Literati is pleased to be the bookseller for Sara Goldrick-Rab’s visit to Ann Arbor. Sara is the author of Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, and this event will take place in Schorling Auditorium at the University of Michigan’s School of Educaiton.
For the last decade, sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab has been studying what happens when economically vulnerable people try to make their way through public higher education. Of the 3,000 young adults she tracked who began college in 2008, half dropped out, and less than one in five finished a bachelor s degree in four years. Additional grant money helped some, but what is clear here is that when college students costs are not fully covered, they rarely finish college. If they do, it takes them longer than it should, and they graduate with a substantial amount of debt.
In addition to marshaling her data and national data, Goldrick-Rab also adds a human dimension to this story. She focuses in on six students in particular to help make plain the human and financial sometimes to the dollar costs of our convoluted financial aid policies. Their stories really drive the point home. Though Chloe Johnson, an aspiring veterinarian, sold her beloved horse, took out loans, shared an off-campus apartment with a friend, and worked two jobs, she ends up dropping out of college. She had to work so many hours at Kohl s and PetSmart often the night shift to pay for her Expected Family Contribution that she could not stay awake in classes and still did not have enough money for food or gas. When she finally dropped a class to help her performance in other classes, she found out at the end of the semester that her reduced load made her ineligible for financial aid. After leaving school, she still owed thousands of dollars; she had nothing to show for her college years but debt.
Goldrick-Rab closes the book with possible solutions, from changing the timing of FAFSA forms, to more flexibility about how students can use aid money, and she makes a strong case for making the first two years of college free.
“Paying the Price is an urgent and necessary text. Through rigorous research and careful analysis, Sara Goldrick-Rab shows how the American Dream is structurally compromised by the exorbitant costs of higher education and a thoroughly dysfunctional financial aid system. With texture and subtlety, Goldrick-Rab spotlights the journeys of students whose road to educational access and social mobility is obstructed by the current crisis. Equally important, she offers a practical and progressive action plan forcreating a more fair and just system.”–Marc Lamont Hill, author of Nobody: Casualities of America’s War on the Vulnerable, From Ferguson to Flint and Beyond
Sara Goldrick-Rab is coeditor of Reinventing Financial Aid: Charting a New Course to College Affordability and has written on education issues for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. She is a recipient of the Early Career Award from the American Educational Research Association and the Atlantic, Slate, and NPR have covered her work. She founded the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, the nation s first research laboratory aimed at making college affordable, and is a noted influence on the development of both federal and state higher education policies. Dr. Goldrick-Rab is professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University.
Literati is pleased to host Anne Carson for a special event celebrating her latest work, FLOAT.
Due to space limitations at our store and expected demand, Literati will be ticketing this event. The ticket can be redeemed for $5 dollars off a hardcover copy of the book.
Currently, Literati plans on hosting this event in our second floor events space, which is only accessible by staircase. If you wish to attend but cannot traverse the stairs, please let us know by reaching out to events@literatibookstore.com, and we will make main floor arrangements.
From the renowned classicist and MacArthur Prize winner: a new collection that explores myth and memory, beauty and loss, all the while playing with–and pushing–the limits of language and form.
Anne Carson consistently dazzles with her inventive, shape-shifting work and the vividness of her imagination. FLOAT reaches an even greater level of brilliance and surprise.
Presented in an arrestingly original format–individual chapbooks that can be read in any order, and that float inside a transparent case–this collection conjures a mix of voices, time periods, and structures to explore what makes people, memories, and stories “maddeningly attractive” when observed in spaces that are suggestively in-between.
One can begin with Carson contemplating Proust on a frozen Icelandic plain, or on the art-saturated streets of downtown New York City. Or journey to the peak of Mount Olympus, where Zeus ponders his own afterlife. Or find a chorus of Gertrude Steins performing an essay about falling–a piece that also unearths poignant memories of Carson’s own father and great-uncle in rural Canada. And a poem called “Wildly Constant” piercingly explores the highs and lows of marriage and monogamy, distilled in a wife’s waking up her husband from the darkness of night, and asking him to make them eggs for breakfast.
