Susan Orlean, LARB Luminary Dinner

Save the date for LARB’s Winter Luminary Dinner featuring Susan Orlean at the Thomas Mann House in the Pacific Palisades on January 24, 2026. Ticket sales will open soon, but you can secure your spot now and support the work we do as a nonprofit literary publication by donating during LARB’s year-end Fund Drive. All donations made between now and the end of 2025 will be matched by an anonymous donor.

Los Angeles Review of Books is thrilled to present an evening with acclaimed journalist and writer Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, The Library Book, and the recent best-selling memoir Joyride. Join us for a night of dining, drinks, and conversation at our Winter Luminary Dinner on January 24. Orlean will be joined by music critic and writer Alex Ross to discuss the inspirational depths of storytelling within nonfiction, writerly life beyond the deadline, and more.

LARB Luminary Dinners are a celebration of innovative voices from the creative world. Held in homes across Los Angeles several times a year, each evening welcomes guests for illuminating conversation in intimate settings to support the work of LARB, a nonprofit literary magazine.

This LARB Luminary Dinner will be held at the beautiful and historic Thomas Mann House in the Pacific Palisades, where the award-winning writer spent his years in exile. Cocktail reception for VIP guests begins at 6 p.m. Dinner begins at 7 p.m.

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Donate $1,000 and join our Programming Circle. You’ll receive one ticket to the LARB Luminary Dinner with Susan Orlean this January in addition to recognition on our supporter’s page and the benefits of a LARB Friend membership.

Donate $2,500 and join our Publisher’s Circle. You will receive two tickets to the LARB Luminary Dinner with Susan Orlean this January, as well as recognition on the LARB supporter’s page and on the website for LITLIT, LARB’s Little Literary Fair. You will also receive all the benefits of a LARB Friend membership!

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Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. Following the release of her 2025 memoir Joyride, she is now a New York Times best-selling author of eight books, including The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. Before joining The New Yorker, she was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and at Vogue, and she has also written for The Times Magazine, Spy, Esquire, and Outside. She has served as a judge for the National Book Awards and was the chair of the literary journalism program at the Banff Centre. 

Alex Ross has been writing for The New Yorker since 1993. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007), won a National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of Listen to This (2010) and Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (2020). Ross received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008.

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The Thomas Mann House Los Angeles is a residency center and space for transatlantic debate in the former exile home of German Nobel-laureate Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades. The house organizes programs and events in L.A. and beyond, where innovators, scholars and artists from Germany and the U.S. address pressing issues related to democracy, society, arts and culture. Learn more at www.vatmh.org and follow them on social media @thomasmannhouse!

If you are interested in donating via check or wire transfer or additional sponsorship opportunities, please contact Emily VanKoughnett at emily@lareviewofbooks.org.

Proceeds directly support the Los Angeles Review of Books, a 501(c)(3) literary and cultural arts nonprofit