All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Ann Arbor Storytellers Guild members host a storytelling program. Audience members are encouraged to bring a 5-minute story to tell.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom Tea Room, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is thrilled to welcome journalist Jason Fagone whose new book The Woman Who Smashed Codes explores the life of brilliant codebreaker Elizabeth Smith.
About The Woman Who Smashed Codes:
Joining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II
In 1916, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the “Adam and Eve” of the NSA, Elizebeth’s story, incredibly, has never been told.
In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nation’s history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizabeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitler’s Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an Army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma—and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life.
Fagone unveils America’s code-breaking history through the prism of Smith’s life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence. Blending the lively pace and compelling detail that are the hallmarks of Erik Larson’s bestsellers with the atmosphere and intensity of The Imitation Game, The Woman Who Smashed Codes is page-turning popular history at its finest.
Jason Fagone is a journalist who covers science, sports, and culture. Named one of the “Ten young Writers on the Rise” by the Columbia Journalism Review, he is a contributing writer to the Huffington Post Highline, and writes for a number of outlets, including GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, the New York Times, Mother Jones, and Philadelphia magazine. He is the author of Ingenious and Horsemen of the Esophagus, and lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Literati is excited to partner with our neighors at the Arbor Brewing Company to welcome author William Rapai who will be sharing his new book on craft beer Brewed in Michigan.
About Brewed in Michigan
Brewed in Michigan: The New Golden Age of Brewing in the Great Beer State is William Rapai’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”-a discussion of art and art’s audience. The art in this case is beer. Craft beer. Michigan craft beer, to be exact. Like the Great Lakes and the automobile, beer has become a part of Michigan’s identity. In 2016, Michigan ranked fifth in the number of craft breweries in the nation and tenth in the nation in craft beer production. Craft brewing now contributes more than $1.8 billion annually to the state’s economy and is proving to be an economic catalyst, helping to revive declining cities and invigorate neighborhoods.
This book is not a beer-tasting guide. Instead, Rapai aims to highlight the unique forces behind and exceptional attributes of the leading craft breweries in Michigan. Through a series of interviews with brewmasters over an eighteenth-month sojourn to microbreweries around the state, the author argues that Michigan craft beer is brewed by individuals with a passion for excellence who refuse to be process drones. It is brewed by people who have created a culture that values quality over quantity and measures tradition and innovation in equal parts. Similarly, the taprooms associated with these craft breweries have become a conduit for conversation-places for people to gather and discuss current events, raise money for charities, and search for ways to improve their communities. They’re places where strangers become friends, friends fall in love, and lovers get married. These brewpubs and taprooms are an example in resourcefulness-renovating old churches and abandoned auto dealerships in Michigan’s biggest cities, tiny suburbs, working-class neighborhoods, and farm towns. Beer, as it turns out, can be the lifeblood of a community.
William Rapai lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan and is the author of two other books: Lake Invaders: Invasive Species and the Battle for the Future of the Great Lakes (Wayne State University Press, 2016) and The Kirtland’s Warbler: The Story of a Bird’s Fight Against Extinction and the People Who Saved it.
Literati is excited to host author and Oylmpian Casey Barnett to read from and discuss his new novel Under Water.
About Under Water:
Duck Darley should have been a winner. Once a competitive swimmer destined for Olympic gold, he drank away his gilded youth and followed his fraudster father’s footsteps into prison. Barely scraping by as an unlicensed private investigator, Duck now chases down cheating spouses for the same Manhattan elite who once viewed him as equal, and drowns bitter memories with whatever fills his glass.
Duck’s lost glory days resurface when he’s tasked with finding the teenaged sister of a former teammate turned Olympic champion. Privileged Madeline McKay vanished over Labor Day weekend, leaving behind a too-perfect West Village apartment and a promising athletic career of her own. Duck thinks he’s hunting for a self-destructive runaway–until Madeline’s film student ex is savagely murdered, and the media spins her as the psycho who killed him.
As Duck searches for Madeline, he’s plunged back into the dark underbelly of Olympic swimming–a world rife with wild lies and terrible violence. And he soon learns that no matter how hard he tries to escape his past, demons still lurk beneath every surface . . .
CASEY BARRETT is a Canadian Olympian and the co-founder and co-CEO of Imagine Swimming, New York City’s largest learn-to-swim school. He has won three Emmy awards and one Peabody award for his work on NBC’s broadcasts of the Olympic Games in 2000, 2004, 2006, and 2008. Casey lives in Manhattan and the Catskill mountains of New York with his wife, daughter, and hound. He can be found online at caseybarrettbooks.com.
