Literati is excited to welcome Robin Sloan in support of his new novel, Sourdough
About Sourdough:
In his much-anticipated new novel, Robin Sloan does for the world of food what he did for the world of books in Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her—feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it.
Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up.
When Lois comes before the jury that decides who sells what at Bay Area markets, she encounters a close-knit club with no appetite for new members. But then, an alternative emerges: a secret market that aims to fuse food and technology. But who are these people, exactly?
“Part love letter to books, part technological meditation, part thrilling adventure, part requiem… Eminently enjoyable, full of warmth and intelligence.” –The New York Times Book Review
“One of the most thoughtful and fun reading experiences you’re likely to have this year…There’s so much largehearted magic in this book.” –NPR
Robin Sloan grew up in Michigan and now splits his time between San Francisco and the Internet.
Reading by this GVSU creative writing professor, a widely published poet whose 2014 book The Dead Wrestler Elegies, is an acclaimed collection of illustrated poems about professional wrestling and the toll it has taken on its stars. “Todd Kaneko’s The Dead Wrestler Elegies is some kind of miracle,” says NMU English professor and poet Matthew Gavin Frank. “The book succeeds as … myth-making and intervention, … and a meditation on everything from gender politics to the points at which we all, eventually, submit. Rarely has a book of poetry (even illustrated poetry) managed to be so profound while being so entertaining.” The program begins with open mike readings.
7-8:30 p.m., Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663
Literati is excited to welcome author Marta McDowell in support of her new book The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder
About The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House series is a classic coming-of-age story based on Wilder’s own family and the pioneer spirit of the time. Deeply rooted in the natural world, Wilder describes the plants, animals, and landscapes in such detail, they are practically their own characters. The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by New York Timesbestselling author Marta McDowell, explores Wilder’s deep relationship with the landscape. Follow the Wilder’s wagon trail starting in the Wisconsin setting of Little House in the Big Woods, through the Dakotas, and finally to Missouri. You’ll learn details about Wilder’s life and inspirations, discover how to visit the real places today, and even learn to grow the plants and vegetables featured in the series. The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder is a must-have treasure celebrating the American landscape through Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beautiful and wild life with original illustrations by Helen Sewell and Garth Williams and lush historical and contemporary photographs.
“This well-researched, sweeping book details the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder and those who came before her. It is clear that the different landscapes shaped them, particularly Laura and ‘Pa.’ The original are of Garth Williams and Helen Sewell deepens the poignancy and power of Laura’s prairie, since today only one percent of it survives. Laura’s work has preserved it for us. This book preserves it for us.” —Patricia MacLachlan, author of Sarah, Plain and Tall, winner of the Newbery Medal
“Lavishly illustrated with photographs, drawings, maps, and, notably, a selection of Helen Sewell and Garth Williams’ illustrations from the Little House books. . . . the book is a feast of opportunity for dedicated Wilder fans and enthusiastic gardeners everywhere.” —Booklist
Marta McDowell lives, gardens, and writes in Chatham, New Jersey. She teaches landscape history and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden, where she studied landscape design. McDowell also consults for public gardens and private clients. Her particular interest is in authors and their gardens, the connection between the pen and the trowel.
Readings by Kathleen McGookey, a widely published poet from the Grand Rapids area who recently published the prose poem collection Heart in a Jar, and Gregory Loselle, a Gabriel Richard English teacher (and former U-M Hopwood Award winner) who has published 4 chapbooks, including the recent About the House.Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is thrilled to welcome Annie Spence in support of her new book Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks
About Fahrenheit 451:
A Gen-X librarian’s snarky, laugh-out-loud funny, deeply moving collection of love letters and break-up notes to the books in her life.
Librarians spend their lives weeding. Not weeds, but books! Books that have reached the end of their shelf life, both literally and figuratively. They remove the books that patrons no longer check out. And they put back the books they treasure. Annie Spence, who has a decade of experience as a Midwestern librarian, does this not only at her Michigan library but also at home, for her neighbors, at cocktail parties—everywhere. In Dear Fahrenheit 451, she addresses those books directly. We read her love letters to The Goldfinch and Matilda, as well as her snarky break-ups with Fifty Shades of Grey and Dear John. Her notes to The Virgin Suicides and The Time Traveler’s Wife feel like classics, sure to strike a powerful chord with readers. Through the lens of the books in her life, Annie comments on everything from feminism to culture to health to poverty to childhood aspirations. Hilarious, compassionate, and wise, Dear Fahrenheit 451 is the consummate book-lover’s birthday present, stocking stuffer, holiday gift, and all-purpose humor book.
