Our Events

Event Recordings

  • Thursday, April 19, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the public | Members' Room | free of charge | advance registration required
    Climate change is already happening. Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy, speaks with visual artist Zaria Forman and conservation biologist Gleb Raygorodetsky about “transitional environments”—that is, regions of land undergoing change so dramatic they’re barely recognizable.
    Embedded thumbnail for Art & Activism of the Anthropocene Series: Strange Reality: The Art and Activism of Transitional Environments
  • Wednesday, April 11, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the public | Members' Room | free of charge | advance registration required
    Climate change is already happening. Author William T. Vollmann, playwright Chantal Bilodeau, and journalist David Wallace-Wells approach its dialogues through different mediums—book-length and magazine journalism, and through theatre. They’ll discuss their approach to gathering stories, their thoughts on why those stories matter, and the challenges they’ve faced when shaping issues of climate change into digestible narratives for the public.
    Embedded thumbnail for Art & Activism of the Anthropocene Series: Don't Shoot the Messenger: The Challenging Narratives of Climate Change
  • Thursday, March 22, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the public | Members' Room | $15 per person | advance registration required
    The mysterious, highly influential hidden world of Yale’s secret societies is revealed in a definitive and scholarly history.
    Embedded thumbnail for David Alan Richards, Skulls and Keys: The Hidden History of Yale's Secret Societies
  • Wednesday, March 14, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the public | Members' Room | $15 per person | advance registration required
    The spectacular true story of a scrappy teenager from New York’s Lower East Side who stowed away on the Roaring Twenties’ most remarkable feat of science and daring: an expedition to Antarctica.
    Embedded thumbnail for Laurie Gwen Shapiro, The Stowaway: A Young Man's Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica
    Event Recording
  • Monday, February 26, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the public | Members' Room | $15 per person | advance registration required
    Two leading scholars discuss their research into Willa Cather’s books and letters and the influence of New York City on her work.
    Embedded thumbnail for Exhibition Conversation: Andrew Jewell and Robert Thacker, Scenes from Willa Cather's Life in New York
  • Thursday, February 22, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the public | Members' Room | $15 per person | advance registration required
    Three master biographers take center stage to excavate and celebrate their art and craft, inspired by James Atlas’ new memoir The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale.
    Embedded thumbnail for Panel: Biographers' Tales with Judith Thurman and Edmund White, moderated by James Atlas
    Event Recording
  • Wednesday, February 7, 2018 - 6:30 PM | The Writing Life | Open to the public | Members' Room | Free of charge | advance registration required
    Just admit it. You love love. Let’s talk about it. This panel covers it all, from the modern to the classic, starting with two debut novels: Leslie Cohen’s This Love Story Will Self-Destruct and Jill Santopolo’s The Light We Lost. The authors converse with Andrew Blauner of Blauner Books Literary Agency.
  • Wednesday, January 10, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the public | Members' Room | $15 per person | advance registration required
    From the author of the acclaimed history The Island at the Center of the World, an intimate new epic of the American Revolution that reinforces its meaning for today.
    Embedded thumbnail for Russell Shorto, Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom
  • Thursday, December 7, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
    Find joy and insight with two authors in enthusiastic conversation about children’s literature, human nature, and their new books: Bruce Handy’s Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult and Gretchen Rubin’s The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too).
    Embedded thumbnail for Conversation: Gretchen Rubin and Bruce Handy, Wild Things and The Four Tendencies
  • Thursday, November 16, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
    Yoga is hugely popular around the world today, yet until now little has been known of its roots. This book collects, for the first time, core teachings of yoga in their original form, translated and edited by two of the world’s foremost scholars of the subject. Sir James Mallinson is a lecturer in Sanskrit and Classical and Indian Studies at SOAS, University of London; Mark Singleton is a long-term research fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies. They are joined in conversation by Daniel Simpson.
    Embedded thumbnail for James Mallinson and Mark Singleton with Daniel Simpson, Roots of Yoga
    Event Recording
  • Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Children | Open to the Public | For grades 6 and older | Members' Room | $10 per person, payable at the door | Advance registration required
    Speed of Life is the heartbreaking, heartwarming story of a girl who thinks her life is over, when really it’s just beginning. The New York Times Book Review calls it “perceptive, funny, and moving.”
    Embedded thumbnail for Carol Weston, Speed of Life
    Event Recording
  • Monday, November 6, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
    After meeting for the first time on the front lines of World War I, two aspiring writers forge an intense twenty-year friendship and write some of America’s greatest novels. Rich in evocative detail from Paris cafés to the Austrian Alps, from the streets of Pamplona to the waters of Key West, The Ambulance Drivers is a biography of a turbulent literary friendship and an illustration of how war both inspires and destroys, unites and divides.
    Embedded thumbnail for James McGrath Morris, The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War
    Event Recording
  • Monday, October 30, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
    To lovers of theater, David Ives’ name says intelligence, humor, and excitement, from All in the Timing to Venus in Fur. In this one-time-only event, Mr. Ives will chat with Tony Award-winner John Rando, a frequent director of his plays, about his own work, the theater world, and the craft of playwriting.
    Embedded thumbnail for An Evening with David Ives, with John Rando
  • Wednesday, October 18, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
    The favored granddaughter of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson reveals a life of glamour, depressive battles, hard-won joy, and peace. It’s My Party is a portrait of another era, a guide to dealing with depression, and one woman’s deep effort to understand herself.
    Embedded thumbnail for Jeannette Watson with Alexander Sanger, It's My Party: A Memoir
    Event Recording
  • Monday, October 16, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required

    In her long-awaited second volume, Mary Stewart Hammond chronicles a long marriage with sharp wit, dark irony, and poignancy. As James Merrill says of Hammond’s poems, they “brim with what the whole world knows.”

