Calendar

Mar
11
Sat
Tony Lewis: Slugg: A Boy’s Life in the Age of Mass Incarceration @ Room 1405
Mar 11 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm

“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.

Zenefit: Soup and Poetry @ Zen Buddhist Temple
Mar 11 @ 5:30 pm – 8:00 pm

Readings by local poets, with a variety of hand-crafted soups for refreshment.
5:30-8 p.m., Zen Buddhist Temple, 1214 Packard at Wells. $10 (kids, $5; family, $25). 761-6520.

FRUIT: A Library Reclamation for the Unseen @ Literati
Mar 11 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

FRUIT is an independent, community-led reading and dialogue series for and by marginalized voices, hosted in Literati Bookstore. This month’s installment features readings by TBD.

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.

 

RC Players: Red Eye Theater @ Keene Theater
Mar 11 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

RC students present an original play that has been conceived, written, and rehearsed within the past 24 hours.

Mar
13
Mon
Theodoris Chlotis: Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis @ Literati
Mar 13 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Literati is pleased to partner with the University of Michigan to present Theodoris Chiotis, editor of the anthology Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis.

Futures features some of the most daring new voices in Greek poetry, together with international poets with Greek connections. These bold, impassioned and critically aware texts stake new poetic and political ground: they articulate what it means to live in a time when capitalism is buckling under its own weight and new ways of living and thinking seem to be emerging. In a time of crisis, Futures calls for solidarity, resistance and poetry as a political paradigm.

Contributors: Dimitris Allos, Orfeas Apergis, Vassilis Amanatidis, Marios Chatziprokopiou, Theodoros Chiotis, Emily Critchley, Yiannis Doukas, Nikos Erinakis, Phoebe Giannisi, Constantinos Hadzinikolaou, Κaterina Iliopoulou, Panayotis Ioannidis, D.I. (Dimitra Ioannou), Adrianne Kalfopoulou, Patricia Kolaiti, Dimitra Kotoula, Alexios Mainas, Christodoulos Makris, Sophie Mayer, Stergios Mitas, Eftychia Panayiotou, Konstantinos Papacharalampos, Iordanis Papadopoulos, Stephanos Papadopoulos, Eleni Philippou, Stamatis Polenakis, Nick Potamitis, George Prevedourakis, Theodoros Rakopoulos, Kiriakos Sifiltzoglou, Eleni Sikélianòs, A. E. Stallings, Yiannis Stiggas, Barnaby Tideman, Maria Topali, Tryfon Tolides, Thanasis Triaridis, Thomas Tsalapatis, George Ttoouli, Universal Jenny, Steve Willey.

“Excellent … launches a counter-offensive against the inhuman and mystifying terminologies of high finance … [Chiotis’s] translations have such vitality that they mesh seamlessly with the English language poems.”–Times Literary Supplement

Mar
14
Tue
Vicki Delany: Elementary, She Read @ Aunt Agatha's
Mar 14 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Vicky Delany launches her new series  – a Sherlock themed cozy titled Elementary, She Read.

Mar
15
Wed
Fiction at Literati: Jung Yun @ Literati
Mar 15 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Literati is pleased to welcome Jung Yun in celebration of the paperback release of her debut novel, Shelter, a staff favorite and a semifinalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.

Kyung Cho is a young father burdened by a house he can’t afford. For years, he and his wife, Gillian, have lived beyond their means. Now their debts and bad decisions are catching up with them, and Kyung is anxious for his family’s future. A few miles away, his parents, Jin and Mae, live in the town’s most exclusive neighborhood, surrounded by the material comforts that Kyung desires for his wife and son. Growing up, they gave him every possible advantage—private tutors, expensive hobbies—but they never showed him kindness. Kyung can hardly bear to see them now, much less ask for their help. Yet when an act of violence leaves Jin and Mae unable to live on their own, the dynamic suddenly changes, and he’s compelled to take them in. For the first time in years, the Chos find themselves living under the same roof. Tensions quickly mount as Kyung’s proximity to his parents forces old feelings of guilt and anger to the surface, along with a terrible and persistent question: how can he ever be a good husband, father, and son when he never knew affection as a child?

