Literati is pleased to welcome Ypsilanti’s own Amy Shrodes, co-author of Lost and Found Cat: The True Story of Kunkush’s Incredible Journey, for an all-ages event.
The true story about one cat’s journey to be reunited with his war-torn family has been seen by millions of people and is now a heartwarming picture book. When an Iraqi family is forced to flee their home, they can’t bear to leave their beloved cat, Kunkush, behind. So they carry him with them from Iraq to Greece, keeping their secret passenger hidden away. But during the crowded boat crossing to Greece, his carrier breaks and the frightened cat runs from the chaos. In one moment, he is gone. After an unsuccessful search, his family has to continue their journey, leaving brokenhearted.
A few days later, aid workers in Greece–Amy among them–find the lost cat. Knowing how much his family has sacrificed already, they are desperate to reunite them with the cat they love so much. A worldwide community comes together to spread the word on the Internet and in the news media, and after several months the impossible happens—Kunkush’s family is found, and they finally get their happy ending in their new home. This remarkable true story is told by the real people involved, with the full cooperation of Kunkush’s family.
Amy Shrodes and co-author Doug Kuntz felt compelled to travel to Greece to help with the refugee crisis, each in their own unique way—Amy as a volunteer helping the arriving refugees and raising awareness back at home through a podcast, and Doug as a photojournalist, who spent time in Greece, Turkey, France, Germany, and finally Norway, bringing the plight of the refugees to people around the globe. When they met Kunkush, they knew he was very special to someone and they wanted to do everything they could to reunite him with his family.
This local novelist reads from The Mountain Goddess, the 2nd in her Sadhana fantasy trilogy that explores the spiritual struggles of women in the Buddha’s time. In this book, the young prince Siddhartha falls for a beautiful warrior who has mastered supernatural yogic powers, and she’s the only person who may be able to convince him to stay with his people rather than leave on a quest for enlightenment. Signing.
Literati is pleased to welcome Nickolas Butler in support of his new novel, The Hearts of Men.
The Hearts of Men is an epic novel of intertwining friendships and families set in the Northwoods of Wisconsin at a beloved Boy Scout summer camp–and a finalist for the 2016 Prix Médicis Etrangere–from the bestselling author of Shotgun Lovesongs.
Camp Chippewa, 1962. Nelson Doughty, age thirteen, social outcast and overachiever, is the Bugler, sounding the reveille proudly each morning. Yet this particular summer marks the beginning of an uncertain and tenuous friendship with a popular boy named Jonathan. Over the years, Nelson, irrevocably scarred from the Vietnam War, becomes Scoutmaster of Camp Chippewa, while Jonathan marries, divorces, and turns his father’s business into a highly profitable company. And when something unthinkable happens at a camp get-together with Nelson as Scoutmaster and Jonathan’s teenage grandson and daughter-in-law as campers, the aftermath demonstrates the depths—and the limits—of Nelson’s selflessness and bravery. The Hearts of Men is a sweeping, panoramic novel about the slippery definitions of good and evil, family and fidelity, the challenges and rewards of lifelong friendships, the bounds of morality—and redemption.
“Like a great campfire story, The Hearts of Men is epic and hushed in the right places, simultaneously local and universal, and brilliantly, beautifully unspooled. It s both a love letter to good men of the past and a hopeful cheer for the good men to come.” —J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest
Nickolas Butler was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He is the author of the internationally-best selling novel Shotgun Lovesongs, a collection of short stories entitled, Beneath the Bonfire, and The Hearts of Men which has already been longlisted for two of France’s top literary awards. He is the winner of France’s prestigious PAGE Prix America, the 2014 Great Lakes Great Reads Award, the 2014 Midwest Independent Booksellers Award, the 2015 Wisconsin Library Association Literary Award, the 2015 UW-Whitewater Chancellor’s Regional Literary Award, and has been long-listed for the 2014 Flaherty Dunnan Award for First Novel and short-listed for France’s FNAC Prix. Along the way, he has worked as: a Burger King maintenance man, a tutor, a telemarketer, a hot-dog vendor, an innkeeper (twice), an office manager, a coffee roaster, a liquor store clerk, and an author escort. His itinerant work includes: potato harvester, grape picker, and Christmas tree axe-man. His short stories, poetry, and non-fiction have appeared in: Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review Online, The Lumberyard, The Christian Science Monitor, Narrative, Sixth Finch, and several other publications.
Mar. 8: All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share. Hosted by local poets and former college English teachers Joe Kelty and Ed Morin.
