Our Events

Event Recordings

  • Thursday, November 19, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | online | open to the public | free of charge | registration required
    In this original series of live online events, hear the voices of Black writers through history re-examined to inspire understanding of race in our country today. This debut presentation features works from the 1700s with dramatic readings, historical context, and images.
    Embedded thumbnail for Black Literature Matters: The 1700s
  • Monday, November 16, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration required
    From the best-selling author of King Leopold's Ghost and Spain in Our Hearts comes the astonishing but forgotten story of an immigrant sweatshop worker who married an heir to a great American fortune and became one of the most charismatic radical leaders of her time.
    Embedded thumbnail for Adam Hochschild, Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes
  • Thursday, November 12, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration required
    Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way.
    Embedded thumbnail for Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives, with Edwin Frank
  • Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | online | free for members of the New York Society Library and membership library members | registration required through the Athenaeum of Philadelphia
    The Princeton University professor and author of BEGIN AGAIN: JAMES BALDWIN'S AMERICA AND ITS URGENT LESSONS FOR OUR OWN addresses the questions raised by Baldwin's 1962 essay "As Much Truth as One Can Bear."
    Embedded thumbnail for Eddie S. Glaude Jr., As Much Truth As We Can Bear: James Baldwin and Our America
  • Sunday, November 8, 2020 - 2:00 PM | Lecture | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration required
    Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf: they all wrote dazzling books that forever changed the way we see history. Prodigy, visionary, 'outlaw,' orator and explorer. As society's outsiders, the exceptional subjects of this study inspired a new breed of women―and one another.
    Embedded thumbnail for Lyndall Gordon, Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World
  • Wednesday, November 4, 2020 - 2:00 PM | Special Event | YouTube | open to the public | free of charge | drop in
    2020 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of New York City diarist George Templeton Strong. Join Library staff Harriet Shapiro and Cathy McGowan for a visit to Strong's 19th-century world with historical narrative, images, dramatic readings, and music.
    Embedded thumbnail for George Templeton Strong: Chronicler of New York
  • Thursday, October 29, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | online | free for members of the New York Society Library and membership library members | registration required through the Athenaeum of Philadelphia
    The acclaimed biographer recreates a celebrated eighteenth-century London club that included critic Samuel Johnson, biographer James Boswell, historian Edward Gibbon, political thinker Edmund Burke, economist Adam Smith, painter Joshua Reynolds, and actor David Garrick.
    Embedded thumbnail for  Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
  • Monday, October 26, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration required
    The iconic author of the bestselling phenomenon CRAZY RICH ASIANS returns with the glittering tale of a young woman who finds herself torn between two men.
    Embedded thumbnail for Kevin Kwan, Sex and Vanity, with Jacqueline B. Weld
  • Thursday, October 22, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration required
    A singular, beautifully written coming-of-age memoir of a Filipino boy with albinism whose story travels from an immigrant childhood to Harvard to a gender transition and illuminates the illusions of race, disability, and gender.
    Embedded thumbnail for Meredith Talusan, Fairest: A Memoir
  • Thursday, October 1, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | open to the public | $10 per person | registration required
    The foremost expert on the book art of Margaret Armstrong talks about her life and career, with stunning images from his own comprehensive collection of her bindings.
    Embedded thumbnail for Lowell Thing, Cover Treasure: The Adventures of a Margaret Armstrong Collector
  • Tuesday, September 29, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | for members of the New York Society Library and membership library members | free of charge | registration required through the Athenaeum of Philadelphia
    In the decades before the Civil War, African Americans in the North lived in an tenuous freedom, denied political rights and threatened with kidnapping and enslavement. In this presentation, REMAKING THE REPUBLIC author Christopher Bonner explores individual and collective strategies African Americans used to defend their freedom and secure rights.
    Embedded thumbnail for Christopher James Bonner, Runaways, or Citizens Claimed as Such
  • Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | open to the public | by donation | registration required
