Past Conversations from the Cullman Center Programs

Set in The New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and in the environs of Times Square circa 1970, Up From the Stacks is the story of Lincoln Cabinée, a college student working part-time as a page, retrieving books for readers from the Library’s collection of 43 million items. This routine evening job inadvertently thrusts young Cabinée into the treacherous crossroads of scholarly obsession and the businesses of amusement and vice that then flourished in the 42nd Street area. The intellectual life of the city and the happiness of a young man hang in the balance.

Co-commissioned by the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts for Target Free Thursdays at the David Rubenstein Atrium.

The distinguished biographer, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Cullman Center Fellow Stacy Schiff discusses her highly acclaimed biography Cleopatra.

STACY SCHIFF is also the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has contributed frequently to the New York Times op-ed page. She lives in New York City.

This event is co-presented with LIVE from the NYPL. Tickets are now available here.

Both books are available in the Library's Book Shop by clicking on the titles.

Reservations for this program are now closed. Stand-by seats will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

JENNIFER EGAN is the author of The Invisible Circus, Emerald City and Other Stories, Look at Me, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2001, and the bestselling The Keep.  Her new book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, a national bestseller, was published last June.  Also a journalist, she writes frequently in the New York Times Magazine.

The Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lectures in American Civilization and Government

Please note: We are no longer taking reservations for this program. Stand-by seats may be available on the night of the event.

The Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lectures in American Civilization and Government

Please note: We are no longer taking reservations for this program. Stand-by seats may be available on the night of the event.

This event is currently full. Seats will be available on a stand-by basis only on the night of the event.

Carla Peterson and Annette Gordon-Reed's books are available at the Library's Book Shop by clicking on the book's title.

Click here to reserve your free tickets.

Karen Russell and Wells Tower's books are available at the Library's Book Shop by clicking on the book's title.

Maya Jasanoff discusses her new book, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, with Jill Lepore, a New Yorker writer and the author most recently of The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History. 

 

THIS EVENT IS FULL. However we will have a "first come, first served" standby line on Tuesday evening for seats available at the last minute.

Both Maya Jasanoff and Jill Lepore's books are available at the Library's Book Shop. To access the Book Shop, click on the book's title.

Colm Tóibín, the author most recently of the novel Brooklyn, talks about his collection of short stories, The Empty Family.

A distinguished panel that includes Astra Taylor, Anthony Gottlieb, Simon Critchley, Cornel West, and James Miller – moderated by Lewis Lapham - will discuss the present state of philosophy in light of Miller’s  book, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche.

Co-sponsored with The New School University

 This event will take place at The New School, Tishman Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street, at 7 p.m.

Admission is free. RSVP: Please email molok819@newschool.edu 

This event is currently full. Standby tickets will be available the night of the event, first-come, first-served. Thank you.

The eminent author and New Yorker writer Ian Frazier talks with NPR and Radio Lab host Robert Krulwich about Frazier's new book,Travels in Siberia.

This event is free, but you must must reserve your seats (no more than four per person).

To do so, please write to cswevents@nypl.org

This fall's theatre season includes the New York premiere of Edward Albee's Me, Myself & I at Playwrights Horizons and the opening of Will Eno's Middletown at the Vineyard Theatre.

 There are no more available seats for this event. Please visit Conversations from the Cullman Center for future events.

Poet and Journalist Melanie Rehak, Steve Jenkins (The Food Life), Fairway's part-owner and cheese monger extraordinare, and David Shea, the founder of applewood restaurant in Brooklyn, discuss, among other things, Rehak's Eating for Beginners: An Education in the Pleasures of Food from Chefs, Farmers, and One Picky Kid. Their conversation will be moderated by the journalist and author Patrick Radden Keefe (Chatter, The Snakehead).

Visit the Library Book Shop by clicking on the title of the book

Shakespeare authority and former Cullman Center Fellow James Shapiro returns to the Library to talk about his critically acclaimed new book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? with "The Ethicist" of The New York Times, journalist and playwright Randy Cohen. Don't miss Shapiro's first New York appearance!

Hillary Mantel, the author of Wolf Hall, calls Contested Will "riveting" and The Financial Times hailed Shapiro's book as "a terrific read." Click here to read Mantel's full review in The Guardian.

Note new location! This event has been moved to the Celeste Bartos Forum. Please enter the building through the 42nd Street entrance, just west of Fifth Avenue.