All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Join us as we are excited to hear authors Cindy Milstein and Jeff Clark share the book Rebellious Mourning, a look at grief’s power for social transformation
About Rebellious Mourning:
We can bear almost anything when it is worked through collectively. Grief is generally thought of as something personal and insular, but when we publicly share loss and pain, we lessen the power of the forces that debilitate us, while at the same time building the humane social practices that alleviate suffering and improve quality of life for everyone. Addressing tragedies from Fukushima to Palestine, incarceration to eviction, AIDS crises to border crossings, and racism to rape, the intimate yet tenacious writing in this volume shows that mourning can pry open spaces of contestation and reconstruction, empathy and solidarity. With contributions from Claudia Rankine, Sarah Schulman, David Wojnarowicz, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, David Gilbert, and nineteen others.
Cindy Milstein is the author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations, co-author of Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism, and editor of the anthology Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism.
Literati is thrilled to host novelist Chloe Benjamin in support of her latest book The Immortalists, a story of four siblings struggling with fate and family following a psychic’s mysterious prophecy.
About The Immortalists:
If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?
It’s 1969 in New York City’s Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. In search of one thing they can know for sure, the Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.
Though the siblings keep the dates secret from one another, their prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in ’80s San Francisco. Dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11, hoping to control fate; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.
A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.
Chloe Benjamin is the author of the novel The Anatomy of Dreams, which received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was longlisted for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. She is a graduate of Vassar College and holds an MFA in fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in The Millions, PANK, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband in Madison, Wisconsin.
Literati is thrilled to welcome back poet Raymond McDaniel who will read from his new collection Cataracts
About Cataracts:
Poetry as Escher: shifting perspective, a landscape that doesn’t stand still, and questions that fold in on themselves.
“A registering, a remembering, a naming, a seeing behind and beyond seeing: The Cataracts is a book of blindness and insight, offering a tenderly, sometimes painfully, scrutinized world. With gorgeous catalogs, reticulated narratives, and aphoristic summings-up, McDaniel offers a mode of neo-Stoic inquiry into ethics and epistemology, of ‘logopoeia, ‘ the dance of the intellect. Here too are sharpened senses, alert to ‘the emerald blur’ of a richly greened world, to ‘the sea the stupid wall exists to stop, ‘ to trip-wired words and moonlit reflections. McDaniel is an astute, generous poet of human stupidity and longing, and his is a mature, ramifying sensibility, alive to the profound tension between the many and the one, the pressure of multitudes and the requirement to declare oneself. These poems both name the wounds and refuse easy balm. As the title of one stunning long poem has it, ‘This Is Going to Hurt.'” –Maureen McLane
“Raymond McDaniel has always been the most brilliant of poets–razor sharp in intellect, take-no-prisoners in form. What is new in The Cataracts is a broader, more hospitable ease with the legible forms of feeling, with even–remarkable!–the partial lineaments of narrative. Make no mistake: this is narrative-with-leverage; the poet’s dazzling mind-play is perfectly intact. Among the other gifts these poems have to offer is a penetrating inquiry into the physics, the metaphysics, and the brutal socioeconomics of sight. From its ravishing title poem to its most excoriating political critiques, this is a book for which I am profoundly grateful.” –Linda Gregerson
Raymond McDaniel is the author of Special Powers and Abilities, Saltwater Empire and Murder (a violet), a National Poetry Series selection. Born in Florida, McDaniel now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, teaches at the University of Michigan, and writes for The Constant Critic.
Literati is excited to welcome poet Rae Paris who will be reading from her new collection The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory
About The Forgetting Tree:
Rae Paris began writing The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory in 2010, while traveling the United States, visiting sites of racial trauma, horror, and resistance. The desire to do this work came from being a child of parents born and raised in New Orleans during segregation, who ultimately left for California in the late 1950s. After the death of her father in 2011, the fiction Paris had been writing gave way to poetry and short prose, which were heavily influenced by the questions she’d long been considering about narrative, power, memory, and freedom. Paris is driven by the familial and historical spaces and by what happens when we remember seemingly disparate images and moments. A blending of prose, poetry, and images, The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory is a necessary collection that argues for a deeper understanding of past and present so we might imagine a more hopeful, sustaining, and loving future for Black lives.
Rae Paris is from Carson, California with roots extending to New Orleans. Her work has been supported by a NEA Literature Fellowship, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Hedgebrook, Hambidge Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts, and VONA. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington.
