(This recording contains explicit content) In Junot Díaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a Dominican American family haunted by an ancient curse is doomed to prison, torture, and ill-starred love. Like Oscar’s family and the narrators of many of the short stories in Diaz's collection Drown, Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and explores the contemporary American experience with the "eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet" (Newsweek). The stories in This is How You Lose Her probe the gaping vulnerabilities of our all-too-human hearts.

Science fiction pioneer Samuel R. Delany plumbs themes of race and sexuality in his provocative, futuristic books, including Return to Neveryon, a four-volume sword-and-sorcery series; Dhalgren; and Babel-17. A professor of creative writing at Temple University, he is the recipient of multiple Nebula and Hugo Awards, as well as the William Whitehead Memorial Award for his lifetime contribution to lesbian and gay writing. He was the subject of the documentary film The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, which premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. His new novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is "a book worthy of his career full of masterpieces" (Los Angeles Review of Books), celebrating companionship, love, and sexual freedom. 

Horace W. Goldsmith Endowed Lecture