Recorded at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 13, 2011.

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. Exiled from Pakistan in the 1960s for his activism against the military dictatorship, Ali has gained a reputation as one of today’s most forceful political thinkers, speaking out consistently against imperialism, religious fundamentalism and the Anglo-American “war on terror.” He has written more than 20 books on world history and politics, including Pirates of the Caribbean; Bush in Babylon; The Clash of Fundamentalisms and his latest, The Obama Syndrome—Surrender at Home, War Abroad. He has also authored five novels in his Islam Quintet series and writes scripts for the stage and screen.

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Length: 1:43:42; Size: 47.6 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 13, 2011.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, hailed by critics as "one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years" (Baltimore Sun), with "prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes" (The Boston Globe).

Her award-winning second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, illuminates a seminal moment in African history: Biafra's struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s.

"We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers. She is fearless, or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria's civil war. Adichie came almost fully made." Chinua Achebe

"An immense achievement. As well as freshly re-creating this nightmarish chapter in her country's history, she writes about the slow process by which love, if strong enough, may overcome."  The Observer (London)

In her most recent book, That Thing Around Your Neck, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in 12 stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977 and grew up in the university town of Nsukka, where she briefly studied medicine and pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to attend college, graduating from Eastern Connecticut State and later earning Masters degrees in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and in African Studies from Yale University. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, and The Iowa Review among other journals.

She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

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Length: 1:10:32; Size: 37.5 MB

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Recorded at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 13, 2011.

Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School in New York. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in New York City. He has a PhD in economics from Yale University, a history degree from Harvard University, and an economics degree from Stanford University. He has authored or co-authored 10 books, over 50 scholarly articles, and 75 popular articles.

Wolff's recent work has concentrated on analyzing the causes and alternative solutions to the current global economic crisis. His documentary film on that crisis, Capitalism Hits the Fan, can be previewed at www.capitalismhitsthefan.com. He has also published Capitalism Hits the Fan: the Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.

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Length: 1:36:34; Size: 53.3 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 18, 2011.

Joe Sacco is one of the world's foremost cartoonists and is widely hailed as the creator of war-reportage comics. He is the author of Palestine, which received the American Book Award, and Safe Area Goražde, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. After completing a degree in journalism at the University of Oregon, Sacco set out to crisscross the globe, producing comics along the way. In the early 1990s he spent two months in Israel and the occupied territories, traveling and taking notes. When he returned to the U.S. he recorded what he had witnessed and heard during his Middle Eastern travels, combining the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comics storytelling to explore this complex, emotionally weighted situation. Palestine, the resulting book, set new standards for the use of the comic book as a documentary medium, and was the first nonfiction graphic novel to invite serious comparison with Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus. In 2000, Sacco finished Safe Area Goražde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995: a 240-page exploration of a small Muslim enclave in Bosnia called Goražde. Sacco's most recent major work is a book about the southern Gaza Strip, called Footnotes in Gaza, published by Metropolitan Books in early 2010. Joe Sacco is a citizen of Malta and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.

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Length: 1:21:22; Size: 28 MB

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Recorded at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 24, 2011.

Michael Ratner is President of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin. Both are non-profit human rights litigation organizations. He was part of the small group of lawyers that first took on representation of the Guantánamo detainees in January 2001, a case that resulted in a victory in the Supreme Court in 2004. CCR established a network of over 600 pro-bono lawyers to represent Guantánamo detainees and continues that work.

He has filed criminal complaints in the courts of Germany, France and Spain against former US officials including Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seeking the initiation of criminal prosecutions against them for the Abu Ghraib abuse and torture as well as for their actions at Guantánamo. Recently, CCR and ECCHR prepared papers to file in Switzerland against George W. Bush for torture. As a result Bush canceled his trip. A major area of Mr. Ratner's litigation and writing is the enforcement of the prohibition on torture and murder against various dictators and generals who travel to the United States. He has sued on behalf of victims in Guatemala, East Timor, Haiti, Argentina, among other countries. He has also litigated numerous suits to prevent or stop illegal US wars ranging from Central America to Iraq. A constant in his work has been litigation against government spying and surveillance of activists.

Ratner's books, authored or coauthored, include the soon to be published, Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in 21st-Century America (2011) and Killing Che: How the CIA Got Away with Murder (2011). Other books include International Human Rights Litigation in U.S. Courts, Second Edition (2008); Against War with Iraq (2003); Guantánamo: What the World Should Know (2004); and The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book (2008). Ratner has taught human rights litigation at Yale and Columbia Law Schools. A past president of the National Lawyers Guild, Ratner has received many awards including Trial Lawyer of the Year, the Columbia Law School Medal of Honor (2005), the North Star Community Frederick Douglass Award, Honorary Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School (2005), and The Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Prize for Creative Citizenship (2007). In 2006, the National Law Journal named Ratner one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the United States.

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Length: 1:28:11; Size: 42.4 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 17, 2011.

Chris Hedges, who has written, "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug," is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and publishes a regular column on truthdig.com. Hedges spoke about Sheldon S. Wolin and his latest work, Democracy Incorporated.