Mar. 22: Readings by Jennifer Clark, a Kalamazoo poet who has a forthcoming 2nd collection Johnny Appleseed: The Slice and Times of John Chapman, and InsideOut Literary Arts Project (Detroit) interim director and Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Detroit project coordinator Alise Alousi, whose work is featured in Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry. Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
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7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is thrilled to be the partner-bookseller for the Zell Visiting Writers Series, presented by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, which brings world-renowned poets and fiction writers to Helmut Stern Auditorium in the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Jenny Offill saw her first novel, Last Things, published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in the UK by Bloomsbury. It was a New York Times Notable book and a finalist for the L.A Times First Book Award. Offill’s second novel Dept. of Speculation was published in January 2014 and was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review. Dept. of Speculation has been shortlisted for the Folio Prize in the UK, the Pen/Faulkner Award and the L.A. Times Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review and she is also the co-editor with Elissa Schappell of two anthologies of essays and the author of several children’s books.
An open mike for poets, who are welcome to read their own work or a favorite poem by another writer. The program begins with a reading by a featured local poet TBA.
Storytellers Guild members present a program of old tales and personal stories for grownups.
Free; donations accepted. annarborstorytelling.org, facebook.com/annarborstorytellers. 665-2757.
Literati is pleased to welcome Will Schwalbe in support of his latest work, Books for Living.
From the author of the beloved New York Times best-selling The End of Your Life Book Club comes an inspiring and magical exploration of the power of books to shape our lives in an era of constant connectivity. Why is it that we read? Is it to pass time? To learn something new? To escape from reality? For Will Schwalbe, reading is a way to entertain himself but also to make sense of the world, to become a better person, and to find the answers to the big (and small) questions about how to live his life. In this delightful celebration of reading, Schwalbe invites us along on his quest for books that speak to the specific challenges of living in our modern world, with all its noise and distractions. In each chapter, he discusses a particular book—what brought him to it (or vice versa), the people in his life he associates with it, and how it became a part of his understanding of himself in the world. These books span centuries and genres (from classic works of adult and children’s literature to contemporary thrillers and even cookbooks), and each one relates to the questions and concerns we all share. Throughout, Schwalbe focuses on the way certain books can help us honor those we’ve loved and lost, and also figure out how to live each day more fully. Rich with stories and recommendations, Books for Living is a treasure for everyone who loves books and loves to hear the answer to the question: “What are you reading?”
“Books for Living by Will Schwalbe lives wonderfully up to its title. He offers an easy tone, sections chapter by chapter of his chosen stories and their affiliations to our own lives. He reminds me of a diviner who walks the open fields, taps, and reveals something rarely talked about, or perhaps never noticed, in one story or another, but is important. That’s a thrill! I can’t imagine a person who loves books not being grateful. Any season of the year, this book is a gift.” —Mary Oliver
Will Schwalbe has worked in publishing (he’s now EVP, Editorial Development and Content Innovation for Macmillan); digital media, as the founder and CEO of Cookstr.com; and as a journalist, writing for various publications, including The New York Times and the South China Morning Post. He is on the board of the Kingsborough Community College Foundation. He is the author of The End of Your Life Book Club, and coauthor, with David Shipley, of Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better.
Literati is pleased to welcome Joseph Scapellato in support of his debut collection, Big Lonesome. Joseph will be joined by UM professor Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn and Gold Fame Citrus.
Reinventing a great American tradition through an absurdist, discerning eye, Joseph Scapellato uses these twenty-five stories to conjure worlds, themes, and characters who are at once unquestionably familiar and undeniably strange. Big Lonesome navigates through the American West—from the Old West to the modern-day West to the Midwest, from cowboys to mythical creatures to everything in between—exploring place, myth, masculinity, and what it means to be whole or to be broken. Though he works in the tradition of George Saunders and Patrick deWitt—writing subversive, surreal, and affecting stories that unveil the surprising inner lives of ordinary people and the mythic dimensions of our everyday lives—”Scapellato’s Big Lonesome is unlike anything else you’ve ever read” (Robert Boswell).
Joseph Scapellato is a visiting assistant professor of English at Bucknell University. His fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Post Road, Puerto Del Sol, PANK, and Lumina, as well as other journals, and has been anthologized in Harper Perennial’s Forty Stories, Gigantic Books’ Gigantic Worlds: An Anthology of Science Flash Fiction and &NOW’s forthcoming The Best Innovative Writing anthology.
“Slugg: A Boy’s Life in the Age of Mass Incarceration” is a blueprint for survival and a demonstration of the power of love, sacrifice, and service. The son of a Kingpin and the prince of a close-knit crime family, Tony Lewis Jr.’s life took a dramatic turn after his father’s arrest in 1989. Washington D.C. stood as the murder capital of the country and Lewis was cast into the heart of the struggle, from a life of stability and riches to one of chaos and poverty. How does one make it in America, battling the breakdown of families, the plague of premature death and the hopelessness of being reviled, isolated, and forgotten? Tony Lewis’ astonishing journey answers these questions and offers, for the first time, a close look at the familial residue of America’s historic program of mass incarceration.
