Forest Service Park

OUTDOORS/LIVESTREAM – Summer Speaker Series: “The Library Book” with Susan Orlean

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On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library.  By the time the fire was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. More than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who?  Weaving her lifelong love of books into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker writer and New York Times bestselling author SUSAN ORLEAN will give us a delightful, stirring reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America and the passion for them that drew her to this story.  

REGISTER HERE

Registration will open on Monday, May 24 at 7:00 a.m.

The 2021 Summer Speaker Series, presented by The Community Library and the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, is a series of four FREE outdoor lectures hosted in Ketchum’s Forest Service Park. Advanced registration is required. Click above to reserve your space. We will determine the number of seats available closer to the event, and waitlisted guests will be notified as soon as possible.

The lecture will also be available to stream on the Library’s Livestream. Click here to watch the live stream, which will be available for a limited time.

Susan Orlean is the author of eight books, including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; My Kind of Place; Saturday Night; and Lazy Little Loafers. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film “Adaptation” starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. Her book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, a New York Times Notable book, won the Ohioana Book Award and the Richard Wall Memorial Award. In 2018, she published The Library Book, about the arson fire at the Los Angeles Public Library. It won the California Book Award and the Marfield Prize, was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book of 2018.

Orlean has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1992, and has also contributed to Vogue, Rolling Stone, Outside, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine. She has written about taxidermy, fashion, umbrellas, origami, dogs, chickens, and a wide range of other subjects. She was a 2003 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. She is currently adapting The Library Book for television, and is a writer and associate producer of “How to With John Wilson” on HBO. She lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles.

Pre-sales of Orlean’s books will be available through Iconoclast Books. Please visit Iconoclast in Hailey or call 208-726-1564 to order your copies. Orlean will sign books in private to protect the health and safety of the speaker and attendees, and those who purchase books through Iconoclast will be able to pick them up at the bookstore approximately 1-2 days following the lecture.

Photo credit: Noah Fecks

 

Summer Speaker Series: “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Family” with Patrick Radden Keefe

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July 28, 2021

Photo Credit: (c) Philip Montgomery.

They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the Sackler fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that they were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis – an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.  As he demonstrated so brilliantly in his award-winning book Say Nothing, PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is a master of the art of deep narrative reportage.  In his new book Empire of Pain, he trains his sights on the jaw-dropping and ferociously compelling reality of a family, its wealth, and the terrible consequences.  Join him for a dynastic story that is also a parable of  21st century greed.

 

The 2021 Summer Speaker Series, presented by The Community Library and the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, is a series of four FREE outdoor lectures hosted in Ketchum’s Forest Service Park. Advanced registration is required. Click above to reserve your space. We will determine the number of seats available closer to the event, and waitlisted guests will be notified as soon as possible.

The lecture will also be available to stream on the Library’s Livestream, and a recording will be available for a limited time.

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the decade by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change. His latest book is Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.

For more information on Patrick Radden Keefe, please visit www.prhspeakers.com.

Pre-sales of Keefe’s books will be available through Chapter One Bookstore. Please visit Chapter One in Ketchum or call 208-726-5425 to order your copies. Keefe will sign books in private to protect the health and safety of the speaker and attendees, and those who purchase books through Chapter One will be able to pick them up at the bookstore approximately 1-2 days following the lecture.

 

Summer Speaker Series: “The Art of the Story” with Tobias Wolff

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July 21, 2021

Long regarded as one of our finest short story writers, TOBIAS WOLFF is equally renowned for his memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharoah’s Army, and he is now in the process of finishing a novel.  A beloved professor at Stanford, he is also – as he so memorably demonstrates in Ken Burns’ Hemingway documentary – a profound reader of other writers’ works and lives.  Novelist JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ sits down with Wolff to discuss life, literature, craft, and the never-ending mysteries and revelations that come from spending one’s time inhabiting the minds of others.

The 2021 Summer Speaker Series, presented by The Community Library and the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, is a series of four FREE outdoor lectures hosted in Ketchum’s Forest Service Park. Advanced registration is required. This event will be livestreamed, and a recording will be available for a limited time only.

