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This event will take place on Literati’s main floor.

Literat is pleased to welcome Edward Dusinberre, author of Beethoven For a Later Age, in conversation with Steven Whiting, professor of musicology at the University of Michigan. This event is being held in conjunction with the UMS presentation of the Takács Quartet on October 8 and 9, at Rackham Auditorium. For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit ums.org.

‘They are not for you but for a later age!’ -Ludwig van Beethoven, on the Opus 59 quartets

Beethoven’s sixteen string quartets are some of the most extraordinary and challenging pieces of music ever written. They have inspired artists of all kinds – not only musicians – and have been subject to endless reinterpretation. What does it feel like to be a musician taking on these iconic works? And how do the four string players who make up a quartet interact, both musically and personally?

The Takács is one of the world’s pre-eminent string quartets. Performances of Beethoven have shaped their work together for over forty years. Using the history of both the Takács Quartet and the Beethoven quartets as the backbone to his story, Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the Takács since 1993, recounts the exhilarating challenge of tackling these pieces. Beethoven for a Later Age takes the reader inside the daily life of a quartet, vividly showing the necessary creative tension between individual and group expression and how four people can enjoy making music together over a long period of time.

The key, the author argues, is in balancing continuity with change and experimentation – a theme that lies at the heart of Beethoven’s remarkable compositions. No other composer has posed so many questions about the form and emotional content of a string quartet, and come up with so many different answers. In an accessible style, suitable for novices and chamber music enthusiasts alike, Dusinberre illuminates the variety and inherent contradictions of Beethoven’s quartets, composed against the turbulent backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath, and shows that engaging with this radical music continues to be as invigorating now as it was for its first performers and audiences.

Edward Dusinberre was born in 1968 in Leamington Spa, England, and has enjoyed playing the violin from a young age. His early experiences as concertmaster of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain encouraged him to choose music as a profession. He studied with the Ukrainian violinist Felix Andrievsky at the Royal College of Music in London and at the Juilliard School with Dorothy DeLay and Piotr Milewski. In 1990 he won the British Violin Recital Prize and gave his debut recital in London at the Purcell Room, South Bank Centre. Upon completion of his studies at Juilliard Dusinberre auditioned for the Takács Quartet, which he joined in 1993 as first violin.

Steven Whiting, a native of Chicago, graduated from Macalester College in 1975 with a major in music (voice, piano) and a minor in German.He studied musicology at Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet in Kiel, Germany, on a Fulbright grant (1975–77) and sang for a season with the Chicago Symphony Chorus before pursuing graduate work at the University of Illinois. There he took an M.M. in Musicology with a thesis on “Erik Satie and Parisian Musical Entertainment,” and his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Beethoven’s early variations (“To the ‘New Manner’ Born”). Between degrees, he spent four years as a desk editor at A-R Editions of Madison, Wisconsin, sang with several early music groups, and performed in contemporary music ensembles. After teaching for two years at the University of Illinois, he came to the University of Michigan in 1991 as a visiting assistant professor.

Literati is thrilled to welcome our friends at harlequin creature back to the store for the launch of their latest, greatest issues.

About the journal: 2016 marks five years of harlequin creature, and to celebrate, we’re launching a special double issue. please join us for the launch of issues 8/9 with an evening of readings. issue 8, “not a metaphor,” was curated by a group of guest editors from across the country, including JP Howard & Casey Rocheteau (poetry), Ginger Buswell (prose), & Alisha Wessler (art). it includes the poetry of Tara Betts, Destiny O. Birdsong, Amber Flame, Micaela Foley, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Amanda Johnston, Stacey Knecht, and Pamela L. Laskin, prose by Emily Hunt and Meg Whiteford, and art by Matt Neff. cover design by Kayla Romberger. issue 9, “sitting between chairs,” is dedicated to translation and was shaped by guest editors Kristin Dickinson, Emily Goedde, and Anne Posten, and features translations from a wide range of languages, including serbian, welsh, portugese, ukrainian and hungarian.

FRUIT is an independent, community-led reading and dialogue series for and by marginalized voices, hosted in Literati Bookstore. More information about this month’s installment forthcoming.

FRUIT is a moment and a movement of reclamation. It is a space of and for literary artists representing the marginalized: the colored, the queer, the silenced, and the unseen. Each event showcases the work of fresh, revolutionary artists and features a conversation around their lives and their crafts. In this space, FRUIT strives to serve as a carefully curated reading and dialogue series for those who live at intersections ignored. This experience exists both physically and digitally in order to help those marginalized voices reclaim their flesh and plant their roots through short-form literature. Our goal is to create an experience that is intentional in its centering of the historically othered. Through this exploration of identity and craft, we hope to cultivate a platform in which the growth and sharing of radical joy— both encumbered and despite— happens in the presence of solidarity and healthy community.

Seating will be open beginning at 7pm. The event will start at 7:30pm.

Literati is pleased to welcome Alexander Maksik in support of his most recent novel, Shelter in Place. Alexander will be joined in conversation by Natalie Bakopoulos, author of The Green Shore.

Set in the Pacific Northwest in the jittery, jacked-up early 1990s, Shelter in Place, by one of America’s most thrillingly defiant contemporary authors, is a stylish literary novel about the hereditary nature of mental illness, the fleeting intensity of youth, the obligations of family, and the dramatic consequences of love.

Joseph March, a twenty-one-year-old working class kid from Seattle, has just graduated from college and his future beckons, unencumbered, limitless, magnificent. Joe’s life implodes when he starts to suffer the symptoms of bipolar disorder, and, not long after, his mother, Anne-Marie March, beats a stranger to death with a hammer.

Joe moves to White Pine, Washington, where Anne-Marie is serving time and his father has set up house. He is followed by Tess Wolff, a fiercely independent woman with whom he is in love. Meanwhile, Joe’s mother is gradually being transformed into a national heroine. Many see her crime as a furious, exasperated act of righteous rebellion. Tess, too, is under her spell. Spurred on by Anne-Marie’s example, she enlists Joe in a secret, violent plan that will forever change their lives.

Maksik sings of modern America’s battered soul and of the lacerating emotions that make us human. Magnetic and masterfully told, Shelter in Place is about the things we are willing to die for, and those we’re willing to kill for.

Alexander Maksik is the author of three novels: You Deserve Nothing; A Marker to Measure Drift, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for both the William Saroyan Prize and Le Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; and the forthcoming Shelter in Place, due out in September. A contributing editor at Condé Nast Traveler, his writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper’s, Tin House, Harvard Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Salon and Narrative Magazine, among other publications. Maksik is the recipient of a 2015 Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from the Truman Capote Literary Trust and The Corporation of Yaddo. He is the co-artistic director of the Can Cab Literary Residence in Catalonia, Spain and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.