Join the Dexter District Library in welcoming back professional storytellers, Jane Fink and Steve Daut as they share the wit and wisdom of American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer, Mark Twain and American cartoonist, author, humorist, journalist, playwright, and celebrated wit, James Grover Thurber. This fun filled performance is sure to amuse and entertain. Register at the Adult Service Desk or call the library at 734-426-4477.
Contact: lryan@dexter.lib.mi.us
Location: Dexter District Library – Lower Level
Rescheduled from February 9.
Literati is excited to host translator Grace Mahoney for this special bi-lengual reading of Ukranian poet Iryna Starovoyt’s collection A Field of Foundlings.
About A Field of Foundlings:
Presented in a dual-language format, A Field of Foundlings is the first in Lost Horse Press’s series of Ukrainian poetry in translation. Starovoyt’s poetry investigates the curse and virtue of forgetting, the suppressed generational memory of the twentieth century, and the new context of its retelling in Eastern Europe. Drawing on the paradoxes of mythology, technology, and tradition, Starovoyt brings the traces of undesirable history and the minefields of memory into an unexpected constellation to interrogate assertions of knowledge and meaning-making in the world today. In a time where the chaos and power of forces beyond our own seem to diminish the potency of the past, Starovoyt’s poems invoke a conscious dialogue with a past that is not severed from the ever-changing present, but echoes in our sense of self, brings some continuity to our daily decisions, and orients us toward the future.
Grace Mahoney is a translator of Ukrainian and Russian literature. She is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder, co-authors of the new book Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America
About Designed for Hi-Fi Living:
How record albums and their covers delivered mood music, lifestyle advice, global sounds, and travel tips to midcentury Americans who longed to be modern.
The sleek hi-fi console in a well-appointed midcentury American living room might have had a stack of albums by musicians like Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, or Patti Page. It was just as likely to have had a selection of LPs from slightly different genres, with such titles as Cocktail Time, Music for a Chinese Dinner at Home, The Perfect Background Music for Your Home Movies, Honeymoon in Hawaii, Strings for a Space Age, or Cairo! The Music of Modern Egypt. The brilliantly hued, full-color cover art might show an ideal listener, an ideal living room, an ideal tourist in an exotic landscape — or even an ideal space traveler. In Designed for Hi-Fi Living, Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder listen to and look at these vinyl LPs, scouring the cover art and the liner notes, and find that these albums offered a guide for aspirational Americans who yearned to be modern in postwar consumer culture.
Borgerson and Schroeder examine the representations of modern life in a selection of midcentury record albums, discussing nearly 150 vintage album covers, reproduced in color — some featuring modern art or the work of famous designers and photographers. Offering a fascinating glimpse into the postwar imagination, the first part, “Home,” explores how the American home entered the frontlines of cold war debates and became an entertainment zone — a place to play music, mix drinks, and impress guests with displays of good taste. The second part, “Away,” considers albums featuring music, pictures, and tourist information that prepared Americans for the jet age as well as the space race.
Janet Borgerson is a Visiting Fellow at City, University of London.
Jonathan Schroeder is William A. Kern Professor of Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology. Borgerson and Schroeder are coauthors of From Chinese Brand Culture to Global Brands: Insights from Aesthetics, Fashion and History.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder, co-authors of the new book Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America
About Designed for Hi-Fi Living:
How record albums and their covers delivered mood music, lifestyle advice, global sounds, and travel tips to midcentury Americans who longed to be modern.
The sleek hi-fi console in a well-appointed midcentury American living room might have had a stack of albums by musicians like Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, or Patti Page. It was just as likely to have had a selection of LPs from slightly different genres, with such titles as Cocktail Time, Music for a Chinese Dinner at Home, The Perfect Background Music for Your Home Movies, Honeymoon in Hawaii, Strings for a Space Age, or Cairo! The Music of Modern Egypt. The brilliantly hued, full-color cover art might show an ideal listener, an ideal living room, an ideal tourist in an exotic landscape — or even an ideal space traveler. In Designed for Hi-Fi Living, Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder listen to and look at these vinyl LPs, scouring the cover art and the liner notes, and find that these albums offered a guide for aspirational Americans who yearned to be modern in postwar consumer culture.
Borgerson and Schroeder examine the representations of modern life in a selection of midcentury record albums, discussing nearly 150 vintage album covers, reproduced in color — some featuring modern art or the work of famous designers and photographers. Offering a fascinating glimpse into the postwar imagination, the first part, “Home,” explores how the American home entered the frontlines of cold war debates and became an entertainment zone — a place to play music, mix drinks, and impress guests with displays of good taste. The second part, “Away,” considers albums featuring music, pictures, and tourist information that prepared Americans for the jet age as well as the space race.
Janet Borgerson is a Visiting Fellow at City, University of London.
Jonathan Schroeder is William A. Kern Professor of Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology. Borgerson and Schroeder are coauthors of From Chinese Brand Culture to Global Brands: Insights from Aesthetics, Fashion and History.
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Literati is thrilled to welcome back author Chris McCormick to celebrate the paperback release of his book Desert Boys. He will be joined in conversation with Douglas Trevor, the current director for the Helen Zell Writers Program.
About Desert Boys:
This series of powerful, intertwining stories illuminates Daley Kushner’s world–the family, friends, and community that have both formed and constrained him, and his new life in San Francisco. Back home, the desert preys on those who cannot conform: an alfalfa farmer on the outskirts of town; two young girls whose curiosity leads to danger; a black politician who once served as his school’s confederate mascot; Daley’s mother, an immigrant from Armenia; and Daley himself, introspective and queer. Meanwhile, in another desert on the other side of the world, war threatens to fracture Daley’s most meaningful–and most fraught–connection to home, his friendship with Robert Karinger.
