Enjoy a stellar line-up of virtual Book Festival events including author talks featuring the year’s hottest writers. Scroll down to see the line-up and check back often as the list of inspiring authors continues to grow.
Dorie Greenspan, Baking with Dorie: A Cookbook
Tuesday, November 9 at 8:00 pm
Here’s your chance to ask the experts why your souffle keeps falling! Say “Dorie Greenspan” and think baking. The renowned author of 13 cookbooks and winner of five James Beard and two IACP awards offers a collection that celebrates the sweet, the savory, and the simple. Every recipe is signature Dorie: easy—beginners can ace every technique in this book—and accessible, made with everyday ingredients. Are there surprises? Of course! You’ll find ingenious twists like Berry Biscuits. Footlong cheese sticks made with cream puff dough. Apple pie with browned butter spiced like warm mulled cider. A s’mores ice cream cake with velvety chocolate sauce, salty peanuts, and toasted marshmallows. It’s a book of simple yet sophisticated baking.
Inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America, Dorie Greenspan is the author of Dorie’s Cookies, a 2017 James Beard Award-winner for Best Baking and Dessert book; Around My French Table, a New York Times bestseller that was named Cookbook of the Year by the IACP; Baking Chez Moi, also a Times bestseller; and Baking: From My Home to Yours, a James Beard Award winner. She lives in New York City, Westbrook, Connecticut, and Paris.
Andrew Lawler, Under Jerusalem
Thursday, November 11 at 7:30 pm
Sacred to three faiths and revered by more than half the people on the planet, Jerusalem conjures up powerful images of the celestial. Yet beneath its narrow alleys and holy places, the ancient city conceals a labyrinthine, three-dimensional time capsule recording five millennia of bustling prosperity, brutal war, and repeated religious innovation that altered the course of human history.
Since the days when Abraham Lincoln was in the White House, adventurers, archaeologists, and religious zealots have flocked here to hunt for buried treasure, unearth sacred artifacts like the Ark of the Covenant, and find proof of the Bible’s veracity. That digging to reveal the past continues today—and, in so doing, continues to alter the city’s future.
In Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City, acclaimed journalist Andrew Lawler takes us into the tombs, tunnels, and trenches of the Holy City—a saga of biblical treasures, intrepid explorers, and political upheaval—and brings to life the indelible characters who have investigated this subterranean landscape.
Andrew Lawler is author of the bestselling The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and the acclaimed Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird that Powers Civilization. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, and Smithsonian. He is a contributing writer for Science and a contributing editor for Archaeology. Lawler’s work has appeared several times in The Best of Science and Nature Writing.
Andrew Feiler, A Better Life for Their Children
Sunday, November 14 at 7:30 pm
Born to Jewish immigrants, Julius Rosenwald rose to lead Sears, Roebuck & Company and turn it into the world’s largest retailer. Born into slavery, Booker T. Washington became the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute. In 1912 the two men launched an ambitious program to partner with black communities across the segregated South to build public schools for African American children. This watershed moment in the history of philanthropy―one of the earliest collaborations between Jews and African Americans―drove dramatic improvement in African American educational attainment and fostered the generation who became the leaders and foot soldiers of the civil rights movement. Of the original 4,978 Rosenwald schools built between 1917 and 1937 across fifteen southern and border states, only about 500 survive. To tell this story visually, Andrew Feiler drove more than 25,000 miles, photographed 105 schools, and interviewed dozens of former students, teachers, preservationists, and community leaders.
Beyond the photographic documentation, A Better Life for Their Children includes an introduction from the late Congressman John Lewis, who attended a Rosenwald school in Alabama.
Andrew Feiler, a fifth-generation Georgian, is an award-winning photographer whose work has been featured in museums, galleries, and magazines and is in a number of private collections. His photography is focused on the contemporary complexities of the American South. More of his photography can be seen at andrewfeiler.com.
Alice Hoffman, The Book of Magic: A Novel
Monday, November 15 at 8:00 pm
Master storyteller Alice Hoffman brings us the conclusion of the Practical Magic series in a spellbinding and enchanting final Owens novel brimming with lyric beauty and vivid characters.
The Owens family has been cursed in matters of love for over three hundred years but all of that is about to change. The novel begins in a library, the best place for a story to be conjured when beloved aunt Jet Owens hears the deathwatch beetle and knows she has only seven days to live. Jet is not the only one in danger—the curse is already at work. The Book of Magic is a breathtaking conclusion that celebrates mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers, and anyone who has ever been in love.
Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including Magic Lessons, The World That We Knew, Practical Magic, The Rules of Magic, the Oprah’s Book Club selection Here on Earth, The Red Garden, The Dovekeepers, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, The Marriage of Opposites, and Faithful. She lives near Boston.
Nick Davis, Competing with Idiots
Tuesday, November 16 at 7:30 pm
A fascinating, complex dual biography of Hollywood’s most dazzling—and famous—brothers, and a dark, riveting portrait of competition, love, and enmity that ultimately undid them both.
One most famous for having written Citizen Kane (with Orson Welles, as most recently portrayed in David Fincher’s acclaimed Netflix film, Mank); the other, All About Eve; one, who only wrote screenplays but believed himself to be a serious playwright, slowly dying of alcoholism and disappointment; the other, a four-time Academy Award-winning director, auteur, sorcerer, and seducer of leading ladies, one of Hollywood’s most literate and intelligent filmmakers.
Nick Davis is a writer, director, and producer. His most recent film is Once Upon A Time in Queens about the 1986 Mets. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughters.
Ivan Maisel, I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye
Wednesday, November 17 at 7:30 pm
In February 2015, acclaimed ESPN sportswriter Ivan Maisel received a call that would alter his life forever: his son Max’s car had been found abandoned in a parking lot next to Lake Ontario. Two months later, Max’s lifeless body would be found in the lake. There’d been no note or obvious indication that Max wanted to harm himself; he’d signed up for a year-long subscription to a dating service; he’d spent the day he disappeared doing photography work for school. And this uncertainty became part of his father’s grief. I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye explores with grace, depth, and refinement the tragically transformative reality of losing a child. But it also tells the deeply human and deeply empathetic story of a father’s relationship with his son, of its complications, and of Max and Ivan’s struggle—as is the case for so many parents and their children—to connect. It is also a stunning, poignant exploration of the father and son relationship, of how our tendency to overlook men’s mental health can have devastating consequences, and how ultimately letting those who grieve do so openly and freely can lead to greater healing.
Ivan Maisel is vice president/editorial and senior writer at on3.com. He has covered college football for nearly four decades, from 2002-2021 as a senior writer for ESPN, where he wrote for ESPN.com, appearing on television, ESPN Radio and on podcasts. He also served as Editor-at-Large for ESPN College Football 150. Prior to joining ESPN.com, Maisel covered national college football for Sports Illustrated, Newsday, and The Dallas Morning News. He has been honored twice by The Associated Press Sports Editors, which in 2019 named him one of the 10 best sports columnists.
Wayne Federman, The History of Standup
Sunday, November 21 at 7:30 pm
Today’s top stand-up comedians sell out arenas, generate millions of dollars, tour the world, and help shape our social discourse. So, how did this all happen? The History of Stand-Up chronicles the evolution of this American art form – from its earliest pre-vaudeville practitioners like Artemus Ward and Mark Twain to present-day comedians of HBO and Netflix. Drawing on his acclaimed History of Stand-up podcast and popular university lectures, veteran comedian and adjunct USC professor Wayne Federman guides us on this fascinating journey.
Wayne Federman is an Emmy-nominated stand-up, actor, author, producer, and professor. He has appeared in numerous television shows and films including Curb Your Enthusiasm, Silicon Valley, Step Brothers, Knocked Up, The X-Files, and Legally Blonde. Federman co-produced the Emmy-winning documentary The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling and is currently co-producing a George Carlin documentary for HBO. He is a tenured, adjunct professor of stand-up comedy history and performance at USC.
David Javerbaum, The Book of Pslams
Thursday, December 9 at 8:00 pm
Just in time for the Apocalypse comes a new Biblical scripture from God and thirteen-time Emmy Award–winning comedy writer David Javerbaum. Three thousand years ago, King David wrote The Book of Psalms—hymns in praise of God that became famous worldwide. Now, with humanity on the verge of a self-generated catastrophe, God (with the help of another David) has decided to return, and reverse, the favor. God has collected a cornucopia of insults of the human race in the form of prose, poetry, and parody. From topics as diverse as COVID-19, racism, meth, math, and on a lighter note, the platypus, God provides a 21st-century spin on life’s many problems. Even the Holy Ghost stops by to make sure you don’t forget him. Anybody who’s a fan @TheTweetofGod and/or NOT a fan of the human race is sure to love The Book of Pslams.
David Javerbaum is a former head writer and executive producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He is the coauthor of that show’s bestsellers, America: The Book and Earth: The Book, and author of the pregnancy parody What to Expect When You’re Expected.