Exquisite, heartbreaking, disarmingly funny, FLOAT kaleidoscopically illuminates the uncanny magic that comes with letting go of expectations and boundaries. It is Carson’s most intellectually electrifying, emotionally engaging book to date.
Anne Carson was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.
Scott Savitt is the in-house Chinese-English translator for numerous human rights organizations and the New York Times. His articles have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and many other newspapers and magazines. He is a former visiting scholar at Duke University.
“In this page-turning debut, Savitt, a New York Times’s Chinese-English translator, relates his experiences in China. He begins his story in 1982, when he was a first-year Duke student; grief-stricken after his girlfriend’s death, he decided to go on a study abroad trip to the country. Returning after graduation to pursue his journalistic dreams, Savitt finds himself in the midst of historic news stories. The book vividly describes his 17 years of knowing China as intimately as an American can, during which he sees its cultural and economic flowering. He also observes the Tiananmen Square massacre, where he dodges bullets and fights the urge to participate, not just witness. His creation of China’s first independent English-language newspaper gets him noticed, first by the Beijing bureaus of Western media outlets and then by the Communist Party. He comes across as a risk taker whose wealthy family back home could only help him so much—his activist reporting style eventually leads to solitary confinement and a hunger strike. Savitt is a smart, thrilling memoirist, but his book is not just a narrative roller-coaster ride: readers will receive a new understanding of what has happened in China over the past 30 years, from someone who stood shoulder to shoulder with students asking for a better country.” — Publishers Weekly (http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-59376-652-8)
Literati is delighted to welcome Matt Bell back to Ann Arbor in support of his most recent work, A Tree or a Person or a Wall.
Here we have Matt Bell at his most inventive and uncanny: parents and children, murderers and monsters, wild renditions of the past, and stunning visions of the present, all of which build to a virtuoso reimagining of our world. A 19th-century minister builds an elaborate motor that will bring about the Second Coming. A man with rough hands locks a boy in a room with an albino ape. An apocalyptic army falls under a veil of forgetfulness. The story of Red Riding Hood is run through a potentially endless series of iterations. A father invents an elaborate, consuming game for his hospitalized son. Indexes, maps, a checkered shirt buried beneath a blanket of snow: they are scattered through these pages as clues to mysteries that may never be solved, ingering evidence of the violence and unknowability of the world. A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Bell’s previously published shorter fiction—the story collection How They Were Found and the acclaimed novella Cataclysm Baby—along with seven dark and disturbing new stories, to create a collection of singular power.
“These fables plumb the depths of human longing… a collection that resonates like a tuning fork, lingering after the book is closed.”—Publishers Weekly
“A clutch of stories with a flavor of the experimental, the apocalyptic, and often both…Admirable efforts to strip familiarity and sentiment from stories of humanity at its worst.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Told in a mythic, omniscient voice, some of these pieces read like cruel fairy tales… Imagine a tale from Lydia Davis on a bad trip… smart and edgy.”—Library Journal
Matt Bell is the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, which was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, a Michigan Notable Book, and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor Recipient, as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. His writing has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Tin House, The New York Times, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, The American Reader, and many other publications. Born in Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Literati is thrilled to be the bookseller for the Zell Visiting Writers Series at the University of Michigan. More information about the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, including a full calendar of visiting writers, can be found here. The November 3rd installment of ZVWS will feature alumni Donovan Hohn and Rachel Richardson.
Donovan Hohn is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, A National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Knight-Wallace Fellowship. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside, among other publications. His book, Moby-Duck, was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Prize for Excellence in Journalism, and runner-up for both the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. A former features editor of GQ and contributing editor of Harper’s, Hohn now teaches creative writing at Wayne State University and lives with his family in Ann Arbor, where he is working on his second book.
Rachel Richardson is the author of two books of poetry, Copperhead (2011) andHundred-Year Wave (2016), both selections in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, the Poetry Foundation website, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Richardson is a contributing editor at Memorious and directs poetry programming for the Bay Area Book Festival. She lives with the writer David Roderick and their two children in Berkeley, California.
