A new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum called “Churchill:  The Power of Words,” which showcased his long, celebrated career as a statesman, writer, and orator, opened on Friday.

After the speech, the PEN festival founder had a conversation with writer Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Super Sad True Love Story).

Hamilton read from his book, “The Speckled People,” as part of the PEN World Voices Festival on May 3. The event was held at Ireland House, a handsome mews building off Washington Square Park that is home to NYU’s Irish studies department. Hamilton was introduced by John Waters, head of the university’s Irish literature program.

The Sunday before the talk, Doctorow (Homer & Langley, Ragtime), Atwood (The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace) and Amis (Time's Arrow, The Rachel Papers) had written essays for The Sunday Review section of The Times on the subject.

The event, entitled “Ties That Bind: Reimagining juvenile justice and child welfare for teens, families and communities,” was intended to coincide with the implementation of key new initiatives that would bring the administration of the intertwined child welfare, juvenile justice and foster care services under New York City jurisdiction. 

The organizers chose an unusual point of departure for event — not a historical overview, but a conversation between Jonathan Spence, former Sterling Professor of History at Yale, and the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh.

Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, actor Kathryn Grody, writers Amitav Ghosh and Deborah Eisenberg, and former political prisoner Law Eh Soe read from Nowhere to Be Home: Narratives from Survivors of Burma's Military Regime. Veteran journalist, educator, and current Director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations Orville Schell opened and closed the event.  

After an hour wait, the crowd finally shuffled in to shake out their umbrellas and hear the writers talk. The event, which was part of the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival, started off with remarks from Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. His introduction got a round of applause in the name of Brooklyn pride.

The room was packed. 

Use the player above to listen to the entire event.

Stream and download the entire conversation here.

Recently, StoryCorps founder and award-winning public radio producer David Isay presented some of these stories at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. The event marked the release of the new book, Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps.

Stream and download the talk here for free.

Prose is the author of Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife. Ernie Colón and Sid Jacobson recently finished a graphic novel of the Anne Frank story and are the creators of The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation.

The panel was moderated by Judith Thurman of The New Yorker.

Annabel Davis-Goff read from "Harold," Hazzard's first story, which written when she was 20 years old and published in The New Yorker.

The company’s staged readings, and critically acclaimed productions, of such lyrically gory works as The Revenger’s Tragedy, Edward the Second, and Women Beware Women have introduced contemporary New York audiences to works that, Berger says, “were written to take the audience on the full gamut of emotion from laughter to horror.”

The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster, is one of the period’s most famous works, and was a natural choice for Red Bull.  Berger describes it as “romantic love tragedy,” in which the Duchess, a willful aristocratic widow, secretly marries her own steward, Antonio, a man well below her social station, with nightmarish consequences.  Christina Rouner, who plays the Duchess, says this was unheard in a period in which women had few rights:  “It’s essentially an impossibility in her time, and she goes and does it anyway, which speaks to her strength of character, that she chooses her own terms.”  

Rouner  relishes the way plays of this period give actors “access to the kind of verse, images, metaphors to express the specificity of what you feel.”  This sometimes requires a leap of faith for naturalistic American actors, she says.  “There is definitely a kind of commitment that needs to happen when you give yourself over to the language and then trust that it will become your truth.” 

It has to become truth for the audience, too, notes Rouner’s real-life husband Matthew Greer, who plays Antonio.  “When doing plays of heightened language, how do you use the richness and the poetry inherent in the language and yet still have it feel like these are two people to whom we can relate?” 

Berger, Rouner, and Greer came in to the WNYC studios to talk about the play and the company; and to give us a taste of the production in a reading of the crucial early wooing scene. 

At the conclusion of the scene, the Duchess claims her man, declaring “Bless heaven, this sacred Gordian [knot], which let violence Never untwine…we are now one.”  In the bloody aftermath, we learn, Berger says, “what is the inherent value of a human being?  Does it come with what’s inside you, what you do in the world, or your status?”  Nearly 400 years after Webster finished his powerful play, we are still looking for an answer.

Listen to the wooing scene from The Duchess of Malfi here

Click onthe link above to listen to a roundtable discussion with Jesse Berger, Matthew Greer, and Christina Rouner.