This just in from Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures:
“Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures’ 2023/24 exciting roster of critically acclaimed authors for our Ten Evenings mainstage series was announced Monday, May 8th at 7:30 pm, live from the Carnegie Music Hall by Executive Director Stephanie Flom, who retires from her role in June.
Says Flom, ‘Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures’ mission is in part to inspire members of our diverse communities by providing opportunities to experience authors who speak on issues that reflect our values, including justice, compassion, civic responsibility, acceptance, courage, and equity.
At this critical time, I am honored to announce the slate of extraordinary authors, whose voices shift our perspectives and profoundly impact our community, as they generously share their humanity, creativity, insights, and brilliance with us.’
Zadie Smith/The Fraud/September 18, 2023
Prize-winning author of White Teeth and many other beloved works, Zadie Smith’s The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity, and the mystery of “other people.” Set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, The Fraud explores issues of justice, slavery, abolitionism, and class and highlights the disparities of who deserves to tell their story—and who deserves to be believed.
Matthew Desmond/Poverty, by America/October 2, 2023
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.
Mary Beard/Emperor of Rome/October 23, 2023
In her newest book, distinguished classicist and BBC icon Mary Beard shines her spotlight on the emperors who ruled the Roman empire, from Julius Caesar to Alexander Severus. She tracks down the emperor at home, at the races, on his travels, even on his way to heaven. She introduces his wives and lovers, rivals and slaves, court jesters and soldiers―and the ordinary people who pressed begging letters into his hands. Emperor of Rome offers an account of Roman history as it has never been presented before.
Abraham Verghese/The Covenant of Water/November 13, 2023
Following his bestselling Cutting for Stone, award-winning Abraham Verghese’s much anticipated novel The Covenant of Water spans 1900 to 1977, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding.
Rebecca Makkai/I Have Some Questions for You/December 11, 2023
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet. I Have Some Questions for You is a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is both a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.
Jennifer Egan/The Candy House/February 12, 2024
In the world of Pulitzer Prize and the NBCCA-winner, Jennifer Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters” who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,” who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. The Candy House is also a moving testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for connection, family, privacy, and love.
Tracy Kidder/Rough Sleepers/March 25, 2024
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award, Tracy Kidder tells the powerful story of an inspiring doctor who made a difference by helping to create a program to care for Boston’s homeless community. Rough Sleepers explores how a small but dedicated group of people have changed countless lives by facing one of American society’s difficult problems, instead of looking away.
Hernan Diaz/Trust/April 8, 2024
Hernan Diaz’s Trust was named a Top Ten Book of 2022 for the NYTimes and the Washington Post, and one of Barack Obama Favorite Books of the year. Trust is an unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception. At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.
Ed Yong/An Immense World/April 29, 2024
Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong explores the sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields of earth in An Immense World. Yong reveals how every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world. Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, An Immense World takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage . . . not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.”
Jesmyn Ward/Let Us Descend/May 13, 2024
The first woman and first Black American winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction, brings us Let Us Descend, a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. This miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South.
Programs will be presented in person and livestreamed at 7:30 pm in Oakland’s historic Carnegie Library Lecture Hall while the Music Hall undergoes a renovation. All ticketholders will have access to the recorded livestreamed lecture for one week following the event.
For ticket information, visit pittsburghlectures.org or email info@pittsburghlectures.org.”
The mission of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures is to connect celebrated authors with the community, elevate civic discourse, and inspire creativity and a passion for the literary arts. Our commitment to knowledge, learning, integrity, and artistic excellence guides and informs our work. We endeavor to inspire members of diverse communities by providing opportunities to experience authors who speak on issues that reflect our values such as justice, compassion, civic responsibility, acceptance, courage, and equity.
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