Literati is pleased to celebrate two of the works chosen as 2016 Michigan Notable Books:Yamasaki in Detroit by John Gallagher and The Orbit Magazine Anthology by Rob St. Mary.
Although his best-known project was the World Trade Center in New York City, Japanese American architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986) worked to create moments of surprise, serenity, and delight in distinctive buildings around the world. In his adopted home of Detroit, where he lived and worked for the last half of his life, Yamasaki produced many important designs that range from public buildings to offices and private residences. In Yamasaki in Detroit: A Search for Serenity, author John Gallagher presents both a biography of Yamasaki—or Yama as he was known—and an examination of his working practices, with an emphasis on the architect’s search for a style that would express his artistic goals. Both knowledgeable fans of modernist architecture and general readers will enjoy Yamasaki in Detroit.
With a mischievous globe-headed mascot that appeared in every issue and even on Quentin Tarantino’s T-shirt in Pulp Fiction, Orbit was an instantly recognizable arbiter of 1990s Detroit culture. But its irreverent tone and unique editorial features could be traced to two earlier local publications from creator Jerry Peterson, a.k.a. Jerry Vile—White Noise (1978–1980) and Fun: The Magazine for Swinging Intelectuals [sic] (1986–1990). In The Orbit Magazine Anthology: Re-Entry, author Rob St. Mary details the full run of White Noise, Fun, and Orbit, collecting two decades’ worth of Detroit’s alternative publishing history into an oversized, heavily illustrated volume that situates the publications in the city’s pop culture and media history. Anyone interested in Detroit arts and culture or the history of alternative publishing will be grateful for The Orbit Magazine Anthology.
Kristine Kruppa is a mechanical engineer at Ford Motor Company, writer, and world traveler. Her days are spent designing cool new car parts, but her evenings are filled with writing and cats. She has traveled solo to seventeen countries on five continents. Her other hobbies include hunting for the perfect cup of coffee, exploring used book stores, and accidentally climbing mountains.
27 Days to Midnight: Everyone in Dahlia’s world knows when they’re going to die. Except her.Her father has never shown her the pocket watch counting down the days she has left to live. When he sacrifices himself to save her from her scheduled death, Dahlia abandons her comfortable home and sets off after his murderer to uncover the secrets her father died to protect…and the time research that could bring him back to life. Then she meets Farren Reed. She should hate him. He’s an enemy soldier, a cowardly deserter, and the most insufferable man Dahlia’s ever met. Still, she needs all the help she can get, and Farren is the only chance she has to find the man who murdered her father. But Farren has only twenty-seven days left on his watch. In that time, Dahlia must recover her father’s time research, foil a psychotic general’s plot, and learn to survive in a world that will never be the same. But the research holds secrets more dangerous than she had ever imagined. She will have to choose what is most important: revenge, Farren’s life, or her own. And time is running out.
Elena Bozzi: Elena Bozzi prefers to focus rather than multi-task, and has a good habit of dropping things that don’t really matter in order to walk through the forest. She received honors and degrees in literature, science, and teaching middle school from Central Michigan University. She has worked in various greenhouses and as a freelance gardener, and has written much more than she has shared. She has been a teacher, and still is, though not always in a formal setting. She is and will always be a student, though not always in a formal setting. She thinks one of the best things anyone can do for themselves is travel, and if one can’t get out, books work perfectly fine. She hopes you will enjoy her first novel, Puddle: A Tale for the Curious.
Puddle: A Tale for the Curious: Puddle is a tale for the curious, the lover of plants, and the healer inside each of us. It is for those of us who notice the little details, such as reflections upon tranquil water. Here is a story that celebrates the power of stories, and knows that solid connections can be made over meals, especially woodland-foraged meals.
Birch loves her garden. Her sanctuary is the nearby forest. She understands that adventures can happen at any moment, especially when there are cats involved. When she witnesses a boy crawl from a puddle that wouldn’t cover a toad, she suspends her disbelief in order to see his side of the tale.
Get your feet wet with Birch and Puddle as they travel to worlds by way of the reflections upon puddles. Prowl with Caht, the cat who spells its name with an h, and arrange necessary… encounters.. with Nimupara, the Watcher of Worlds. Dance all night with the Trees, as they share their stories and their secrets. And listen to the land.
Join the fireside for conversations concerning science and magic (which is often science that has not been explained yet). Review facts, and wonder about wonderful perhapses. Celebrate life, love, joy, health, healing, and the nonjudgmental approach to life that is common among trees.
