Summer book readings and talks

Two impressive writers, one Irish and one English, make a rare combined appearance in the city. The eminent O'Brien's fiction and plays have the keen ability to put the inner lives of female protagonists on display, and O'Brien recently did the same for herself in memoir Country Girl. Best known for his darkly funny Patrick Melrose series, about growing up and getting away from a highly dysfunctional family, St. Aubyn satirizes literary prizes in Lost for Words.

The This American Life contributor's latest batch of autobiographical stories ponder England, book tours and more tales of the Sedaris family. The essayist may have explored the most dramatic events of his life in titles such as Naked, but Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls finds the humorist even more at ease with the oddities of daily life.

Two fiction writers who specialize in tales of the strange, dark and whimsical converse about their latest titles. Russell's recent e-book, Sleep Donation, probes the nature of empathy in a distopian future that finds ordinary citizens turned into insomniacs. In American Innovations, her follow-up to 2008 novel Atmospheric Disturbances, Galchen echoes canonized tales of Gogol, Borges and others with her own sort of magical realism.

As the third volume is translated into English, Knausgaard's six-part memoir, cheekily titled My Struggle, continues to absorb. Sure to be on the agenda as the Norwegian author sits with Eugenides (The Marriage Plot, Middlesex): family, the struggle to write, memory and when being too honest can upset an entire country—as My Struggle has back home.

Whether he's talking photography, John Berger, WWI or Doughnut Plant doughnuts, Dyer writes with a keen eye and a sense of the ecstatic properties of language. Slipping among personal essay, criticism and tangential flights of fancy, Dyer takes on life aboard an aircraft carrier in his new Another Great Day at Sea. He'll talk today with the NYPL's Paul Holdengräber.

The beloved novelist and comic-book writer returns to NYC with a multimedia presentation sure to wow. Accompanied by the FourPlay String Quartet and projections from illustrator Eddie Campbell, Gaiman will read a novella about "family, the otherworld and a search for hidden treasure."