America has been founded not once, but twice, according to Eric Foner, one of the nation’s foremost historians. At this year’s festival he discusses his newest book, “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.”
John Grisham is America’s most popular writer of legal thrillers. “The Guardians” is his hair-raising thriller about wrongful convictions, and “Camino Winds” is a light-hearted novel about a murder investigation undertaken by a bookseller.
Chelsea Clinton discusses her new book, “She Persisted in Sports: American Olympians Who Changed the Game,” which features women athletes who overcame odds and inspired the world.
N.K. Jemisin’s newest fantasy novel, “The City We Became,” is very much a New York story. The author notes in her festival video that, despite being an enormous city spread out over five boroughs, “New Yorkers look out for each other.”
James McBride discusses his newest novel, “Deacon King Kong,” in which the author “wanted to create a world that most people only see from behind the wheel of a tightly locked car… to let the wider world see how people in the projects live.”
Two-time Newbery Medal winner Kate DiCamillo (“Stella Endicott and the Anything-Is-Possible Poem”) and Pulitzer Prize finalist for adult fiction Ann Patchett (“The Dutch House”) talk about their literary friendship and the ways they feed each other’s creativity.
One of America’s most respected and eloquent historians is Jon Meacham. In “His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope,” Meacham writes about the civil rights icon and longtime member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and about Lewis’s lifelong quest for racial justice.
A poet, essayist, novelist and Chicana activist, Sandra Cisneros speaks about the importance of empathy, a writer’s need to have an open heart and the many ways that difficult times have spurred her work and imagination. Her recent book is “A House of My Own: Stories from My Life.”
Looking for something new to engage your mind as fall and winter set in? Then you won’t want to miss the new National Book Festival Presents series of programs, starting today, Thursday, Oct. 22, with a conversation between Walter Isaacson and Danielle Allen.
Welcome to our ongoing celebration of the 2020 Library of Congress National Book Festival! We begin here with Madeleine Albright — Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton — who discloses in a candid conversation with her friend, festival Co-chairman David Rubenstein, that the title of her latest book, “Hell and Other Destinations,” comes from nothing so much as a pet peeve.