Calendar

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.

Literati is thrilled to welcome Bonnie Jo Campbell, Jaimy Gordon, and Andy Mozina to read from their most recent work.

Bonnie Jo Campbell teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University and lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She is the author of Once Upon a River, American Salvage (a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award), Q Road, Women and Other Animals, and, most recently, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters.

Jaimy Gordon lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She is the author ofBogeywoman, She Drove Without Stopping, the novella Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue, and the fantasy classic novel Shamp of the City-Solo. Her fourth novel, Lord of Misrule, won the National Book Award. Gordon teaches at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.

Andy Mozina is a professor of English at Kalamazoo College and the author of the novel Contrary Motion, short story collections The Women Were Leaving the Men, which won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and Quality Snacks, which was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Prize. His fiction has also appeared in numerous magazines, including Tin House and McSweeney’s.

Literati is pleased to welcome Jordan Zandi, reading from his collection Solarium. UM Zell Fellows in Poetry Amanda Rybin Koob and Hannah Webster will also read.

“Solarium is a completely original gem of a book. I have never met Jordan Zandi, but I would like to, for there is a sweet spirit haunting his guileless poems. His inner world is always interacting with the outer world, and as a result everything seems to be shining. ‘Walking across the binary field, / what does the young man see?’ Zandi asks, searching for signs with his subtle eyes. The answer seems to be the great opium of simply being content within oneself—with a heart that receives and watches (if a heart watches), while resisting the systems that hurt us—and remaining awake to experience.”—Henri Cole, from the Foreword

Jordan Zandi is the author of Solarium (Sarabande Books), which was chosen by Henri Cole as the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize. The New Yorker named it one of the twelve best poetry-related books of 2015, calling it, “A first book made eventful by the weirdness and clarity of Zandi’s mind.” He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Boston University, where he was an Elizabeth Leonard Fellow and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow to Bolivia, and his poems have appeared in The New Republic, Little Star, and Verse Daily, among others. He is founder and co-editor of Prodigal, an independent print and online journal of poetry and prose and currently lives in Indianapolis with his wife and their two rabbits.