Former federal prosecutor Leotta, an MSU grad best, discusses The Last Good Girl, a mystery set in a thinly veiled Ann Arbor that’s the latest in her series of legal thrillers featuring sex-crimes prosecutor Anna Curtis, and Washington (DC) writer Lehane discusses Murder at the 42nd Street Library, a mystery set in a NYC public library that features a librarian-turned-reluctant sleuth. Signings.
Ann Arbor Community High School students read their poetry.
Literati is delighted to host the launch of Chris McCormick’s debut, Desert Boys.
A vivid and assured work of fiction from a major new voice, following the life of a young man growing up, leaving home, and coming back again, marked by the stark beauty of California’s Mojave Desert and the various fates of those who leave and those who stay behind. This series of powerful, intertwining stories illuminates Daley Kushner’s world–the family, friends and community that have both formed and constrained him, and his new lief in San Francisco. Back home, the desert preys on those who cannot conform: an alfalfa farmer on the outskirts of town; two young girls whose curiosity leads to danger; a black politician who once served as his school’s confederate mascot; Daley’s mother, an immigrant from Armenia; and Daley himself, introspective and queer. Meanwhile, in another desert on the other side of the world, war threatens to fracture Daley’s most meaningful–and most fraught–connection to home, his friendship with Robert Karinger. A luminous debut, Desert Boys traces the development of towns into cities, of boys into men, and the haunting effects produced when the two transformations overlap. Both a bildungsroman and a portrait of a changing place, the book mines the terrain between the desire to escape and the hunger to belong.
“This is a book about place, or really like so many books about place (Dubliners, Winesburg, Ohio) two places, in this case two Californias―San Francisco on the one hand; the less familiar but finely evoked small desert community from which the narrator originates on the other. But it’s also a book about shame, two shames, the shame of where we come from, and the shame of leaving it. Through a series of quietly intimate confessions we learn how torn the teller is between past and present, small town and big city, and McCormick captures this tension beautifully in the contrast between his laconic, but frankly feeling prose and his restless formal innovation. Wise and vulnerable by turns, this is a quietly stunning debut.”―Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl
Chris McCormick was raised in the Antelope Valley. He earned his B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.F.A. at the University of Michigan, where he was the recipient of two Hopwood Awards. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Jennifer Haigh in support of her latest novel, Heat and Light, a staff favorite and our Literati Cultura pick for May!
Jennifer Haigh returns to the Pennsylvania town at the center of her iconic novel Baker Towers, in this ambitious, achingly human story of modern America and the conflicting forces at its heart.
Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas. To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn’t count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother’s skepticism or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. Meanwhile his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling—until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives.
Heat and Light depicts a community blessed and cursed by its natural resources. Soaring, ambitious, it zooms from drill rig to shareholders’ meeting to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to the ruined landscape of the “strippins,” haunting reminders of Pennsylvania’s past energy booms. This is a dispatch from a forgotten America—a work of searing moral clarity from one of the finest writers of her generation, a courageous and necessary book.
“Heat and Light achieves pure novelistic virtuosity. It’s brilliant beginning to end.” — Richard Ford
“Heat and Light is a work of tremendous sweep and ambition, a timely, inventive novel powered by Jennifer Haigh’s remarkable compassion for her characters.” — Jess Walter, author ofBeautiful Ruins
“Paragraph by paragraph, the prose is full of marvelous texture and material sensation. Heat and Light is an intricate and ambitious novel, firmly grounded in history and our time. The narrator’s encyclopedic knowledge and keen insights about the physical world and social life make the novel a thrilling page turner.” —Ha Jin, National Book Award-winning author of Waiting
Jennifer Haigh is the author of four previous novels: Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers, and Mrs. Kimble, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her short story collection News from Heaven won the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction. Haigh’s short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories and many other places. She lives in Boston.
Literati is pleased to welcome poet Maggie Smith in support of her most recent collection, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison.
Delving into the depths of fairy tales to transform the daily into encounters with the marvelous but dangerous, Maggie Smith’s poems question whether the realms of imagination and story can possibly be safe. Even as her compressed stories are unfolding on a suburban cul de sac, they are deep in the mythical woods, “where children, despite their commonness, / are a delicacy.”