Sheldon S. Wolin, born in 1922, is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He taught political theory for 40 years at Oberlin College, the Universities of California, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Los Angeles, Princeton University, Cornell University, and Oxford University. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Democracy and a former regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His newest book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, is a devastating critique of the contemporary government of the United States--including what has happened to it in recent years and what must be done if it is not to disappear into history along with its classic totalitarian predecessors: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to audio recordings of this event there.

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Length: 1:03:32; Size: 45.8 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 4, 2011.

For 25 years, Maria Hinojosa has helped reveal America's untold stories and brought to light unsung heroes in America and abroad. As the anchor and managing editor of the long-running weekly NPR show, Latino USA, and anchor of the award-winning talk show Maria Hinojosa: One-on-One, she has informed millions of Americans about Latinos – the fastest growing minority group in the United States. A contributor to PBS shows, including Frontline, she has reported on hundreds of important stories – from the immigrant work camps in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to teen girl victims of sexual harassment on the job, to award-winning stories of the poor in Alabama.

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Length: 1:31:07; Size: 41.8 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 13, 2011.

Kay Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress's 16th Poet Laureate in 2008. She has published several collections of poetry, including The Niagara River, Say Uncle, and Flamingo Watching. A re-issue of her 2002 collection, Believe It or Not!, poems inspired by stories from the newspaper cartoon Ripley's Believe It or Not!, has recently been re-released and re-titled as The Jam Jar Lifeboat & Other Novelties Exposed. Her most recent publication is The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. A longtime resident of Marin County, she was born in California in 1945 and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. About her work, J.D. McClatchy has said: "Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes. She is an anomaly in today's literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost." Ryan's poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, and The Threepenny Review, among other journals and anthologies. She was named to the "It List" by Entertainment Weekly and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York's Central Park Zoo. Ryan was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006. In October 2009, Kay Ryan launched her project "Poetry for the Mind's Joy," an initiative through which she hopes to draw national attention to community colleges, as well as drawing the colleges' attention to poetry.

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Length: 1:29:14; Size: 81.8 MB

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Recorded at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 8, 2011.

Glenn Greenwald is an attorney and the author of three books: How Would a Patriot Act?, A Tragic Legacy, and Great American Hypocrites. In 2009, he received an Izzy Award by the Park Center for Independent Media for his "pathbreaking journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom, official deception, and controversial issues." He also received an Online Journalism Award in 2010 for Best Commentary for his coverage of U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning. Greenwald is a columnist and blogger at Salon.com and has contributed to several newspapers and political news magazines.

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Length: 1:33:42; Size: 43 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 16, 2011.

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was one of the most acclaimed and influential American writers of his generation. A gifted novelist, essayist and humorist, he is best known for his 1996 opus, the novel Infinite Jest. His other books include his debut novel The Broom of the System (1987), followed by the short story collections Girl With Curious Hair (1989) and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005), and the nonfiction work Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003). He received a Whiting Writers' Award in 1987, a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 1996, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997. Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, educated at Amherst College, and lived for many years in Illinois. He taught creative writing at Pomona College in Claremont, California, from 2002 until his death in 2008.

An evening in celebration of the life and work of DAVID FOSTER WALLACE (1962-2008). Writers David Lipsky, Rick Moody, and Joanna Scott will read some of their favorite selections from Wallace's writings followed by an in depth discussion moderated by Michael Silverblatt, host of the radio interview program, Bookworm.

Abstraction has all kinds of problems and headaches built in, we all know. Part of the hazard is how we use nouns. We think of nouns' meanings in terms of denotations. Nouns stand for things–man, desk, pen, David, head, aspirin. A special kind of comedy results when there's confusion about what's a real noun, as in 'Who's on first?' or those Alice in Wonderland routines–'What can you see on the road?' 'Nothing.' 'What great eyesight! What does nothing look like?' The comedy tends to vanish, though, when the nouns denote abstractions, meaning general concepts divorced from particular instances. Many of these abstraction-nouns come from root verbs. 'Motion' is a noun, and 'existence'; we use words like this all the time. The confusion comes when we try to consider what exactly they mean.
- From Everything and More.

David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine and the author of works of fiction, nonfiction, and short stories including The Art Fair and Three Thousand Dollars.
David Lipsky Bio and Cross Links

Rick Moody has been celebrated in America for twenty years for his work in fiction, nonfiction, and short stories. His first novel, Garden State (1992), was the winner of the 1991 Editor's Choice Award from the Pushcart Press.
Rick Moody Bio and Cross Links

Joanna Scott is the author of eight novels, including Liberation, Tourmaline, Make Believe, The Manikin, Arrogance, and most recently Follow Me (2009) as well as two collections of short fiction, Various Antidotes and Everybody Loves Somebody.
Joanna Scott Bio and Cross Links

Michael Silverblatt, a New York native, studied at Johns Hopkins University, where he came under the influence of such cutting-edge author-teachers as Donald Barthelme and John Barth.
Michael Silverblatt Bio and Cross Links

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Length: 2:15:34; Size: 61.2 MB

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