“…perfect for any bibliophile and terrifically funny. This book should appeal to readers who are looking for the next Texts from Jane Eyre, or those who enjoyed that concept but don’t especially like texting. It will also attract anyone who, upon walking into someone’s house, first side-eyes the bookshelves and instantly judges. VERDICT Highly recommended.” —Starred Review, Library Journal
Annie Spence has spent the last decase as a librarian at public libraries in the Midwest. She lives in Detroit with her husband and son. Dear Fahrenheit 451 is her first book.
Tonight Literati is thrilled to welcome authors Sharon Harrigan and Rick Bailey in support of their new memoirs Playing with Dynamite and American English, Italian Chocolate
About Playing with Dynamite
Sharon Harrigan’s father was larger than life, a brilliant but troubled man who blew off his hand with dynamite before she was born and died in a mysterious and bizarre accident when she was seven. The story of his death never made sense. How did he really die? And why was she so sure that asking would be dangerous? A series of events compel her to find the answers, collecting other people’s memories and uncovering her own. Her two-year odyssey takes her from Virginia to Detroit to Paris and finally to the wilds of northern Michigan where her father died. There, she discovers the real danger and has to confront her fear.
Playing with Dynamite is about the family secrets that can distance us from each other and the honesty that can bring us closer. It’s about a daughter who goes looking for her father but finds her mother instead. It’s about memory and truth, grieving and growing, and what it means to go home again.
About American English, Italian Chocolate
American English, Italian Chocolate is a memoir in essays beginning in the American Midwest and ending in north central Italy. In sharply rendered vignettes, Rick Bailey reflects on donuts and ducks, horses and car crashes, outhouses and EKGs. He travels all night from Michigan to New Jersey to attend the funeral of a college friend. After a vertiginous climb, he staggers in clogs across the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In a trattoria in the hills above the Adriatic, he ruminates on the history and glories of beans, from Pythagoras to Thoreau, from the Saginaw Valley to the Province of Urbino. Bailey is a bumbling extra in a college production of Richard III. He is a college professor losing touch with a female student whose life is threatened by her husband. He is a father tasting samples of his daughter’s wedding cake. He is a son witnessing his aging parents’ decline. He is the husband of an Italian immigrant who takes him places he never imagined visiting, let alone making his own. At times humorous, at times bittersweet, Bailey’s ultimate subject is growing and knowing, finding the surprise and the sublime in the ordinary detail of daily life
Sharon Harrigan has a B.A. in English from Columbia University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University. She teaches memoir writing at WriterHouse in Charlottesville. She has published over four dozen essays, reviews, and short stories. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Slice, Narrative, Pearl, Prime Number, Silk Road, Mid American Review, Louisiana Literature, Apercus Quarterly, Rain Taxi, Hip Mama, Fiction Writers’ Review, Streetlight Magazine, Passing Through Journal, The Nervous Breakdown, and The Rumpus. She is a contributing editor at The Nervous Breakdownand at Silk Road Review.
Ricky Bailey is a professor emeritus of English at Henry Ford College in Michigan. He is the author or editor of several books on writing, including The Creative Writer’s Craft.
Literati is thrilled to welcome back Phil & Erin Stead for the launch of their new book The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine!
About The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine:
A never-before-published, previously unfinished Mark Twain children’s story is brought to life by Caldecott Medal winners Philip Stead and Erin Stead.
In a hotel in Paris one evening in 1879, Mark Twain sat with his young daughters, who begged their father for a story. Twain began telling them the tale of Johnny, a poor boy in possession of some magical seeds. Later, Twain would jot down some rough notes about the story, but the tale was left unfinished…until now.
Plucked from the Mark Twain archive at the University of California at Berkeley, Twain’s notes now form the foundation of a fairy tale picked up over a century later. With only Twain’s fragmentary script and a story that stops partway as his guide, author Philip Stead has written a tale that imagines what might have been if Twain had fully realized this work.
Johnny, forlorn and alone except for his pet chicken, meets a kind woman who gives him seeds that change his fortune, allowing him to speak with animals and sending him on a quest to rescue a stolen prince. In the face of a bullying tyrant king, Johnny and his animal friends come to understand that generosity, empathy, and quiet courage are gifts more precious in this world than power and gold.
Illuminated by Erin Stead’s graceful, humorous, and achingly poignant artwork, this is a story that reaches through time and brings us a new book from America’s most legendary writer, envisioned by two of today’s most important names in children’s literature.
