Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this all-new dark academia fantasy from R. F.

From the acclaimed environmentalist comes a call to harness solar power and rewrite our scientific, economic, and political future.

A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Mother Mary Comes to Me traces the complex relationship between Arundhati Roy and her mother, Mary, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Roy’s life both as a woman and a writer. Tickets with “& Book” include a copy of Mother Mary Comes to Me, shipped to your door by our bookstore partner Elliott Bay Book Company.

From the best-selling author of These Truths comes We the People, a stunning new history of the U.S. Constitution, for a troubling new era.

After five years, Seattle Arts & Lectures is returning to an in-person luncheon fundraiser to support Writers in the Schools (WITS)! Please join us on Friday, October 17 for our 2025 Back-to-School Luncheon and help support thousands of K-12 public school students in developing their creative voice! Funds raised from the luncheon supports SAL’s Writers in the Schools (WITS) program as well as SAL’s mission of cultivating spaces of creative expression for the next generation of writers and readers. WITS is a youth program of Seattle Arts & Lectures that connects professional, Seattle-based writers with K-12 public school classrooms to elevate and amplify the voices of over 6,000 students throughout the region.

In her first nonfiction book in a decade, #1 bestselling writer Elizabeth Gilbert who taught millions of readers to live authentically (Eat Pray Love) and creatively (Big Magic) shows how to break free, joining Community Curated Series director Colleen Echohawk in conversation.

From On Tyranny to On Freedom, Timothy Snyder has delved into how to resist fascism and where we go from here. Literary Arts Series subscriptions, Create Your Own Series subscriptions and SAL Memberships include a paperback copy of On Freedom, shipped to your door by our bookstore partner Queen Anne Book Company.

Acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee—“the poet of rapture and tenderness” (Major Jackson)—offers revelatory volumes of ecstatic poems that search out divine voices in the silences of life, love, and death, most recently with his collection The Invention of the Darling.

A radiant new memoir from beloved artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids. Tickets with “& Book” include a copy of Bread of Angels, shipped to your door by our bookstore partner Elliott Bay Book Company.

Join food expert, television producer, and bestselling author Padma Lakshmi in a trip across the United States in Padma’s All American.

From internationally renowned, award-winning author Salman Rushdie comes a spellbinding exploration of life, death, and what comes into focus at the proverbial eleventh hour of life. Tickets with “& Book” include a copy of The Eleventh Hour, shipped to your door by our bookstore partner Elliott Bay Book Company.

The Irish writer Colm Tóibín grew up in a home where, he once said, there was “a great deal of silence.” He has since made a career of telling stories—clear and human—to the world through his many volumes of fiction and non-fiction, drama, and poetry, including works like the bestselling, critically acclaimed Brooklyn and its sequel Long Island.

 National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B.

aja monet is a Grammy-nominated surrealist blues poet, musician, and cultural worker whose poems sing to us of love, gender, justice, and spirituality. Florida Water, her latest collection, is a vulnerable meditation about the poet’s migration to South Florida in search of love, connection, and belonging.

Join us for a double feature with two genre-defying writers! Cristina Rivera Garza is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer and, most recently, Death Takes Me and Autobiography of Cotton. Javier Zamora is the author of the groundbreaking and bestselling memoir Solito, chronicling his journey from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine.

James McBride is a New York Times bestselling author, musician and screenwriter. His latest novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, has soared to a global phenomenon with over a million copies sold in the US alone.

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of bone-chilling novels that include The Only Good Indians, My Heart Is a Chainsaw, I Was a Teenage Slasher, and most recently, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, an instant bestselling historical horror novel tracing the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.

Wit and wisdom are the cornerstones of bestselling author Emma Straub’s fiction—from the time-traveling heroine of This Time Tomorrow to the tight-knit group of college friends in Modern Lovers, Straub writes books “that will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you call the people you love” (Emily Henry).

The mastermind of narrative reporting who brought us Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe delves into the mysterious death of a teenager and his family’s search for truth in London Falling. Create Your Own Series subscriptions, Encore Series subscriptions, and SAL Memberships include a copy of London Falling, shipped to your door by our bookstore partner Third Place Books.

Author of the Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings and the genre-defying Dark Star trilogy, Marlon James brings myth, magic, and history into the sharp light of our own human desires.

The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity’s most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Emily Wilson’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey give us a complete Homer for our generation.

 The Pulitzer Prize-finalist and author of the breakout bestseller There There delivers a masterful follow-up to his already classic first novel in Wandering Stars.