Adaptations
Featured writers: Daniel Kraus and Susan Orlean
Daniel Kraus, who developed the story for the film The Shape of Water and co-wrote the novel, in conversation with Susan Orlean, whose book The Orchid Thief lead to the creation of the film Adaptation. Kraus also recently adapted his hit novel Whalefall into a feature film coming out this October from 20th Century Fox. The two accomplished writers will discuss the process of adapting a book into a film and vice versa, as well as their latest releases.
Book signing times (all signings take place in the First Floor Lobby of the library)
🖊️Daniel Kraus: 1:00 – 1:20
🖊️Susan Orlean: 1:00 – 1:20
About the writers:
DANIEL KRAUS is a New York Times bestselling writer of novels, TV, and film. His latest novel, Angel Down, was a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2025. His novel Whalefall won the Alex Award, was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, and was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR, The New York Times, Amazon, Chicago Tribune, and more. With Guillermo del Toro, he cowrote The Shape of Water, based on the same idea the two created for the Oscar-winning film.
SUSAN ORLEAN is the author of nine books, including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; My Kind of Place; Saturday Night; and On Animals. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film Adaptation starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. Her book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend won the Ohioana Book Award and the Richard Wall Memorial Award. In 2018, she published The Library Book, about the arson fire at the Los Angeles Public Library. It won the California Book Award and the Marfield Prize and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal. It is being adapted for television. Her memoir, Joyride, was published in October 2025. Orlean has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1992, and has also contributed to Vogue, Rolling Stone, Outside, and Esquire. She has written about taxidermy, umbrellas, origami, chickens, and a wide range of other subjects. She was a 2003 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. She lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles.
Joyride: A Memoir
by Susan Orlean
From Susan Orlean, the beloved New Yorker writer and bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book who has been hailed as “a national treasure” by The Washington Post, comes a masterful memoir of finding her creative calling and purpose that invites us to approach life with wonder, curiosity, and an irrepressible sense of delight.
Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World
by Daniel Kraus
Daniel Kraus first saw George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead when he was five years old. Through watching it approximately three hundred times since, Kraus discovered the many ways the film is tied to his childhood trauma and how its influence has carried into his adulthood. Partially Devoured uses a frame-by-frame deep dive into Night of the Living Dead to produce a kaleidoscopic cultural investigation of the film’s importance and to examine the author’s early life of rural isolation and local violence.
The Sixth Nik
by Daniel Kraus
Deep into space soars The Sickness: a ship woven from biomatter and capable of reacting to every need of its human crew. Sisilla, a nine-year-old cultist with a brain enhanced by arcane tech known as “niks,” has boarded to investigate the enigma of Fém—a plague-riddled planet that has abruptly gone rogue… To survive, Sisilla will need to forsake her predetermined fate and embrace the unknown.
Whalefall
by Daniel Kraus
The Martian meets 127 Hours in this “astoundingly great” (Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author) and scientifically accurate thriller about a scuba diver who’s been swallowed by an eighty-foot, sixty-ton sperm whale and has only one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out.