    A husband, a father, a son, a business owner...And the best getaway driver east of the Mississippi. Like Ocean's Eleven meets Drive with a Southern noir twist, S. A. Cosby's Blacktop Wasteland is a searing, operatic story of a man pushed to his limits by poverty, race, and his own former life of crime. Lee Child calls it "sensationally good - new, fresh, real, authentic, twisty, with characters and dilemmas that will break your heart. More than recommended."
    Embedded thumbnail for S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland
  • Wednesday, September 16, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | open to the public | $10 per person | registration required
    Two acclaimed novelists discuss their research and writing about the experiences of women in the Second World War and its aftermath.
    Embedded thumbnail for The Past is Never Past: Jan Eliasberg, Hannah's War, and Ellen Feldman, Paris Never Leaves You
  • Sunday, September 13, 2020 - 4:00 PM | Online Event | open to the public | free of charge | drop in
    Staffer and love-story reader Marialuisa Monda chats about guilty pleasures and pet peeves in classic romances and contemporary love stories.
    Embedded thumbnail for The Hopeless Romantic
  • Tuesday, September 8, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | for members of the New York Society Library and membership library members | by donation | registration required
    In Dawson’s Fall, a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson’s great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson’s tale weaves her family’s journal entries and letters with a novelist’s narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the country’s new political, social, and moral landscape.
    Embedded thumbnail for Roxana Robinson, Dawson's Fall
  • Monday, July 20, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration required
    An African-American writer’s concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in twenty-first-century America.
    Embedded thumbnail for Clifford Thompson, What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues
  • Thursday, July 16, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration required
    Jamaica Kincaid is a writer and professor whose works include the novels See Now Then, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and Mr. Potter; a classic history of Antigua, A Small Place; and a memoir, My Brother. In this special one-time-only event, Ms. Kincaid talks about her work and the past and present worlds in which it happens.
    Embedded thumbnail for An Evening with Jamaica Kincaid
  • Wednesday, July 8, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | online | open to the public | by donation | registration required
    A special virtual tour of Margaret Armstrong's botanical watercolors from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Embedded thumbnail for Virtual Tour: Margaret Armstrong's Botanical Watercolors at the Met Museum
  • Monday, June 29, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration required
    A genteel summer visit to 1815 with writer/actress Laura Rocklyn as Jane Austen.
    Embedded thumbnail for Performance: Laura Rocklyn as Jane Austen: Who Dares to Be an Authoress?
  • Thursday, June 25, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | YouTube Premiere | open to the public | by donation | no registration required
    Our New York City Book Award-winning poet reads from and discusses his recent work - a new collection that chronicles a weekend in the life of a group of friends coming of age in East Harlem at the dawn of the hip-hop era.
    Embedded thumbnail for Poetry: Willie Perdomo, The Crazy Bunch
  • Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Online Event | online
    Two remarkable writers join Chicago Review of Books Editor-in-Chief Amy Brady for an interactive discussion about the worlds of their novels and our current nonfiction world of climate change.
    Embedded thumbnail for Conversation: Michael Zapata and Lydia Millet with Amy Brady
  • Friday, June 5, 2020 - 12:00 PM | Online Event | online | open to the public | $10 per person | registration required
    An interactive chat with author Gretchen Rubin on living a happier, healthier, more productive life even during and while emerging from the season of quarantine.
    Embedded thumbnail for Happier at (Quarantine) Home: A Q&A with HAPPINESS PROJECT Author Gretchen Rubin
  • Monday, May 18, 2020 - 12:00 PM | Online Event | YouTube Live | open to the public | by donation | registration required
    An interactive chat with author and journalist Maggie Jackson on how to tame distractions, keep screens from taking over, and push back on the blur that work and home have become during the lockdown.
    Embedded thumbnail for The New Work-Home Equation: A Q&A with DISTRACTED Author Maggie Jackson on how to Flourish When Office and Life Are One
  • Tuesday, May 12, 2020 - 6:00 PM | Special Event | Online | open to the public | free of charge | no registration required
    Our author-judges offer writing advice and inspiration in honor of this year's winning young writers.
    Embedded thumbnail for The Young Writers Awards 2020
  • Thursday, May 7, 2020 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Online | open to the public | by donation | no registration required
    A long-overdue biography of the head of Grand Central Terminal’s Red Caps, who flourished in the cultural nexus of Harlem and American railroads.
    Embedded thumbnail for Online: Eric K. Washington, Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal

Pages