The Greatness of Sylvia Plath

Helen Vendler’s Sixth Sense

December 2—Groundbreaking critic and revered scholar Helen Vendler could “second-guess the sixth sense of the poem,” wrote Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. For Vendler, who died last year, the language and form of a poem can reveal its writer’s deepest thoughts and feelings—an empathic approach that found full expression in her last essays, collected in the new Library of America special publication Inhabit the Poem [https://www.loa.org/books/inhabit-the-poem-last-essays/]. To celebrate these career-crowning pieces, four acclaimed poets, scholars, and former students of Vendler’s gather to reflect on her remarkable achievement: Harvard professor and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Stephanie Burt, celebrated poet-critic Dan Chiasson, Vendler’s literary executor Christopher Spaide, and essayist Kamran Javadizadeh, Professor of English at Villanova. Join us for a lively evening of personal remembrances and insights into the great critic’s assessments of poets from Walt Whitman to Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson to Ocean Vuong.

The Radical Imagination of Octavia E. Butler

Monday, November 24—Like a signal from a distant star, Octavia E. Butler’s luminous fiction jumps galactic distances to relay searing, often surprising revelations about the universe we inhabit and the planet we call home. In Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy [https://www.loa.org/books/liliths-brood-the-xenogenesis-trilogy/], just published by Library of America, three classics of Afrofuturist speculative fiction from the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award winner confront urgent questions about technology, hybridity, and the future of humankind. To explore these prophetic masterworks and their inimitable creator, LOA LIVE presents two preeminent scholars and writers in conversation: Imani Perry, National Book Award winner and editor of the LOA Xenogenesis edition, and Tananarive Due, World Fantasy Award–winning novelist and a close friend of Butler’s, about whom she once wrote: “Sister, we got cities burning, they were telling her. And how dare she retreat into this world. But actually, she was showing us an even bigger world, something that we couldn't even wrap our minds around.”

Reading Democracy in America Now

Wednesday, September 10—Two centuries on, Alexis de Tocqueville’s brilliant Democracy in America [https://www.loa.org/books/202-democracy-in-america/?no_lightbox=1] remains the most prescient account of the virtues, and potential dangers, of our politics and culture. How do Tocqueville’s insights illuminate current events and political trends, both at home and abroad? Join four distinguished scholars for a lively debate on the continued resonance of this enduring masterpiece: Yale professor Joanne Freeman (acclaimed author of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War), Pulitzer Prize–winning NYU historian Steven Hahn (Illiberal America: A History), Harvard’s James T. Kloppenberg (Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought), and Olivier Zunz, Commonweath Professor at the University of Virginia and editor of the definitive LOA edition of Democracy in America [https://www.loa.org/books/202-democracy-in-america/?no_lightbox=1], featuring Arthur Goldhammer’s celebrated translation.

Remembering Victory: World War II Memoirs of the European Theater

Thursday, May 8—Eighty years ago the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany closed the curtain on six years of total war in Europe, a conflict that tested the courage and forever changed the lives of five young Americans who survived to write astonishing personal narratives of their experiences, from the frontlines of the Battle of the Bulge to the navigator’s seat of a B-17 bomber. To mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day, West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet, editor of World War II Memoirs: The European Theater [https://www.loa.org/books/world-war-ii-memoirs-the-european-theater/], joins National Book Award–winning author and Marine veteran Phil Klay for a conversation about these classics of modern war literature: remarkable memoirs that capture the immediacy of history in the making and the impact of wartime on combatants and noncombatants alike. The views expressed in this program do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

The Greatness of Sylvia Plath

Thursday, April 17—Sylvia Plath’s bold and incandescent poems have struck a deep chord with generations of readers. A visionary writer who scaled astonishing literary heights in her short life, Plath may best be understood, says acclaimed classicist and Plath devotee Sarah Ruden, as a modern mythmaker: an artist who, at the peak of her powers, transcends autobiography to give us poems that describe the shape of our shared experience. Ruden joins LOA LIVE for a conversation inspired by her book I Am the Arrow: The Life & Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems [https://www.loa.org/books/i-am-the-arrow-the-life-art-of-sylvia-plath-in-six-poems/], published this April by Library of America, with Pulitzer-winning poet Diane Seuss and pre-eminent Plath scholars Heather Clark and Amanda Golden.