LIBRARY is a four act performance program that celebrates the library as a space for communal gathering in an expansive reconception of a traditional reading that includes poetry, dialogues, and live performance. Whitney Mallett is the curator and organizer of LIBRARY and the founding editor of The Whitney Review—a new publication that features reviews and criticism of new writing and interviews with writers.
 
Mallett found inspiration in Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 story The Library of Babel, which conceives of the universe as an infinite library, reimagining its “labyrinthine…hexagonal galleries, corridors, staircases, mirrors, and reflections” as a strip club, casino, and convention center. The program features a performance by Kellian Delice engaging choreographies of processing; a conversation between Esmé Naumes-Givens, contributing writer to The Whitney Review, and their father David Givens, writer and librarian; a demonstration of poet and painter Whitney Claflin’s language-based card game, its hyper-mediated presentation inspired by televised poker tournaments; and a performance by poet and performer, Maya Martinez, and writer and deputy editor of The Whitney Review, Mani Mekala, combining dance and spoken word.
 
The Whitney Review creates community around the printed word and LIBRARY embodies the communal function of the library, inspired by the many contributors to The Whitney Review. As the program unfolds, audience members are invited to participate in the ongoing narrative, the infinite act, where the spirit of the library lives on.