Upcoming Featured Events

Ketchum Remote Collective aims to bridge the intangible gap between the Wood River Valley’s physical community and the remote workplace for many of its residents. Come meet and spend part of your week working alongside other remote workers. Drop in Fridays between 1:00 and 4:00 p.m.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024
5:30pm – 6:30pm
John A. and Carole O. Moran Lecture Hall
More/register here.

For more than a decade Cheryl Strayed has written the popular “Dear Sugar” advice column, which has been collected in her bestselling book Tiny Beautiful Things that was recently adapted for an Emmy-nominated Hulu television show.

In this talk, Cheryl will share stories about everything she’s learned about the art of writing advice—and indeed, writing honestly in all of her work—about the wildly human and universal experiences that connect us all. Cheryl will also take questions from the audience and sign books afterwards.

This program will be livestreamed, and a recording will be available upon request. 

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which was made into an Oscar-nominated film. Her bestselling collection of Dear Sugar columns, Tiny Beautiful Things, was adapted for a Hulu television show and as a play that continues to be staged in theaters nationwide. Strayed’s other books are the critically acclaimed novel, Torch, and the bestselling collection Brave Enough, which brings together more than one hundred of her inspiring quotes. Her award-winning essays and short stories have been published in The Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, and elsewhere. Strayed has also made two hit podcasts, Dear Sugars, which she co-hosted with Steve Almond, and Sugar Calling.

A Virtual Conversation with Nghi Vo and Anna-Marie McLemore 

Thursday, March 7, 2024
5:30pm – 6:30pm
Lecture Hall
More/register here.

As part of the 2024 Winter Read of The Great Gatsby, join us for a virtual conversation with authors Nghi Vo and Anna-Marie McLemore, whose novels retell F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic through new lenses. Vo and McLemore will join us over Zoom, but all are welcome to join us in the Library’s John A. and Carole O. Moran Lecture Hall, or over Vimeo. Livestream link forthcoming.

Nghi Vo’s debut novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful, reinvents Fitzgerald’s classic as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice. In Vo’s telling, Jordan Baker is our narrator. Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her. But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how. Vo’s novel was listed as a Most Anticipated in 2021 Pick for Oprah Magazine and a Best of Summer Pick for TIME Magazine.

Anna-Marie McLemore, a Stonewall Honor recipient and two-time National Book Award Longlist selectee, weaves an intoxicating tale of glamor and heartache in Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix, part of the Remixed Classics series. Her novel centers on Nicolás Caraveo, a 17-year-old transgender boy from Wisconsin, who has no interest in the city’s glamor. Going to New York is all about establishing himself as a young professional, which could set up his future—and his life as a man—and benefit his family. Nick rents a small house in West Egg from his 18-year-old cousin, Daisy Fabrega, who lives in fashionable East Egg near her wealthy fiancé, Tom—and Nick is shocked to find that his cousin now goes by Daisy Fay, has erased all signs of her Latine heritage, and now passes seamlessly as white. Nick’s neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious young man named Jay Gatsby, whose castle-like mansion is the stage for parties so extravagant that they both dazzle and terrify Nick. At one of these parties, Nick learns that the spectacle is all meant to impress a girl from Jay’s past—Daisy. And he learns something else: Jay is also transgender. As Nick is pulled deeper into the glittery culture of decadence, he spends more time with Jay, aiming to help his new friend reconnect with his lost love. But Nick’s feelings grow more complicated when he finds himself falling hard for Jay’s openness, idealism, and unfounded faith in the American Dream. McLemore’s novel was longlisted for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature.

Nghi Vo is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, as well as the acclaimed novellas Mammoths at the Gates, Into the Riverlands, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, and The Empress of Salt and Fortune, a Locus and Ignyte Award finalist and the winner of the Crawford Award and the Hugo Award. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.

