Literati is delighted to welcome Ruth Behar in support of her first book for young readers, Lucky Broken Girl.
In this unforgettable multicultural coming-of-age narrative—based on the author’s childhood in the 1960s—a young Cuban-Jewish immigrant girl is adjusting to her new life in New York City when her American dream is suddenly derailed. Ruthie’s plight will intrigue readers, and her powerful story of strength and resilience, full of color, light, and poignancy, will stay with them for a long time.
Ruthie Mizrahi and her family recently emigrated from Castro’s Cuba to New York City. Just when she’s finally beginning to gain confidence in her mastery of English—and enjoying her reign as her neighborhood’s hopscotch queen—a horrific car accident leaves her in a body cast and confined her to her bed for a long recovery. As Ruthie’s world shrinks because of her inability to move, her powers of observation and her heart grow larger and she comes to understand how fragile life is, how vulnerable we all are as human beings, and how friends, neighbors, and the power of the arts can sweeten even the worst of times.
“A book for anyone mending from childhood wounds.”—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
Ruth Behar (www.ruthbehar.com) is an acclaimed author of adult fiction and nonfiction, and Lucky Broken Girl is her first book for young readers (ages 10 and up). She was born in Havana, Cuba, grew up in New York City, and has also lived and worked in Spain and Mexico. An anthropology professor at the University of Michigan, she is also co-editor of Women Writing Culture, editor of Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba, and co-editor of The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World. Her honors include a MacArthur “Genius” Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, and a Distinguished Alumna Award from Wesleyan University. Much in demand as a public speaker, Ruth’s speaking engagements have taken her to the United States, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Spain, Finland, Israel, Italy, Ireland, Poland, England, the Netherlands, Japan, and New Zealand. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Literati is pleased to welcome Jay Baron Nicorvo in support of his first novel, The Standard Grand.
The Standard Grand is “a desperate masterpiece of a debut” (Bonnie Jo Campbell) that tells a huge-hearted American saga—of love, violence, war, conspiracy and the aftermath of them all.
When an Army trucker goes AWOL before her third deployment, she ends up sleeping in Central Park. There, she meets a Vietnam vet and widower who inherited a tumbledown Borscht Belt resort. Converted into a halfway house for homeless veterans, the Standard—and its two thousand acres over the Marcellus Shale Formation—is coveted by a Houston-based multinational company. Toward what end, only a corporate executive knows.
With three violent acts at its center—a mauling, a shooting, a mysterious death decades in the past—and set largely in the Catskills, The Standard Grand spans an epic year in the lives of its diverse cast: a female veteran protagonist, a Mesoamerican lesbian landman, a mercenary security contractor keeping secrets and seeking answers, a conspiratorial gang of combat vets fighting to get peaceably by, and a cougar—along with appearances by Sammy Davis, Jr. and Senator Al Franken. All of the characters—soldiers, civilians—struggle to discover that what matters most is not that they’ve caused no harm, but how they make amends for the harm they’ve caused.
Jay Baron Nicorvo’s The Standard Grand confronts a glaring cultural omission: the absence of women in our war stories. Like the best of its characters—who aspire more to goodness than greatness—this American novel hopes to darn a hole or two in the frayed national fabric.
“I find few things more hopeful, in these darkening times, than a writer who can stare, unblinking, into the gut-wrenching destruction humans are wreaking upon each other and the earth, and still find shards of humor and humanity. A dash of Coetzee, a dram of Delillo, but mostly just the complicated compassion of Jay Nicorvo. The Standard Grand is a brutally beautiful novel.” —Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted
Jay Baron Nicorvo is the author of a novel, The Standard Grand, forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in April, and a poetry collection, Deadbeat (Four Way Books, 2012). His writing can be found in Salon, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, The Believer, and was twice named “Notable” in Best American Essays. Featured on NPR and PBS NewsHour, he’s been an editor at Ploughshares and at PEN America, the literary magazine of the PEN American Center, and was membership director of a nonprofit organization supporting independent publishing, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses [clmp]. A sometimes teacher at Western Michigan University, where he helps advise Third Coast, he lives on an old farm outside Battle Creek with his wife, Thisbe Nissen, their son, and a couple dozen vulnerable chickens.
