Talk by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.
4-5:30 p.m., Mendelssohn Theatre. Free. 998-7666.
Please join the Clements Library as we celebrate the release of The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering an Early American Crisis, by James E. Lewis, Jr. A professor of History at Kalamazoo College, Lewis examines how rumors and reports of Aaron Burr’s activities in the trans-Appalachian West in 1805 and 1806 produced a sense of crisis that was broadly held across the new nation. He discusses the various political and cultural forces that shaped how men and women at the time turned vague and often conflicting accounts into enough certainty to act.
Books will be available for purchase.
Hatcher Graduate Library – The Gallery, 913 S. University Ave. Free. 734-647-0864.ehanka@umich.edu http://clements.umich.edu/exhibits-upcoming.php
Literati is thrilled to host novelist Thisbe Nissen who will be reading and discussing her latest Our Lady of the Prairie
About Our Lady of the Prairie
A sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish midwestern life gives way to a vortex of crises–and her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herself
In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad–long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter–grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, Phillipa returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny’s wedding. There, Phillipa must endure (among other things) a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her heretofore docile husband.
Naturally, she does what any newly liberated woman would do: she takes a match to her life on the prairie and then steps back to survey the wreckage.
Set in the seething political climate of a contentious election, Thisbe Nissen’s new novel is sexy, smart, and razor-sharp–a freight train barreling through the heart of the land and the land of the heart.
Thisbe Nissen is the author of a story collection, Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night, and two novels, The Good People of New York and Osprey Island. Her fiction has been published in the Iowa Review and the American Scholar, among others, and her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue, Glamour, and elsewhere. She teaches at Western Michigan University and lives in Battle Creek, Michigan, with her husband, writer Jay Baron Nicorvo, and their son.
Scott Seegert is the author of the Vordak the Incomprehensible series. He lives in Farmington, MI with his wife, Margie, and their three children.
John Martin is an illustrator, graphic artist, and website designer. He is the illustrator for the Vordak the Incomprehensible series. He lives in Farmington Hills, MI, with his wife, Mary, and their three children.
James Patterson presents a hilarious space adventure featuring an average human kid getting into a universe of trouble.
Kelvin is the new kid at Sci-Fi Junior High – a floating space station filled with alien kids form across the universe. And he arrived just in time for the annual school dance: The Galactic Get Down
Kelvin is desperate to take luminous Luna (her species literally glows), but now that his secret about not being a Mega Supergenius is out, Kelvin is doesn’t have a shot. He has to think of a way to become super cool so everyone forgets he lied about his average intelligence…
Cue mad scientist Erik Failenheimer’s escape from his asteroid prison, an army of Pinions (any similarities to the MinionsTM is purely coincidental), and a battle to save Sci-Fi Junior High from imminent doom. Let’s dance.
“Saving the universe has never been so much fun ” — Gordon Korman, #1 New York Timesbestselling author of 39 Clues and Masterminds on Sci-Fi Junior High.
Jan 2 & 16. Monthly open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. The 3 teams of judges are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Space limited, so it’s smart to arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), Greyline, 100 N. Ashley. $8. 764-5118.
Jane Austen Book Club Discussion at Nicola’s Books – Associated event of the University of Michigan Graduate Library ‘The Life and Times of Lizzy Bennet’ Exhibit
With the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, the Grad Library is showcasing not only significant early editions of Austen’s works held in the Special Collections Library, but a much broader swath of materials revealing the historical milieu in which she and her characters lived. This lead to a discussion about books about or written by Austen that reflected these times; out of that the Jane Austen Book Club Discussion was created. There will be three discussion events, February 7th, 28th and March 7th.
Sigrid Anderson Cordell is the Librarian for English Language and Literature and a lecturer in American Culture at the University of Michigan. She holds a PhD in English language and literature from the University of Virginia, and her research focuses on gender and race in nineteenth-century print culture. She is the author of Fictions of Dissent: Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women’s Writing of the Late Nineteenth Century (2010).
Juli McLoone is an Outreach Librarian & Curator in the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan. She holds an MA in Library and Information Science, with a Graduate Certificate in Book Studies / Book Arts and Technologies from the University of Iowa, as well as an MA in Anthropology, also from the University of Iowa. Her curatorial portfolio includes a number of areas, including the Special Collections Library’s post-1700 General and Rare Collection, the Children’s Literature Collection, and the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive.
Books will be available through Nicola’s Books – contact the store directly 734-662-0600 or come in to the store (2513 Jackson Avenue – Westgate Shopping Center.) Nicola’s Books will offer a 15% discount for the purchase of this title when you tell them that the book is for the Jane Austen Book Club. You may also check with the AADL for availability of the title.
Reading and discussion of several poems around the theme of dogs (Feb. 21). Followed by collaborative writing games and exercises. Attendees invited to read their poems. Snacks & socializing.
8-10 p.m., Argus Farm Stop greenhouse, 325 W. Liberty. $5 suggested donation. onepausepoetry.org, 707-1284
Robin Coste Lewis, the winner of the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, is the poet laureate of Los Angeles. She is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California, as well as a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California. Lewis was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.
Literati is thrilled to welcome poety Chris Glomski who will be reading from his new collection Lit Up.
About Lit Up:
There are fissures in quotidian details, light in the cracks of our daily lives, and nowhere are these gaps, reliefs, ands releases better displayed and bridged than in this book, Chris Glomski’s third collection of poetry. With characteristic intelligence and skill, the poet illuminates the *right* details and brings his artistry to recalling and connoting the scenes memory brings to bear, as narrative, event, and non sequitur.
Chris Glomski was born in Pueblo, Colorado, and has mostly lived in or around Chicago. He is the author of TRANSPARENCIES LIFTED FROM NOON (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005), THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND OTHER POEMS (The Cultural Society, 2011), and LIT UP (The Cultural Society, 2017). He lived in Pisa, Italy, from 1991 to 1992, and translates Italian poetry as an intermittent pursuit.
Literati is thrilled to welcome poet Lauren Clark who will be reading from her new collection Music for a Wedding.
About Music for a Wedding:
Lauren Clark’s poems move lucidly, depicting beautiful struggles of distrust, dream, grief, and intimacy. They show such conflicts through entrancing narrative drive and song-like abandon. In their unpredictable, unforgettable language, they make pain a tonic for pleasure, sorrow ground for revelation. This is a book that is celebratory, gentle, and queer.
Lauren Clark’s poems have appeared in FIELD, Ninth Letter, the Offing, and many other journals. They earned an MFA from the University of Michigan, where they won four of five categories of the university’s prestigious Hopwood Awards. They have been the recipient of scholarships from the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Sewanee Writers Conference. They work as program and development coordinator at Poets House in New York City and collaborate with Etc. Gallery in Chicago.
t.
