Alice Wong joins SAL and The Seattle Public Library for a free community event celebrating the release of her memoir, Year of the Tiger. Wong is a disabled activist, writer, media maker, and consultant. She is the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture created in 2014.

Winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives is a sweeping, multi-generational saga of displacement, loss, and love, set against the brutal colonization of east Africa. Following the story of Ilyas, a boy stolen by German colonial troops, Afterlives is a novel that “gathers close all those who were meant to be forgotten, and refuses their erasure.

Maggie O’Farrell, the Northern Irish author of the “magnificent and searing” novel Hamnet, returns with The Marriage Portrait, an electrifying new tale. Full of the drama and verve with which she illuminated the Shakespearean canvas of Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell brings the world of Renaissance Italy to jewel-bright life and offers an unforgettable portrait of a resilient young woman’s battle for her very survival.

Celeste Ng is the bestselling author of three novels: Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and her latest work, Our Missing Hearts. In 2020, Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere was adapted into a popular limited series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Following its nationwide success, Ng’s latest work, Our Missing Hearts, explores the ways that supposedly civilized communities can pretend to ignore the most searing injustice. Most tickets, with the exception of a limited number of Pay What You Can and complimentary tickets, include a copy of Our Missing Hearts, mailed to the ticket holder’s door.

John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time, from The World According to Garp to The Cider House Rules. Irving returns with The Last Chairlift, his first novel in seven years—a ghost story, a love story, and a lifetime of sexual politics, set between Colorado and New England. Most tickets, with the exception of a limited number of Pay What You Can and complimentary tickets, include a copy of The Last Chairlift, mailed to the ticket holder’s door.

Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Jon Meacham chronicles the life of Abraham Lincoln in And There Was Light, charting how—and why—he confronted secession, threats to democracy, and the tragedy of slavery to expand the possibilities of America. “Written with wisdom and grace, his story of Lincoln’s complex moral journey to Emancipation mirrors America’s long and troubled quest to live up to its founding ideals,” writes Doris Kearns Goodwin. Literary Arts Series subscriptions include a copy of And There Was Light, mailed to the subscriber’s door. Please note: complimentary subscriptions and single tickets do not include the book.