    Embedded thumbnail for Poetry: Mary Stewart Hammond, Entering History: Poems
    Event Recording
  • Thursday, October 12, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
    James Fenimore Cooper has been credited with inventing genre fiction from the Western and the spy novel to the high seas adventure tale and the Revolutionary War romance. America’s first crusading novelist, Cooper reminds us that literature is not a cloistered art; rather, it ought to be intimately engaged with the world. Dr. Wayne Franklin offers readers the most comprehensive portrait to date of this underappreciated literary icon. This event is the first annual Henry S.F. Cooper Jr. Lecture on Early American History & Literature.
    Embedded thumbnail for Wayne Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper: The Later Years
    Event Recording
  • Thursday, September 28, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
    This unique event brings together two cutting-edge historians on the era of women’s suffrage. Angela P. Dodson’s Remember the Ladies: Celebrating Those Who Fought for Freedom at the Ballot Box documents the fight for women’s right to vote, drawing on historic research, biographies of leaders, and primary sources from books to buttons. Brooke Kroeger’s The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote is the untold story of thousands of men who involved themselves with the suffrage campaign.
    Embedded thumbnail for Conversation: Angela P. Dodson and Brooke Kroeger, Remember the Ladies, and Don't Forget the Gentlemen
  • Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
    His father conceived of the Brooklyn Bridge, but it was Washington Roebling who built what has become one of America’s most iconic structures—as much a part of New York as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. The literary editor of the London Times brings us an elegantly written biography with a compelling narrative sweep that will introduce Washington Roebling and his era to a new generation of readers.
    Embedded thumbnail for Erica Wagner, Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, the Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge
  • Sunday, September 17, 2017 - 3:00 PM | Special Event | Open to the Public | Members' Room | Free of charge; advance registration required

    Latino/a writers discuss issues in writing and publishing genre fiction and celebrate Latin@ Rising, a new collection of science fiction and fantasy stories.

    Embedded thumbnail for Latino Genre Writers: Diversity in Mystery, Science Fiction, and Horror
    Event Recording
  • Wednesday, June 14, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required

    In this unique event, two writers who are scientists - and whose scientific interests converge on olfaction - discuss their work, the process and joys of science writing, and, of course, smell.

    Embedded thumbnail for Conversation: Alexandra Horowitz and Stuart Firestein, Olfactory Convergence: How We Smell
  • Thursday, June 1, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
    Long before archaeological excavations began to reveal the magnificence of the ruins at Persepolis, Ancient Iran was an object of enormous interest in the West. In connection with our exhibition Broken Beauty: Ruins of the Ancient World, one of New York's leading archaeology scholars introduces the tales, engravings, plays, and operas about Iran and its rules that circulated across Europe from the late 15th through the 18th centuries.
    Embedded thumbnail for Daniel T. Potts, Ancient Iran in the Mediaeval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Consciousness of Europe: The Printed Word, the Graven Image, the Learned Traveller, and the Stage
    Event Recording
  • Wednesday, May 24, 2017 - 6:00 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
    Spend an evening with beloved cartoonist Roz Chast, author of the multi-award-winning Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? This event is co-sponsored with Uptown at Night.
    Embedded thumbnail for Theories of Everything, and Much, Much More: An Evening with New Yorker Cartoonist and Author Roz Chast
  • Thursday, May 11, 2017 - 6:00 PM | Special Event | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
    During the past thirty years, the editors of the Hudson Review observed a trend among the best literary essayists and reviewers to couch their criticism in a highly personal manner as opposed to the theoretical, technocratic work being produced in other venues. The Hudson Review became a home for this kind of accessible, memoirist writing. This event celebrfates the publication of an anthology of such essay/memoirs, introduced by William H. Pritchard and with a panel including Susan Balée, Sir Andrew Motion, and Igor Webb. These diverse contributions unite in the joy of appreciation, the pleasures of engaging with literature. The Writing Life events in 2017 are generously underwritten by Jenny Lawrence.
    Embedded thumbnail for Literary Awakenings: Personal Essays from the Hudson Review
  • Wednesday, May 3, 2017 - 6:00 PM | Special Event | For members and guests | Members' Room | Free of charge; advance registration required
    The New York Society Library’s New York City Book Awards, established in 1996, honor books of literary quality or historical importance that, in the opinion of the selection committee, evoke the spirit or enhance appreciation of New York City.
    Embedded thumbnail for The New York City Book Awards 2016-2017
  • Wednesday, April 26, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
    You might not know Terry McDonell, but you certainly know his work: he has served as top editor for Outside, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated, among others. In this revealing memoir, McDonell talks about what really happens when editors and writers work with deadlines ticking (or drinks on the bar).
    Embedded thumbnail for Terry McDonell, The Accidental Life: An Editor’s Notes on Writing and Writers
    Event Recording

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