Meet Susan Orlean:

On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As moments passed, the patrons and staff cleared out of the building, realizing that this was not the usual fire alarm. As one firefighter recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’”

Weaving her lifelong love of books into an investigation of the fire, award-winning  New Yorker  reporter and  New York Times  bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that tells the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

Orlean grew up in Cleveland and attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she studied literature and history and dreamed of being a writer. Her writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe. Her seven books include Saturday Night and The Orchid Thief, which profiles an orchid poacher and the odd world of orchid fanatics. She became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 1992 and was awarded a fellowship at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Still writing for The New Yorker and other publications, Orlean splits her time between Hudson Valley of New York and Los Angeles with her husband, son and various pets.

This program is funded, in part, by the Michigan Humanities Council, an affiliate of the National Endowment of the Humanities.