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About Max Rudin
Max Rudin is President & Publisher of Library of America.
Max Rudin is President & Publisher of Library of America.
NBN Episodes hosted by Max:
February 23, 2026
American Masterpiece
Wednesday, February 18—Called “the greatest American diary of the nineteenth century,” the journal of the patrician New York City lawyer George Temple…
December 23, 2025
Liberation & the Literature of the Women’s Movement
Wednesday, December 17—“The best play I’ve seen this season,” says New York Magazine’s Sara Holdren about Liberation, Bess Wohl’s moving exploration o…
December 3, 2025
Helen Vendler’s Sixth Sense
December 2—Groundbreaking critic and revered scholar Helen Vendler could “second-guess the sixth sense of the poem,” wrote Nobel laureate Seamus Heane…
November 25, 2025
The Radical Imagination of Octavia E. Butler
Monday, November 24—Like a signal from a distant star, Octavia E. Butler’s luminous fiction jumps galactic distances to relay searing, often surprisin…
September 11, 2025
Reading Democracy in America Now
Wednesday, September 10—Two centuries on, Alexis de Tocqueville’s brilliant Democracy in America remains the most prescient account of the virtues, …
May 9, 2025
Remembering Victory
Thursday, May 8—Eighty years ago the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany closed the curtain on six years of total war in Europe, a conflict that t…
April 18, 2025
The Greatness of Sylvia Plath
Thursday, April 17—Sylvia Plath’s bold and incandescent poems have struck a deep chord with generations of readers. A visionary writer who scaled asto…
March 12, 2025
What Is Totalitarianism?
Tuesday, March 11—“The rise of totalitarian governments,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the central event of our world.” In her masterpiece, The Origins of…
November 15, 2024
“A Place None of Us Know”
Thursday, November 14—Grief, Joan Didion wrote, “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” In two luminous memoirs, The Year of Magi…
May 22, 2024
Faith, Fiction, and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer
Tuesday, May 21—Published in 1961, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer announced a major new voice in American fiction. In this lush, New Orleans–based nov…
April 16, 2024
Robert Frost
Monday, April 15—Why does the poet Robert Frost continue to beguile and intrigue readers 150 years after his birth? What is it about the four-time Pul…
March 7, 2024
Deadline Artist
Wednesday, March 6—Brash, opinionated, funny, and an indefatigable champion of the vulnerable over the rich and well-connected, Jimmy Breslin brought …
February 7, 2024
Black Writers of the Founding Era
Tuesday, February 6—The story told and retold about America’s founding often excludes the Black communities that existed during the Revolution and the…
January 18, 2024
Why Don DeLillo Deserves the Nobel
Wednesday, January 17, 2024—Don DeLillo is “our most necessary writer,” says his longtime editor Gerald Howard, one whose “intuitions and sentences ha…
December 6, 2023
I’m Dreaming of a Noir Christmas
Tuesday, December 5, 2023—To cap LOA LIVE’s fall season, a killer lineup of panelists explores classic crime fiction of the 1960s, from Donald Westlak…
November 9, 2023
Black Writers in Paris, the FBI, and a Lost 1960s Classic
Wednesday, November 8—The expatriate literary scene in Paris that flourished around Richard Wright and James Baldwin produced brilliant writing, intel…
October 26, 2023
The Startling Theater of Adrienne Kennedy
Wednesday, October 25—For more than sixty years, in such works as Funnyhouse of a Negro and Ohio State Murders, Adrienne Kennedy has bewitched audienc…
September 25, 2023
The Mysterious Greatness of Gatsby
Thursday, September 21—In the hundred years since The Great Gatsby was published, American society and culture have been utterly transformed. Why th…
July 20, 2023
A Celebration of Ray Bradbury
Wednesday, July 19—In The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, and other visionary works melding science fiction, horror, fantasy,…
June 22, 2023
Rediscovering the Pathbreaking Fiction of Nancy Hale
Wednesday, June 21—Best-selling author Kate Bolick joins LOA LIVE to discuss one of the most gifted American writers of the mid–twentieth century. Nan…
May 18, 2023
‘The Best American Writer You’ve Never Heard Of’
Wednesday, May 17—Charles Portis’s novels and stories, with their deadpan style, unforgettable characters, and rollicking plots of pursuit, obsession,…
April 24, 2023
Small Miracles
Thursday, April 20—An unparalleled master of the short story, Bernard Malamud ranks among America’s greatest mythmakers and illuminators of the human …
April 14, 2023
Frederick Douglass
Wednesday, February 15, 2023—Frederick Douglass’s first recorded speech, “I Have Come to Tell You Something About Slavery,” inaugurated a five-decade …
April 14, 2023
Ordinary Heroes
Wednesday, January 18, 2023—One of the most popular works ever written about the Civil War, Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac Trilogy is a masterpiec…