The Manhattan Beach Public LIbrary will host a book club and several authors in February.
On Feb. 1 from noon to 1 p.m., author Viet Thanh Nguyen will appear via Skype. Nguyen is the winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel “The Sympathizer,” and is a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times. The event is sponsored by the Woman’s Club of Hermosa Beach Literary Salon.
On Feb. 6, the library will host a book club devoted to Dashiell Hammett’s noir masterpiece “The Maltese Falcon.” The book club is part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read Program, with similar discussions happening at other libraries throughout the county system. A screening of the 1941 film version of the novel, starring Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, will take place at the library later this month.
And on Feb. 15 at 3:30 p.m., author Kay Haring will appear as part of the library’s monthly Get Smart on Art Program, targeted at elementary school students and sponsored by Pages Bookstore. Haring will be presenting her children’s book “The Boy Who Just Kept Drawing,” about her brother Keith Haring, an artist and activist in New York City during the 1980s. Keith Haring is famous for his faceless figures, and painted the iconic “Crack is Wack” mural on a Harlem handball court in 1986. The mural, done without official sanction, was preserved by New York City and still stands.
