Join us for a virtual Live Talks Los Angeles event:
Friday, November 1, 2024, 6pm PT/ 9pm ET
**An Afternoon with Ta-Nehisi Coates
discussing his book, “The Message”**
This event is taped with an audience on October 27.
TICKETS:
$46 Virtual Admission + book (includes shipping to US addresses only). Includes access to watch the event on November 1 at 6pm PT/9pm ET and on video-on-demand for five days.
**The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.**
**Ta-Nehisi Coates** is the author of *The Beautiful Struggle*, *We Were Eight Years in Power*, *The Water Dancer* and *Between the World and Me*, for which he won the National Book Award in 2015. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, he is currently the Sterling Brown endowed chair in English at Howard University.
Just as *Between the World and Me* took the form of a letter to his son, The Message is crafted as a letter to his writing students. He bears an urgent message for them: their “task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”
“[Coates] is intellectually fearless . . . unshackled by political or racial ideology, humane in his judgments, respectful of facts, acutely aware of the difference between what is knowable and what is not.”—The New Yorker
Just as *Between the World and Me* took the form of a letter to his son, The Message is crafted as a letter to his writing students. He bears an urgent message for them: their “task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”
Coates’s call to action is in fact a diagnosis of the political and social polarization currently sweeping the globe: the world is riven by stories. He comes to this realization not as a geopolitical wonk or a statesman, but as a journalist who has seen firsthand how stories are more powerful tools of persuasion than the assemblage of interconnected facts.
Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, The Message is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Next, he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning. In the book’s longest section, he travels to Palestine, where he sees the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.