“Enchantment: that rarest of all poetic gifts. As when the neurons, in the kaleidoscopic movie they call a “functional MRI,” speak to us in colors on a screen from the deepest recesses of what we already know. Maggie Smith’s are poems of transformation: haunting, gorgeous, intimately unsettling. I cannot remember when I last read a book to match her powers of delight.” — Linda Gregerson
Maggie Smith holds a BA from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA from The Ohio State University. Her previous books are Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005) and three prizewinning chapbooks, Disasterology (Dream Horse Press, forthcoming), The List of Dangers (Kent State/Wick Poetry Series, 2010), and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005). She lives with her husband and two children in Bexley, Ohio, where she works as a freelance writer and editor.
Nicola’s Books is an official Children’s Book Week store and we have put together a great Special Story Time for you. We will have local picture book authors Shanda Trent and Melanie Zwegers coming who will read their books and as a special treat The Library Mouse will also stop by for a visit! So bring you youngsters and have some fun.
Melanie M Zwegers is a writer and illustrator of children’s literature. She is a native of Ann Arbor, Michigan and graduated with honors and two degrees from the University of Michigan. She now lives and works in Northville, Michigan with the support and encouragement of her wonderful husband, family, and friends.
Shanda Trent has worked with young children for 30 years. She has read thousands of picture books–to her own daughters, to small groups of toddlers and preschoolers, and classrooms of elementary children. She knows what kids love, and what brings them back to a beloved book again and again. Her first book was ‘Farmer’s Market Day’ and her newest is ‘Giddy-Up Buckaroo’.
Every child can be a writer—and Library Mouse shows them how! Beloved children’s books author and illustrator Daniel Kirk wonderfully brings to life the story of Sam, a library mouse. Sam’s home was in a little hole in the wall behind the children’s reference books, and he thought that life was very good indeed; for Sam loved to read. He read picture books and chapter books, biographies and poetry, and ghost stories and mysteries. Sam read so much that finally one day he decided to write books himself! Sam shared his books with other library visitors by placing them on a bookshelf at night…until there came the time that people wanted to meet this talented author. Whatever was Sam to do? The joy of reading, writing, and sharing is brought to life in this warmhearted tale.
Literati is delighted to welcome Wendy BooydeGraaff, author of Salad Pie, to a very special story time. Kids of many ages are welcome to attend. Free and open to the public.
About the book: There is nothing sweeter than arriving at the playground, seeing it empty, and knowing you have it all to yourself–the silent comfort of playing alone. Maggie is overjoyed to have that solitude to make her Salad Pie. But then Herbert saunters over and wants to play too. “I’m making salad. Salad Pie. And don’t you touch it!” Herbert just wants to help, even though Maggie makes it clear she won’t let him. Then her imaginary pie takes a spill, and she realizes Herbert’s intentions are not so bad after all.
Wendy BooydeGraaff grew up making mud pies on a fruit farm in Ontario, Canada. She now lives in Michigan with her family, where she whips up all kinds of salads and all kinds of pies.
Join us for this event and bring dry dog and cat food with you for donation to the Humane Society of Huron Valley Bountiful Bowls Program to help people keep their pets instead of surrendering them to a shelter.
It wasn’t an easy start for George. Nobody wanted him… he had been abandoned and needed a home. He was scared and unsure of everything. He was rescued by a recently divorced marketing executive, who had a big, empty house and wanted to help him. Eventually, George’s loving personality, and wisdom of an old soul emerges, and it becomes apparent that it is in fact George who rescues his new human friend…
George went from abandoned and homeless in cold rural Canada to a surfing Champion and local celebrity on the sunny beaches of California.
Free Days with George is his story.
Marketing executive, consumer engagement specialist, digital content producer, active athlete and animal advocate, Colin Campbell has a clear passion for work and life. He is thrilled with the opportunity to write this book and share his story of free days and the journey with his friend, George.
For over twenty years, Colin has built a solid marketing resume across Canada and the United States. He has worked with some of North America’s leading agencies and sport organizations including MKTG, the National Hockey League Players’ Association, MacLaren McCann and the Canadian Hockey League. He has held executive roles where he has developed and managed consumer engagement programs for brands such as General Motors, Nike, Verizon and Kraft. He has created and managed large scale nationally televised events to simple digital branded-content campaigns.
Bountiful Bowls Program
The Humane Society of Huron Valley understands that financial difficulty often means making a list of priorities. Frequently, animals are forced to be low on that list. HSHV’s Bountiful Bowls pet food assistance program helps Washtenaw County and Plymouth residents who are having difficulty meeting the nutritional needs of their dog or cat due to financial burden.
Trying times can be temporary. With a little assistance, a pet owner can often find a way to keep their pet in their home. bit.ly/1Ywz4TQ
