Lannan Foundation Readings & Interviews on Audio & Video

With the dry wit that has come to make her a literary icon, Margaret Atwood reads selections from her work and discusses writing in this audio download released by the Lannan Foundation.

In this recorded event from the Lannan Foundation, Howard Zinn introduces dramatic readings from Voices of a People's History of the United States which is a companion to his A People's History of the United States...

Listen to a reading from one of America's most versatile and prolific writers: Joyce Carol Oates. She pulls no punches in her public reading, as she reads from her novella Rape: A Love Story.

Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1998.

Susan Sontag spent her formative years in New York City, Tucson and Los Angeles and attended the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and Saint Anne's College at Oxford.

Lewis Lapham became editor of Harper's Magazine in 1976, having worked for the San Francisco Examiner and New York Herald Tribune.

Noam Chomsky, who has said, "If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all," was born in 1928 in Philadelphia.

Timothy Ferris, called "the best popular science writer in the English language" by The Christian Science Monitor, is the author of Coming of Age in the Milky Way, The Mind's Sky, Galaxies and other best selling books on astronomy, physics, and the history of philosophy of science.

Tariq Ali was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1944. While at Punjab University, Ali organized public demonstrations against Pakistan's military dictatorship, and was consequently banned from participating in student politics.

In this inspiring oration from the Lannan Foundation, African American intellectual Cornel West calls for revival in America's democratic tradition which draws on our religious, philosophical, and literary history.