Anna-Marie McLemore (they/them) is the author of William C. Morris Debut Award Finalist The Weight of Feathers; Wild Beauty; Blanca & Roja, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Novels of All Time; Indie Next List title Dark and Deepest Red; Lakelore; and National Book Award longlist selections When the Moon Was Ours, which was also a Stonewall Honor Book; The Mirror Season; and Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix. Their latest release is Venom & Vow, co-authored with Elliott McLemore, and their next novel is Flawless Girls, forthcoming in May 2024.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024
6:30pm – 7:30pm
Lecture Hall

Presented in partnership with the Sun Valley Music Festival, featuring Alasdair Neale, Jon Kimura Parker, and Festival Orchestra Concertmaster Jeremy Constant and Principal Cellist Amos Yang in conversation.

This program will be livestreamed and available to watch later.

Reservations open on Wednesday, February 21st at 9:00 a.m. through the Festival’s website here.

The Sun Valley Music Festival’s sixth Winter Season will be held at the Argyros Performing Arts Center March 6-9 and focuses on “The Romance of Brahms,” curated by Music Director Alasdair Neale and featuring pianist Jon Kimura Parker—winner of the Gold Medal at the 1984 Leeds International Piano Competition—and string musicians from the all-star Sun Valley Music Festival Orchestra.

A Virtual Conversation with Jennifer Lang

Tuesday, February 20, 2024
5:30pm – 6:30pm
Lecture Hall
More/register here.

When American-born Jennifer falls in love with French-born Philippe during the First Intifada in Israel, she understands their relationship isn’t perfect. 

Both 23, both Jewish, they lead very different lives: she’s a secular tourist, he’s an observant immigrant. Despite their opposing outlooks on two fundamental issues—country and religion—they are determined to make it work. For the next 20 years, they root and uproot their growing family, each longing for a singular place to call home.

In Places We Left Behind, Jennifer puts her marriage under a microscope, examining commitment and compromise, faith and family while moving between prose and poetry, playing with language and form, daring the reader to read between the lines.

Join us for a virtual conversation with Jennifer, who will join us over Zoom. Jennifer will be in conversation with Leslie Kaplan of the Wood River Jewish Community, a partner on this event.

The program will be livestreamed, and attendees are also welcome to join us in the library’s John A. and Carole O. Moran Lecture Hall. 

Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jennifer Lang lives in Tel Aviv, where she runs israelwriterstudio.com. Her prize-winning essays appear in Baltimore Review, Under the Sun, Midway Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is an Assistant Editor at Brevity Journal, longtime yoga practitioner and instructor. Places We Left Behind: a memoir-in-miniature (September 2023) and Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses (October 2024) are both with Vine Leaves Press.

with Molly Guptill Manning

Thursday, February 22, 2024
5:30-6:30 p.m.
John A. and Carole O. Moran Lecture Hall
More/register here.

As part of the 2024 Winter Read of The Great Gatsby, join us for an evening with Molly Guptill Manning, author of When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II.

When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned 100 million books. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops, gathering 20 million hardcover donations. Two years later, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million specially printed paperbacks designed for troops to carry in their pockets and rucksacks in every theater of war.

These small, lightweight Armed Services Editions were beloved by the troops and are still fondly remembered today. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy, in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific, in field hospitals, and on long bombing flights. This pioneering project not only lifted soldiers’ spirits, but also helped rescue The Great Gatsby from obscurity and made Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, into a national icon.

This program will be livestreamed and available to view later. 

Molly Guptill Manning is an author, historian, curator, and associate professor of law at New York Law School. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller When Books Went to War, The Myth of Ephraim Tutt, and has recently released The War of Words: How America’s GI Journalists Battled Censorship and Propaganda to Help Win World War II. She has written numerous articles and has spoken across the country about the power of the written word. Molly is the curator of the exhibit, “The Best-Read Army in the World,” which was on display in New York City in 2023 and will be traveling to California later this year. The exhibit showcases the essential role that books, magazines, and newspapers played in World War II. 

Before she became a professor, Molly worked in the federal courts of New York for thirteen years. She earned a B.A. and M.A. in American history from the University at Albany and a J.D. at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. She will complete an M.A. in Museum Studies from NYU in 2024. Molly lives in Manhattan with her husband and daughter.