Innovations rarely come from “experts.” When it comes to improbable innovations, a legendary tech VC told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. It is the nature of the venture-capital game that most attempts at discovery fail, but a very few succeed at such a scale that they more than […]

YA launch with Lizzy Mason. In a world that feels distorted by celebrity and the manipulations of social media and public opinion, Natalie and Carter need something real to hold onto. Remind Me to Hate You Later is a moving account of grief, depression, complex relationships, love, and the search for truth.

Join historian and author Claire Bellerjeau as she introduces Elizabeth, or Liss. Enslaved on Long Island, Liss showed great agency when she risked everything to escape with a British commander during the Revolutionary War. Despite her bravery, within weeks of her escape Liss was re-enslaved in British-held Manhattan, where she interacted with Washington’s lead spy, […]

Set in Civil Rights–era Harlem, this novel features shady cops and local gangsters in an entertaining and spellbinding way. Join NYPL staff for a moderated discussion.

Reading. A Bustle, LitHub, Debutiful, and NYLON Most Anticipated Book of 2023. A magnetic and unforgettable story of desire and its complexities, and a powerful reckoning with memory, loss, and longing, Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel, Thirst for Salt, reveals with stunning, sensual immediacy the way the past can hold us in its thrall, shaping who […]

Géraldine Schwarz’s riveting account of her German and French grandparents’ lives during World War II is an urgent warning against forgetting the lessons of history in the dangerous rise of far-right nationalism in Europe, the UK, and the U.S. In her book, Those Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe, Schwarz weaves together the […]

In this special Saturday afternoon lecture, Julie Flavell will present her book The Howe Dynasty, the first biography of a British "First Family." The Howe family had as much at stake as the Washingtons and Adamses in the conflict that created the United States. Meet the men and women of the aristocratic Howe dynasty and […]

Women's History Month lecture.

Joint book launch. From Sophie Ward, the Booker Prize-longlisted author of Love and Other Thought Experiments, comes a masterful and gripping thriller about truth, silence, and the weight of the past. Meanwhile, Margot Douaihy presents her masterful debut, Scorched Grace in which Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun, puts her amateur sleuthing skills […]

An American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York City, written by Phillip James Dodd with photography by Jonathan Wallen, is a sumptuous book on an era – roughly from the 1870s to the 1930s – when New York acquired and displayed its wealth and sophistication with complete confidence. The titans of American finance and industry […]

For this month's Non-Fiction/Fiction conversation series Join Sarah Schulman and K.M. Soehnlein in commemorating the 30-year anniversary of ACT UP.

With its gleaming shopping centers and refurbished row houses, today’s Harlem bears little resemblance to the neighborhood of the midcentury urban crisis. In The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem, first published in 2017 by Harvard University Press, Brian D. Goldstein traces Harlem’s Second Renaissance to a surprising source: the radical […]

In commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the American war in Iraq, join us for an informal and open discussion about the war through political cartoons. In addition, we can explore how concepts such as the "Turner's Frontier Thesis," "Entitlement to Greatness," "The End of History" help explain the American support for military interventionism and […]

In commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the American war in Iraq, join us for an informal and open discussion about the war through political cartoons. In addition, we can explore how concepts such as the "Turner's Frontier Thesis," "Entitlement to Greatness," "The End of History" help explain the American support for military interventionism and […]

The Sassoons, known as “the Rothschilds of the East,” were one of the richest families in the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Baghdadi Jewish family built a vast financial and trade empire that spanned continents, became members of British Parliament, and owned some of Britain’s leading newspapers. In his new book The […]

In this program, poet David Mills will read from and reflect upon the research behind his poetry collection, Boneyarn, a book of poems about slavery in New York City. For this reading, Mr. Mills will focus on the poems about enslaved women in his collection. The collection also includes a suite of poems dedicated to […]

Dr. Gisella Perl was a Hungarian Jewish gynecologist who was imprisoned at Auschwitz. While there, she acted to address the terrors that were visited upon women by the Nazi regime, as happened in all concentration camps. If a woman was discovered to be pregnant, she was often beaten or killed; Dr. Perl vowed to help […]

Book discussion group. All are welcome.

Delve into the events leading up to the Alhambra Decree and what happened to the Jewish community in the wake of the edict in this panel discussion. On March 31, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain issued the Alhambra Decree, also known as the Edict of Expulsion, which gave Jews until the end […]