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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Mar. 6 & 20. 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. Mar. themes: “Manners” (Mar. 6) & “Aftermath” (Mar. 20). 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.
Kathleen A. Flynn is an editor at the New York Times, where she works at “The Upshot.” She holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.A. from the University of North Carolina. She has taught English in Hong Kong, washed dishes on Nantucket, and is a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their shy fox terrier, Olive.
The Jane Austen Project: Perfect for fans of Jane Austen, this engrossing debut novel offers an unusual twist on the legacy of one of the world’s most celebrated and beloved authors: two researchers from the future are sent back in time to meet Jane and recover a suspected unpublished novel.
London, 1815: Two travelers–Rachel Katzman and Liam Finucane–arrive in a field in rural England, disheveled and weighed down with hidden money. Turned away at a nearby inn, they are forced to travel by coach all night to London. They are not what they seem, but rather colleagues who have come back in time from a technologically advanced future, posing as wealthy West Indies planters–a doctor and his spinster sister. While Rachel and Liam aren’t the first team from the future to “go back,” their mission is by far the most audacious: meet, befriend, and steal from Jane Austen herself.
Carefully selected and rigorously trained by The Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics, disaster-relief doctor Rachel and actor-turned-scholar Liam have little in common besides the extraordinary circumstances they find themselves in. Circumstances that call for Rachel to stifle her independent nature and let Liam take the lead as they infiltrate Austen’s circle via her favorite brother, Henry.
But diagnosing Jane’s fatal illness and obtaining an unpublished novel hinted at in her letters pose enough of a challenge without the continuous convolutions of living a lie. While her friendship with Jane deepens and her relationship with Liam grows complicated, Rachel fights to reconcile the woman she is with the proper lady nineteenth-century society expects her to be. As their portal to the future prepares to close, Rachel and Liam struggle with their directive to leave history intact and exactly as they found it…however heartbreaking that may prove.
Laura Hulthen Thomas’s short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany, and Witness. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
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.
Readings by teen poets from Washtenaw County battling for a spot at the Ann Arbor Youth Poetry Slam finals on Apr. 12. Other semifinals are held at Community High School (Mar. 2, 7 p.m.), Huron High School (Mar. 8, 6 p.m.), Washtenaw International High School (Mar. 15, 6 p.m.), and Pioneer High School (Mar. 16, 6 p.m.).
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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Ypsilanti poet Stephanie Heit reads from The Color She Gave Gravity, her 2017 collection that explores connections between women. The program begins with an open mike for poets, who are welcome to read their own work or a favorite poem by another writer.
7 p.m., Bookbound, Courtyard Shops. Free. 369-4345.
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
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.
Literati is proud to partner with the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies to welcome author and activist Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman to Ann Arbor for a talk on their new book Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia. This lecture will occur at the Weiser Hall on the University of Michigan campus.
About Never Remember:
The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than half a century after the end of Stalinist terror, the geography of the Gulag has been barely sketched and the number of its victims remains unknown. Has the Gulag been forgotten? Writer Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman set out across Russia in search of the memory of the Gulag. They journey from Moscow to Sandarmokh, a forested site of mass executions during Stalin’s Great Terror; to the only Gulag camp turned into a museum, outside of the city of Perm in the Urals; and to Kolyma, where prisoners worked in deadly mines in the remote reaches of the Far East. They find that in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where Stalin is remembered as a great leader, Soviet terror has not been forgotten: it was never remembered in the first place.
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin. Gessen’s books include The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She is the recipient of numerous other awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Fellowship, and her work appears regularly in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and Slate. A longtime resident of Moscow, Gessen now lives in New York City.
Misha Friedman regularly photographs for The New Yorker, Time, Der Spiegel, GQ, Le Monde, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Sports Illustrated, Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders. His work has received numerous awards, including grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. He was born in Moldova and graduated from Binghamton University and the London School of Economics. He taught himself photography while working in humanitarian medical aid. He lives in New York City.
Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian who has written op-eds for the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, TIME magazine, Publishers Weekly, and the Huffington Post. Her expertise on the American South has led to interviews with the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Mic, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Slate (France), the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, the Houston Chronicle, and the Charlotte Observer, as well as international newspapers in Germany, Denmark, Ireland, and Japan. She has also appeared on BBC Newshour, Black Politics Today, The Mike Smerconish Show (Sirius XM), C-SPAN, Canadian Public Broadcasting, Minnesota Public Radio, Georgia Public Radio, and Charlotte Talks.
Cox is the author of three books and numerous essays and articles on the subject of southern history and culture. Her first book, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, won the 2004 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians for the Best Book in Southern Women’s History. Her second book, published by UNC Press in 2011, is Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. She is also the editor of Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (University Press of Florida, 2012), which won the Allen G. Noble Book Award from the Pioneer America Society for the Best Edited Book on North American material culture. She authored the blog Pop South: Reflections on the South in Popular Culture where she wrote over 100 essays about representations of the region and its people in popular media.
Her most recent book, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, was released in October 2017.
Cox is originally from Huntington, West Virginia, and is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