Tobias Wolff is author of the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War; the short novel The Barracks Thief; the novel Old School, and four collections of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, The Night in Question, and, most recently, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. He has also edited several anthologies, among them Best American Short Stories 1994, A Doctor’s Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. His work is translated widely and has received numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, both the PEN/Malamud and the Rea Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Story Prize, and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English, Emeritus, at Stanford. In 2015 he received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.

John Burnham Schwartz is the bestselling author of six novels, including The Red Daughter, The Commoner, and Reservation Road, which was made into a film based on his screenplay. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and he has done extensive screen and television writing for the major Hollywood studios, including as screenwriter of HBO Films’ The Wizard of Lies starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, for which he was nominated for a 2018 Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Writing. The longtime Literary Director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, Schwartz is also host and co-producer of the literary podcast Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.

Photo credit: C Marion Ettlinger.

OUTDOORS/LIVESTREAM – Summer Speaker Series: “Researching Into the Void: ‘The Great Believers’ and Approaching History as an Outsider” with Rebecca Makkai

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Unless every character you write is exactly like you, fiction involves writing across difference. Those differences might be ones of identity and demographics, or they might be ones of knowledge, experience, setting, and historical era. With so much valid concern and debate around the touchy issue of appropriation, writers can find themselves crippled by fears: Do I have permission to write this? What if I get it horribly wrong? Even if I do it well, will people be upset that I wrote outside my own life? REBECCA MAKKAI’s award-winning The Great Believers is a novel that took the author far beyond her own lived experience and her own identity.  Join her as she discusses the essential questions she asked herself as she wrote, and what she learned in her years of researching the AIDS epidemic in 1980s Chicago and filtering that experience into her fiction.

REGISTER HERE

Registration will open on Monday, May 24 at 7:00 a.m.

The 2021 Summer Speaker Series, presented by The Community Library and the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, is a series of four FREE outdoor lectures hosted in Ketchum’s Forest Service Park. Advanced registration is required. Click above to reserve your space. We will determine the number of seats available closer to the event, and waitlisted guests will be notified as soon as possible.

The lecture will also be available to stream on the Library’s Livestream. Click here to watch the live stream, which will be available for a limited time.

Rebecca Makkai’s 2018 novel, The Great Believers, is a masterful story of love, friendship, and redemption that intertwines the saga of the 1980s Chicago AIDS crisis with that of a mother trying to track down an estranged daughter in modern Paris. Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “an absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis,” The Great Believers has become a critically acclaimed masterpiece. It received the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the LA Book Prize, was a National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize finalist, and it was selected as a New York Times “Best 10 Books of the Year,” among numerous honors.  The Great Believers was optioned by Amy Poehler for a major television event. Makkai is also the author of Music for Wartime, a collection of stories, and the novels The Hundred-Year House and The Borrower.

In talks and workshops that blend wisdom and humor with time-tested strategy, Makkai welcomes readers and writers into her process. From wrestling with issues of identity and appropriation to overcoming writer’s block and ensuring meticulous research, Makkai shares the techniques that she uses to create her bestselling works.

In addition to the Andrew Carnegie Medal, Makkai is the recipient of the 2017 Pushcart Prize for her short fiction. Her books have been translated into ten languages, and her short fiction has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize XLI, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Fantasy.  Her work has also been featured in publications such as Harper’s and Tin House, and on Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts and This American Life. The recipient of a 2014 NEA fellowship, Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is the Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. Rebecca holds an MA from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. She currently lives in Chicago.

For more information on Rebecca Makkai, please visit www.prhspeakers.com.

Pre-sales of Makkai’s books will be available through Iconoclast Books. Please visit Iconoclast in Hailey or call 208-726-1564 to order your copies. Makkai will sign books in private to protect the health and safety of the speaker and attendees, and those who purchase books through Iconoclast will be able to pick them up at the bookstore approximately 1-2 days following the lecture.

Photo credit: Benjamin Busch

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