Jessica Lipowski is the author of Flavors of Life (2016). Jessica, originally from Troy, Michigan and a graduate of Michigan State University, moved to the Netherlands in February 2011. With previous journalistic work published on 10Best.com (part of USAToday) and in The Washington Times, she is now an author. She is also a permanent host of two travel-related Twitter chats, #TRLT (The Road Less Travelled) and #CultureTrav.The book, in combination with Jessica’s past work experience, travels, and life as an expat, has enabled her to view food, travel, and culture through a different lens.
Flavors of Life (ISBN: 9789082523805) is a collection of inspirational biographies, sharing the stories of 62 entrepreneurs from around the world. Ranging from a famous Swiss drummer to an American ballet dancer, they are connected by a common thread: all own a restaurant in Amsterdam. Discover how these diverse individuals landed in the same city, in the same industry, with a shared passion – a love for food. While the restaurateurs live in Amsterdam, the stories have universal themes. The book examines culture, lifestyle, entrepreneurship, food, and family values. Regardless or whether someone has visited Amsterdam or not, readers can find a piece of themselves in this book. If you’d like, you can read more on my website: https://jessicalipowski.com/
Literati is pleased to welcome Julia Sonnevend in support of her book Stories without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event. Julia will be joined in conversation by Professor William Uricchio.
How do stories of particular events turn into global myths, while others fade away? What becomes known and seen as a global iconic event? In Stories without Borders, Julia Sonnevend considers the ways in which we recount and remember news stories of historic significance. Focusing on journalists covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and on subsequent retellings of the event in a variety of ways – from Legoland reenactments to slabs of the Berlin Wall installed in global cities – Sonnevend discusses how certain events become built up so that people in many parts of the world remember them for long periods of time. She argues that five dimensions determine the viability and longevity of international news events. First, a foundational narrative must be established with certain preconditions. Next, the established narrative becomes universalized and a mythical message developed. This message is then condensed and encapsulated in a simple phrase, a short narrative, and a recognizable visual scene. Counter-narratives emerge that reinterpret events and in turn facilitate their diffusion across multiple media platforms and changing social and political contexts. Sonnevend examines these five elements through the developments of November 9, 1989 – what came to be known as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Stories Without Borders concludes with a discussion of how global iconic events have an enduring effect on individuals and societies, pointing out that after common currencies, military alliances, and international courts have failed, stories may be all that we have to bring hope and unity.
Julia Sonnevend is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. She was a Lady Davis Fellow at the Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace in Israel in 2014 and a Leibniz Fellow at the Center for Contemporary History in Germany in 2015. She is co-editor of Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future (forthcoming with MIT Press in 2016). She is author and co-author of articles published in journals including Journalism Studies, Columbia Journalism Review and The New Everyday. Her work also appears in edited collections including Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (Ed. Benjamin Peters, Princeton University Press, forthcoming in 2016),Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life (Eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline (Eds. James Elkins et al, Routledge, 2012). She received her Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University, her Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School and her Juris Doctorate and Master of Arts degrees in German Studies and Aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
William Uricchio revisits the histories of old media when they were new; explores interactive and participatory documentary; writes about the past and future of television; thinks a lot about algorithms and archives; and researches cultural identities and the question of “Americanization” in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and faculty director of the MISTI-Netherlands Program. He is also Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has held visiting professorships at the Freie Universität Berlin, Stockholm University, the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Lichtenberg-Kolleg), China University of Science and Technology, and in Denmark where he was DREAM professor. He has been awarded Guggenheim, Humboldt and Fulbright fellowships and the Berlin Prize; and is currently Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. His publications include Reframing Culture (Princeton); We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (Chicago/Intellect); Media Cultures(Heidelberg); hundreds of essays and book chapters … and, timed to coincide with the Batman-Superman big screen face-off, a forthcoming collection entitled Many More Lives of the Batman (BFI/Palgrave). He is currently completing a book on new forms of documentary; and another on games and playing with history and historiography after post-structuralism.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Jonathan Safran Foer to Rackham Auditorium on the campus of The University of Michigan, in celebration of his most recent novel, Here I Am. Following a reading will be an in-conversation segment with Douglas Trevor, director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at The University of Michigan.
Tickets are available exclusively through Brown Paper Tickets:
About Here I Am
How do we fulfill our conflicting duties as father, husband, and son; wife and mother; child and adult? Jew and American? How can we claim our own identities when our lives are linked so closely to others? These are the questions at the heart of Jonathan Safran Foers first novel in eleven years, a work of extraordinary scope and heartbreaking intimacy.
Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, D.C., Here I Am is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living, a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East. At stake is the meaning of homeand the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear.
Showcasing the same high-energy inventiveness, hilarious irreverence, and emotional urgency that readers loved in his earlier work, Here I Am is Foers most searching, hard-hitting, and grandly entertaining novel yet. It not only confirms Foers stature as a dazzling literary talent but reveals a novelist who has fully come into his own as one of our most important writers.
About the Event
This event will take place at Rackham Auditorium on the campus of The University of Michigan on November 4th, 2016, at 7pm. Doors for seating will open at 6:15. There are two ticket options: a $12 dollar general admission ticket, and a $32 dollar general admission and hardcover bundle. Follow the link above to purchase your tickets through Brown Paper Tickets. Tickets will not be sold in store. Though both ticketing options provide general admission seating, book-bundle ticket holders will have first access to the signing line following the reading and conversation. Additional copies of Here I Am, as well as Jonathan Safran Foer’s other titles, will be available to purchase in the lobby. General admission ticket holders may also have books signed, and are asked to join the signing line after book-bundle ticket holders. Those wishing to have more than 3 previous Foer titles signed are asked to wait until the end of the signing. Books may be personalized.
Edward Morin is from Chicago, where he earned degrees in English at University of Chicago and Loyola University. His poems have appeared in Hudson Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Collections of his poems include Labor Day at Walden Pond (1997) and The Dust of Our City (1978). A chapbook titled Housing for Wrens is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press in September 2016. His co-translations of modern Greek and Chinese poems have appeared in Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Poetry Miscellany. He edited and co-translated an anthology, The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry since the Cultural Revolution (U. of Hawaii Press, 1990) and a book of poems by Cai Qijiao. Recent co-translations of Arabic poems have been published in Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, The Dirty Goat, and Asymptote. He is editor of the Poetry Society of Michigan’s journal, Peninsula Poets, and co-hosts the Crazy Wisdom Poetry Series in Ann Arbor.
Bob Brill is a retired computer programmer and digital artist. He is now devoting his energies to writing fiction and poetry. His novellas, short stories and 150 poems have appeared in over 45 online magazines, print journals, and anthologies. His most recent publications are 2 poems in Water Music: The Great Lakes State Poetry Anthology, and his first book of poems, Hello Goodbye, Selected Poems by Bob Brill.
Literati is pleased to welcome Randa Jarrar in support of her recent story collection Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. Randa will be joined by Michigan writers Tariq Luthun and Kamelya Youssef.
Award-winning novelist Randa Jarrar’s new story collection moves seamlessly between realism and fable, history and the present, capturing the lives of Muslim women and men across myriad geographies and circumstances. With acerbic wit, deep tenderness, and boundless imagination, Jarrar brings to life a memorable cast of characters, many of them “accidental transients”—a term for migratory birds who have gone astray—seeking their circuitous routes back home. Fierce and feeling, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali is a testament to survival in the face of love, loss, and displacement.
Randa Jarrar is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved to the U.S. after the first Gulf War. Her novel A Map of Home, was published in six languages and won a Hopwood Award, an Arab-American Book Award, and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes & Noble Review. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, The Rumpus, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Five Chapters, and other venues. She’s received fellowships and residencies from the Lannan Foundation at Marfa, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Hedgebrook, Caravansarai, and Eastern Frontier. In 2010, the Hay Festival and Beirut UNESCO’s world capital of the book named Jarrar one of the most gifted writers of Arab origin under the age of 40.
Tariq Luthun is a Palestinian-American writer & strategist from Detroit, MI. He is currently an MFA candidate for poetry at Warren Wilson College’s Program for Writers. Among other things, Luthun is the Social Director of Organic Weapon Arts, an advisory board member of the Detroit‐based nonprofit Write A House, and is Director of the Ann Arbor Poetry Slam. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, Winter Tangerine Review, and Button Poetry, among others.
Kamelya Youssef is a poet, teacher, and organizer. A graduate of the University of Michigan, she is currently an M.A. candidate in English at Wayne State University in Detroit.