A luminous debut, Desert Boys by Chris McCormick traces the development of towns into cities, of boys into men, and the haunting effects produced when the two transformations overlap. Both a bildungsroman and a portrait of a changing place, the book mines the terrain between the desire to escape and the hunger to belong.
Chris McCormick is the author of the debut story collection Desert Boys, winner of the 2017 Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award. Originally from the California side of the Mojave Desert, he earned his MFA at the University of Michigan, where he was the recipient of two Hopwood Awards. He is currently an assistant professor at Minnesota State University, where he’s at work on his second book, a novel.
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Literati is proud to welcome author Moriel Rotham-Zecher who will be sharing his debut novel Saddness Is A White Bird.
About Saddness Is A White Bird:
In this lyrical and searing debut novel written by a rising literary star and MacDowell Fellow, a young man is preparing to serve in the Israeli army while also trying to reconcile his close relationship to two Palestinian siblings with his deeply ingrained loyalties to family and country. Four days after his nineteenth birthday, Jonathan is sitting in a military jail in Israel. Languishing in the dark cell, he recalls the series of events that led him to this point. It all began when he returned to Israel after being raised and educated in Pennsylvania. He knows that he will soon be drafted as a soldier. He will be called upon to preserve and defend the Jewish state, which includes monitoring the Palestinian territories within its borders but he is conflicted. With an intense drive to know more about the plight of the displaced and occupied Palestinians, he encounters Laith and Nimreen–the twin daughter and son of his mother’s friend. From that summer afternoon on, the three become inseparable: wandering the streets on weekends, piling onto buses en route to new discoveries, laughing uncontrollably. They share joints on the beach, trade private cultural treasures, intimate secrets, resentments, hopes, and dreams, revealing the deepest parts of themselves to each other. But with his draft date rapidly approaching, Jonathan wrestles with the question of what it means to be proud of your heritage while also feeling love for those outside of your own tribal family. And then that fateful day arrives, the one that lands Jonathan in prison and changes his relationship with the twins forever. Unflinching, important, and timely, Sadness Is a White Bird looks into the heart of what occupation and freedom really mean, exploring how one man attempts to find a place for himself, and discovers a beautiful, cross-cultural, against-the-odds love, the kind of love which we can hold up as an ideal in the midst of what seems like an implacable and never-ending conflict.
Moriel Rotham-Zecher is an American-Israeli writer, poet, and novelist. Born in Jerusalem, he graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in Arabic and political science. A recipient of a 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellowship for Literature, his work has been published in The New York Times, Haaretz, and elsewhere. Moriel lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio with his wife, Kayla, and their dog, Silly Department.
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This Ohio-based American-Israeli writer reads from Sadness Is a White Bird, his debut novel about a young man preparing to serve in the Israeli army while trying to reconcile his close relationship to 2 Palestinian siblings with his deeply ingrained loyalty to family and country. Signing.
About The Bible of Dirty Jokes:
When Ketzel Weinrach’s beloved brother Potsie goes missing in Las Vegas, she not only must try to find him, she must confront her family’s shady history and their ties to the legendary Jewish mob, Murder, Inc., as well as her troubling relationship to her cousin Perry (who runs a strip club on the outskirts of Vegas), her long and apparently not-so-loving marriage to her recently departed husband Morty Tittelman (a self-styled professor of dirty jokes and erotic folklore), and her own failed career as a stand-up comic.
Eileen Pollack is the award-winning author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction, including Breaking and Entering (Four Way Books 2012) and In The Mouth (Four Way Books 2008). She lives in Manhattan and Ann Arbor and teaches on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program in creative writing at the University of Michigan.
About When History Is Personal:
When History Is Personal contains the stories of twenty-five moments in Mimi Schwartz’s life, each heightened by its connection to historical, political, and social issues. These essays look both inward and outward so that these individualized tales tell a larger story—of assimilation, the women’s movement, racism, anti-Semitism, end-of-life issues, ethics in writing, digital and corporate challenges, and courtroom justice.
A shrewd and discerning storyteller, Schwartz captures history from her vantage as a child of German-Jewish immigrants, a wife of over fifty years, a breast cancer survivor, a working mother, a traveler, a tennis player, a daughter, and a widow. In adding her personal story to the larger narrative of history, culture, and politics, Schwartz invites readers to consider her personal take alongside “official” histories and offers readers fresh assessments of our collective past.
Mimi Schwartz is an award-winning, socially conscious memoirist and essayist who crafts personal experiences into compelling narratives. Her recent books include When History Is Personal (2018); Good Neighbors, Bad Times- Echoes of My Father’s Germany Village (2008); Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed (2002); and Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, co-authored with Sondra Perl. Her short work has appeared in Agni, Creative Nonfiction, The Writer’s Chronicle, Calyx, Prairie Schooner, Tikkun, The New York Times and The Missouri Review, among others. A recipient of a Foreword Book of the Year Award in Memoir and the New Hampshire Outstanding Literary Nonfiction Award, Schwartz’s essays have been widely anthologized and nine have been Notables in the Best American Essays Series. She is Professor Emerita in writing at Richard Stockton University and gives talks and creative writing workshops nationwide and abroad.
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