PHILIP STEAD is the author of the Caldecott Medal–winning book A Sick Day for Amos McGee. With his wife, illustrator Erin Stead, he also created the acclaimed Bear Has a Story to Tell, Lenny & Lucy, and The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine, based on a previously-unpublished children’s story by Mark Twain. Philip has also written and illustrated his own books, including Hello, My Name Is Ruby; Jonathan and the Big Blue Boat; and A Home for Bird. Philip and Erin live in northern Michigan.
ERIN STEAD is the illustrator of eight picture books, including the Caldecott Medal–winning A Sick Day for Amos McGee; The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine, illustrated by Philip Stead and based on a previously-unpublished children’s story by Mark Twain; And Then It’s Spring, a 2012 Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book and a Best Children’s Book of 2012 by Kirkus and Publishers Weekly; Bear Has a Story to Tell, a Best Children’s Book of 2012 by Kirkus; and The Uncorker of Ocean Bottles, named a best book of the year by Time, People Magazine, the Boston Globe, and School Library Journal. She lives in northern Michigan with her husband, author/illustrator Philip Stead.
Readings by these 2 writers. Born in Saigon and raised in Connecticut, Vuong writes poems that explore transformation, desire, and violent loss. His debut 2016 collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, has been praised by the New York Times for its “powerful emotional undertow … that springs from Mr. Vuong’s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.” Gates is an acclaimed fiction writer, dubbed “John Updike Without God,” whose 1991 novel, Jernigan, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His 2015 collection, A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me, is “brutal, viciously intelligent, and full of reckless, difficult love for its characters,” says New Yorker critic Ben Marcus. “These are gripping, sophisticated, gasp-inducing stories.”
5:30 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 615-3710.
Literati is excited to host a reading from three wonderful poets; Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Heather Derr-Smith and Molly Spencer.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American poet of Palestinian, Jordanian and Syrian heritage. Her poems have been published in American and international journals including Blackbird, The Boiler, Borderlands Texas Review, The Indianola Review, James Franco Review, The Lake for Poetry, Lunch Ticket, Mizna, The Ofi Press Mexico, Sukoon, and the Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art. Several of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, “Immigrant” in 2015 and for “Middle Village” and “Ruin” in 2016. She is an MFA candidate at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Redmond, Washington, with her family.
Heather Derr Smith is a poet and human rights activist and the author of four books of poetry, Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005), The Bride Minaret (University of Akron Press, 2008), Tongue Screw (Spark Wheel Press, 2016), and Thrust winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award (Persea Books, 2017. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and divides her time between Iowa and Sarajevo, Bosnia.
Molly Spencer’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, The Missouri Review poem of the week web feature, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and other journals. Her critical writing has appeared at Colorado Review, Kenyon Review Online, and The Rumpus. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop, and is a poetry editor at The Rumpus. Find her online at www.mollyspencer.com.
Literati is excited to welcome Lucy Ives for a reading from her new novel Impossible Views of the World.
About Impossible Views of the World
Stella Krakus, a curator at Manhattan’s renowned Central Museum of Art, is having the roughest week in approximately ever. Her soon-to-be ex-husband (the perfectly awful Whit Ghiscolmbe) is stalking her, a workplace romance with “a fascinating, hyper-rational narcissist” is in freefall, and a beloved colleague, Paul, has gone missing. Strange things are afoot: CeMArt’s current exhibit is sponsored by a Belgian multinational that wants to take over the world’s water supply, she unwittingly stars in a viral video that’s making the rounds, and her mother—the imperious, impossibly glamorous Caro—wants to have lunch. It’s almost more than she can overanalyze.
But the appearance of a strange map, depicting a mysterious 19th-century utopian settlement, sends Stella—a dogged expert in American graphics and fluidomanie (don’t ask)—on an all-consuming research mission. As she teases out the links between a haunting poem, several unusual novels, a counterfeiting scheme, and one of the museum’s colorful early benefactors, she discovers the unbearable secret that Paul’s been keeping, and charts a course out of the chaos of her own life. Pulsing with neurotic humor and dagger-sharp prose, Impossible Views of the World is a dazzling debut novel about how to make it through your early thirties with your mind and heart intact.
Lucy Ives is the author of several books of poetry and short prose, including Anamnesis, a long poem that won the Slope Book Prize, and the novella nineties. Her writing has appeared in Bomb, Artforum, n+1, Conjunctions, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and at newyorker.com. For five years she was an editor with Triple Canopy, the Brooklyn-based online magazine. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is completing a Ph.D. in comparative literature at NYU.
