Miami. He edits the journal Cuban Studies, and co-authored The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States. He is currently a Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow at the Cullman Center.

Admission is free but registration is required. Please call 212-930-0084 or send e-mail to csw@nypl.org to reserve a seat.

Tuesday, November 30 at 6:30 p.m.
MAN OF THE MOMENT: HOW NEWTON MOVED MATHEMATICS TO THE TOP OF THE SCIENTIFIC AGENDA
Lisa Jardine
South Court Auditorium

Lisa Jardine is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, and Director of the AHRB Research Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. Her books include Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, On A Grander Scale: The Career of Christopher Wren, and most recently, The Curious Life of Richard Hooke: The Man Who Measured London. She is an Honorary Fellow of King's College Cambridge and Sheffield Hallam University, and she chaired the 1997 Orange Prize for Fiction and the 2002 Man Booker prize. One of two lectures in the series Idealizing Sir Isaac: Two Scholars Mark the Newtonian Moment, presented in conjunction with the Library's exhibition The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture.

Wednesday, January 5 at 6:30 p.m.
THE SCIENTIST AS SCHOLAR: NEWTON AS HISTORIAN
Anthony Grafton
South Court Auditorium

Anthony Grafton is a Professor of History at Princeton University, specializing in the history of classical scholarship, of Renaissance education, and of early astronomy. His books include From Humanism to the Humanities, Forgers and Critics, Defenders of the Text, The Footnote: A Curious History, and Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation. One of two lectures in the series Idealizing Sir Isaac: Two Scholars Mark the Newtonian Moment, presented in conjunction with the Library's exhibition The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture.

Tuesday, January 11 at 6:30 p.m.
BUDDHA, GANDHI AND THE INDIAN PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION
Pankaj Mishra and Jonathan Schell
Celeste Bartos Forum

Jonathan Schell will interview Pankaj Mishra about the Indian philosophical tradition and its views of war and politics. The conversation will center on Mishra's new book, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World.

Pankaj Mishra, born in North India in 1969, now lives in London and New Delhi. He is the author of a novel, The Romantics, and contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books, Granta, and The Times Literary Supplement. A 2004-2005 Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, he is working on a new novel.

Jonathan Schell was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine from 1967 until 1987. His many award-winning books include The Fate of the Earth, The Village of Ben Suc, The Time of Illusion, and, most recently, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (2003), which Richard Falk in The New York Times called "the most impressive argument ever made that there exists a viable and desirable alternative to a continued reliance on war."

WHAT TO DO ABOUT INTEREST GROUPS
Nicholas Lemann
Celeste Bartos Forum

Wednesday, January 12 at 6:30 p.m.
The Inevitability of Faction

Wednesday, January 19, at 6:30 p.m.
The Problem of the Public Interest

Wednesday, January 26, at 6:30 p.m.
Domestic Realism

Nicholas Lemann is delivering the Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lectures on American Civilization and Government. Made possible by a generous gift from the Estate of Eric F. Goldman, this lecture series brings leading intellectuals to the Library to deliver three public talks on contemporary issues of long-term significance for American democracy. These lectures will be published as a book by Harvard University Press

Mr. Lemann is Henry R. Luce Professor and Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, and has served as national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, executive editor of Texas Monthly, and national staff reporter for The Washington Post. His books include The Fast Track: Texans and Other Strivers, Out of the Forties, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, and The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. He has been honored with the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History (for The Promised Land).

Tuesday, January 18 at 6:30 p.m.
EDITH WHARTON'S ENGLISH LIFE: THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
Hermione Lee
Celeste Bartos Forum

Hermione Lee, a 2004-2005 Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, is the Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature and Fellow of New College at Oxford University. Her widely acclaimed books include Virginia Woolf: A Biography, The Novels of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, and Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up. A Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Hilda's College and St. Cross College, Oxford, she was in 2003 appointed Commander of the British Empire for services to literature and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At the Center she is working on a biography of Edith Wharton and on a collection of essays about life-writing.

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The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Estate of Charles J. Liebman, Sue Ann and John Weinberg, The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, William W. Karatz, and additional gifts from Mel and Lois Tukman, The Gilder Lehrman Institute, and Margaret and Herman Sokol.