American Library in Paris member, Dr. Robert L. Murphy has been at the forefront of every infectious disease global crisis since the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s. In this special Zoom session, Dr. Murphy will share with us the latest updates in the fight against COVID-19. He will also answer questions from the audience. He will join us from Chicago, where he is the Executive Director, Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Dr. Murphy is currently...

For this evening of conversation, Inès Seddiki interviewed Jean Beaman about her research, including her book, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France. Dr. Beaman then posed some questions to Inès about her organization, GHETT’UP. Finally, the two discussed racism in France more broadly re COVID-19 and police violence. They also offered their thoughts and perspectives on the recent protests in France for Adama Traoré and in support of the Black Lives Matter...

An exploration of how distance and solitude can spur the literary imagination and how 2020-style social distance can kill it. Part craft talk, part Zoom performance, part lecture on literature, part creative self-help for the quarantined. Addressed to creative writers and readers of all stripes. Mark Mayer has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the University of Denver. His first book, AERIALISTS (Bloomsbury 2019), won the Michener-Copernicus Prize and his stories have...

Please join us for an informal conversation with author Anissa M. Bouziane. Anissa was born in Tennessee, daughter of a Moroccan father and a French mother.  She grew up in Morocco, but returned to the US to attend Wellesley College, and went on to earn an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. Her debut novel, Dune Song, is rooted in her experience of witnessing the collapse of the Twin Towers. She now works and teaches in Paris. “I came to the Sahara to be buried.” After...

Please join us as we check in with author Whitney Scharer, author of The Age of Light. This absorbing debut tells a fictionalized account of Lee Miller’s life, focusing on the years she spent in Paris and her tumultuous relationship with Surrealist artist Man Ray. An icon during her own time, Lee’s bold vision and fearlessness still serve today as a template for a life lived fully. In Whitney’s novel, we follow Lee through her time as a model, Surrealist photographer, fashion photographer,...

Please join us as we check in with author Whitney Scharer, author of The Age of Light. This absorbing debut tells a fictionalized account of Lee Miller’s life, focusing on the years she spent in Paris and her tumultuous relationship with Surrealist artist Man Ray. An icon during her own time, Lee’s bold vision and fearlessness still serve today as a template for a life lived fully. In Whitney’s novel, we follow Lee through her time as a model, Surrealist photographer, fashion photographer,...

Please join us for a fun and informal talk by author and professor Susan Harlan, who has the rare gift of making the ordinary extraordinary for her readers and audiences. Susan will share with us a personal essay about the tote bags she’s acquired on her travels and throughout her life, touching on themes that are at the forefront of our minds right now: travel, home, souvenirs, including unused bags and luggage. In her words, “I keep looking at my purses on my coat rack and thinking how...

Please join us for an informal and uplifting check-in with author and journalist Elaine Sciolino. Following country-wide quarantine measures put in place by the French government, Elaine is confined on the Rue des Martyrs, the subject of her 2016 book, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs. Despite the circumstances, this unique Parisian quartier–and its residents–retain a certain degree of pre-Covid 19 life and charm. In Elaine’s words, the Rue des Martyrs is “a half-mile...

A global tour of energy – the builder of human civilization and also its greatest threat. Energy is humanity’s single most important resource. In fact, as energy expert Dr. Michael E. Webber argues in Power Trip, the story of how societies rise can be told largely as the story of how they manage energy sources through time. In 2019, as we face down growing demand for and accumulating environmental impacts from energy, we are at a crossroads and the stakes are high. But history shows us that...

An investigation into the damage wrought by the colossal clothing industry – and the grassroots, high-tech, international movement fighting to reform it by New York Times bestselling author and journalist Dana Thomas. In Fashionopolis, journalist Dana Thomas surveys the environmental and human cost of a globalized, profit-hungry supply chain: sweatshop labour, ecological degradation, overconsumption, waste and creative exhaustion. As awareness of the damage inflicted on the planet by...

What would Paris be without its souvenirs? Snow globes, keychains, and fridge magnets seem to be everywhere. We often think of souvenirs as worthless junk, but they can be powerful material memories. Join us for Susan’s talk about her own Parisian souvenir collection and about what souvenirs tell us about the city, travel, and ourselves. (With photography by Sarah Torretta Klock.) Susan Harlan’s essays have appeared in venues including The Guardian US, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Roads...

George Packer is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a former staff writer for The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. He has published five other works of non-fiction, including The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2013, as well as two novels and a play. The late American diplomat Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, wholly self-absorbed, and possessed...

In this episode, Emma Jacobs discusses her book, The Little(r) Museums of Paris, part guide-part travelogue through Paris’ landscape of small museums, from the better-known to deeply obscure. Deeply-researched and hand-illustrated, it includes stories and highlights of the collections and conversations with conservators, museum founders and artists. Emma is a multimedia journalist and illustrator who has reported internationally for NPR, Marketplace and PRI’s The World. Her work has appeared...

Most people are familiar with the basics of the Cuban Revolution of 1956 to 1959: It was led by two of the 20th century’s most charismatic figures, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara; it successfully overthrew the island nation’s U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista; and it quickly went awry under Castro’s rule. But less is remembered about the amateur nature of the upstart movement, or the lives of its players. To mark the 60th anniversary of the revolution, Smithsonian magazine writer Tony...

Another Paris: 10 Walks in the Districts that are Transforming the East of Paris– Industrial Wastelands, Contemporary Architecture, Shared Gardens, Street Art, Coffee Shops…the east of Paris is undergoing a major metamorphosis. By offering itineraries beginning where tourists generally stop, these ten walks invite urban explorers to take side steps and widen their horizons. Venture forth to discover the districts where the heart of the city is now pulsing. Graduate of Sciences Po Rennes and...

Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl and The Past, and three collections of stories, Sunstroke, Married Love and Bad Dreams. The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and Bad Dreams won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She lives in London and is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Her...

A meditation on race and identity from one of our most provocative cultural critics. A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family’s multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a “black” father from the segregated South and a “white” mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single...