As Shelter veers swiftly toward its startling conclusion, Jung Yun leads us through dark and violent territory, where, unexpectedly, the Chos discover hope. Shelter is a masterfully crafted debut novel that asks what it means to provide for one’s family and, in answer, delivers a story as riveting as it is profound.

Shelter is domestic drama at its best, a gripping narrative of secrets and revelations that seized me from beginning to end.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of The Sympathizer

Jung Yun was born in South Korea, grew up in North Dakota, and educated at Vassar College, the University of Pennsylvania, and University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her work has appeared in Tin House (the “Emerging Voices” issue); The Best of Tin House: Stories, edited by Dorothy Allison; and The Massachusetts Review; and she is the recipient of two Artist Fellowships in fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize. Currently, she lives in Baltimore with her husband and serves as an Assistant Professor of English at the George Washington University.

Mar
16
Thu
Zell Visiting Writers: Marie Howe @ U-M Museum of Art
Mar 16 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm

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.

Marie Howe has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and NYU. Her most recent book, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W. W. Norton, 2009) was a finalist for the IBook Prize. Her other collections of poetry include What the Living Do (1998) and The Good Thief (Persea, 1988), which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1987 National Poetry Series. She coedited (with Michael Klein) the essay anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She was the Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012 to 2014. She lives in New York City.

Fiction at Literati: Dan Chaon @ Literati
Mar 16 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Literati is delighted to welcome Dan Chaon in support of his latest novel, the staff-favorite Ill Will. Dan will be joined for a post-reading conversation by UM MFA first year in fiction Sam Krowchenko.

Two sensational unsolved crimes—one in the past, another in the present—are linked by one man’s memory and self-deception in this chilling novel of literary suspense from National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon. “We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves.” This is one of the little mantras Dustin Tillman likes to share with his patients, and it’s meant to be reassuring. But what if that story is a lie? A psychologist in suburban Cleveland, Dustin is drifting through his forties when he hears the news: His adopted brother, Rusty, is being released from prison. Thirty years ago, Rusty received a life sentence for the massacre of Dustin’s parents, aunt, and uncle. The trial came to epitomize the 1980s hysteria over Satanic cults; despite the lack of physical evidence, the jury believed the outlandish accusations Dustin and his cousin made against Rusty. Now, after DNA analysis has overturned the conviction, Dustin braces for a reckoning.

Meanwhile, one of Dustin’s patients has been plying him with stories of the drowning deaths of a string of drunk college boys. At first Dustin dismisses his patient’s suggestions that a serial killer is at work as paranoid thinking, but as the two embark on an amateur investigation, Dustin starts to believe that there’s more to the deaths than coincidence. Soon he becomes obsessed, crossing all professional boundaries—and putting his own family in harm’s way. From one of today’s most renowned practitioners of literary suspense, Ill Will is an intimate thriller about the failures of memory and the perils of self-deception. In Dan Chaon’s nimble, chilling prose, the past looms over the present, turning each into a haunted place.

“Dan Chaon’s new novel is subtly, steadily unnerving—like a scalpel slipping under your skin and prying it, ever so slowly, from the muscle beneath. Ill Will is a dark Möbius strip of a thriller that will leave you questioning what’s perceived and what’s imagined, and whether the reverberations of tragedy ever truly come to an end.”—Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You

Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.

Wayne Facelle: The Humane Economy @ Ross School of Business
Mar 16 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States and author of The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers are Transforming the Lives of Animals (William Morrow/Harper Collins), will discuss the themes of his book and sign copies at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
The Humane Economy has been listed as a national best seller in both the New York Times and Washington Post.
Ross School of Business, 701 Tappan Avenue. Free. 301-258-1563. KFeldman@humanesociety.org https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wayne-pacelle-ross-prof-andy-hoffman-attorneys-for-animals-net-impact-tickets-30886206475

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