This Mt. Pleasant poet (and U-M grad) reads from Our Sudden Museum, his new collection of elegiac poems that explore what sustains us in spite of loss. Signing.
Literati is please to welcome Clayton Eshleman back to the store in support of his new collection, Penetralia.
The world embraced by Eshleman’s poetry is our world. As a contemporary writer, Eshleman’s history is our own: his writing a record and reflection of our times. Eshleman’s story — the story revealed in his poetry — is the story of mid-America meeting the wider world; the story of social and political radicalism, of a counterculture raising a voice in poetry and in art; of the challenges, frustrations and anomie that befell that counterculture and of the continued and indeed on-going drama of empire and overreaching power, from Vietnam and El Salvador to Afghanistan and Iraq. Eshleman’s life in letters has exemplified a commitment to ceaseless, wide-ranging exploration and encounter: with other places, other people, other poetries — foreign and familiar —, other modes of thought and image. As he has written of his work: “I dream of poems that could change something essential / about the way a few people view creation…”
Clayton Eshleman has published roughly 100 books and chapbooks of original poetry, translations, and nonfiction writings, and edited seventy issues of magazines and journals, including the ground-breaking Caterpillar and Sulfur. He has published a translation of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo, for which he received the National Book Award, several collections of poetry by Aime Cesaire, a collection of poetry and prose from Antonin Artaud’s final period, as well as translations and co-translations of book by such poets as Vladimir Holan, Bernard Bador, Jose Antonio Mazzotti, Pablo Neruda, and Bei Dao. He has received two Landon Translation Prizes from the American Academy of Poets. His writings have appeared in over 500 literary magazines and journals around the world and his books and writings have been translated into a number of languages. It is undoubtedly unnecessary to observe that he made and has fulfilled a life commitment to poetry.
Literati is delighted to welcome staff-favorite Patricia Lockwood in support of her memoir, Priestdaddy.
From Patricia Lockwood—a writer acclaimed for her wildly original voice—a vivid, heartbreakingly funny memoir about having a married Catholic priest for a father. Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met—a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates “like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972.” His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church’s country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents’ rectory, their two worlds collide.
In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves emblematic moments from her childhood and adolescence—from an ill-fated family hunting trip and an abortion clinic sit-in where her father was arrested to her involvement in a cultlike Catholic youth group—with scenes that chronicle the eight-month adventure she and her husband had in her parents’ household after a decade of living on their own. Lockwood details her education of a seminarian who is also living at the rectory, tries to explain Catholicism to her husband, who is mystified by its bloodthirstiness and arcane laws, and encounters a mysterious substance on a hotel bed with her mother.
Lockwood pivots from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the deeply serious, exploring issues of belief, belonging, and personhood. Priestdaddy is an entertaining, unforgettable portrait of a deeply odd religious upbringing, and how one balances a hard-won identity with the weight of family and tradition.
“Patricia Lockwood’s side-splitting Priestdaddy puts the poetry back in memoir. Her verbal verve creates a reading experience of effervescent joy, even as Lockwood takes you through some of her life’s darker passages. Destined to be a classic, Priestdaddy is this year’s must-read memoir.”–Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club
Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a New York Times Notable Book. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, and The London Review of Books. She lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
Literati is pleased to welcome Susan Faludi in support of her memoir, In the Darkroom, winner of the 2016 Kirkus Prize and one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2016.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of Backlash, In the Darkroom is an astonishing confrontation with the enigma of her father and the larger riddle of identity consuming our age.
“In the summer of 2004 I set out to investigate someone I scarcely knew, my father. The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things—obligation, affection, culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing discovery for a trial. But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor became a witness.”
So begins Susan Faludi’s extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of identity in the modern world and in her own haunted family saga. When the feminist writer learned that her 76-year-old father—long estranged and living in Hungary—had undergone sex reassignment surgery, that investigation would turn personal and urgent. How was this new parent who claimed to be “a complete woman now” connected to the silent, explosive, and ultimately violent father she had known, the photographer who’d built his career on the alteration of images?
Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her suburban childhood and her father’s many previous incarnations: American dad, Alpine mountaineer, swashbuckling adventurer in the Amazon outback, Jewish fugitive in Holocaust Budapest. When the author travels to Hungary to reunite with her father, she drops into a labyrinth of dark histories and dangerous politics in a country hell-bent on repressing its past and constructing a fanciful—and virulent—nationhood. The search for identity that has transfixed our century was proving as treacherous for nations as for individuals.
Faludi’s struggle to come to grips with her father’s reinvented self takes her across borders—historical, political, religious, sexual—to bring her face to face with the question of the age: Is identity something you “choose,” or is it the very thing you can’t escape?
Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and the author of the bestselling Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. In The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America, she examines the post-9/11 outpouring in the media, popular culture, and political life. Faludi’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Nation, among other publications.
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.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is pleased to host Teen Spirit, an award-winning publication of the Skyline High School Writing Center. Teen Spirit is a literary magazine that allows students to share their writing, art, photography, songs, and videos with our broader community, providing them an authentic audience for their work. This event will feature several exceptional Skyline student writers reading their fiction, poetry, and essays from the fifth edition of Teen Spirit publicly for the first time.
An editorial board comprised of students in the Skyline Writing Center curate, design, and edit Teen Spirit. This year’s editorial board consists of general editors Anne Boyd (’17), Bridgette Bauer (’18), Christopher Morgan-Martin (’17), Sophia Nam (’17), Madeline Small (’18), art editor Star Su (‘17), and promotions directors Leahley Alawi (’18) and Bailey Christensen (’18). The first two editions of Teen Spirit (‘13 and ‘14) received a superior rating from National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), which is the highest possible rating. The third and fourth editions of Teen Spirit (’15 and ‘16) received an excellent rating from NCTE, the second highest rating a literary magazine can earn.
The Skyline Writing Center is a student-centered peer tutoring and mentoring organization that provides high-quality writing support to students every hour of every school day. Each year, 30 qualified juniors and seniors are trained to work with all students on a wide variety of genres at any stage of the writing process. Since opening in 2012, the Writing Center has made more than 5,000 student contacts. Jeffrey Austin, a Skyline English teacher, is the program’s founder and director.
Website: tinyurl.com/skylinewc
Twitter: @Skyline_WC
Instagram: Skyline_Writing_Center
Facebook: Skyline Writing Center
Literati is pleased to welcome Ann S. Epstein in support of her novel, On the Shore.
Set in 1917–1925, On the Shore follows the upheaval in an immigrant Jewish family when a son lies about his name and age to fight in WWI. Without telling his family, 16-year-old Shmuel Levinson (a.k.a. Sam Lord) strives to prove his manhood and escape his father’s pressure that he become a rabbi by enlisting in the Navy. His smart but rebellious younger sister, Dev, mourns his disappearance, while chafing against her father’s expectation that she marry instead of pursuing a career in science. Their successful uncle, Gershon Mendel, confronts failure when he ventures beyond their sheltered Lower East Side community to search for the missing boy. On the Shore offers a poignant look at the strained relationships that trouble the multi-generation immigrant families of today as well as yesteryear.
Ann S. Epstein writes novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction. She is the winner of the 2017 Walter Sullivan Prize for Rising Talent. Her novels include On the Shore (Vine Leaves Press, 2017), A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (Alternative Book Press, 2017, in press), and Tazia and Gemma (Vine Leaves Press, 2018, in press). Her stories appear in Sewanee Review, PRISM International, Ascent, The Long Story, Saranac Review, Passages North, Red Rock Review, William and Mary Review, Tahoma Literary Review, The Copperfield Review, The Normal School, Carbon Culture, Earth’s Daughters, theNewerYork, Clark Street Review, Emrys Journal, and The Offbeat. In addition to creative writing, she has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology and M.F.A. in textiles, which influence the content and imagery of her work. Her books and stories often have historical settings where fact and fiction are liberally mixed, and she is gratified to have forgotten what is and is not real by the time a work is finished. Her nonfiction explores the people, places, and events that shape us, especially the residue left by family and friends.
