Wilson College (PA) political science professor Jill Abraham Hummer discusses her new book exploring how presidential wives have reflected the changing place of women in American society over the last century. Book sale, signing, and reception follow.
7 p.m., Ford Library, 1000 Beal. Free. 205-0555.
Literati is thrilled to welcome back author and essayist Leslie Jamison who will share and discuss her latest book The Recovering. Leslie will be joined for a post-reading discussion with author Lillian Li.
About The Recovering:
One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2018: Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Elle, Newsday, The Millions, Huffington Post, Nylon, Bustle, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Bitch, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, Boston Globe, The Week
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams, a transformative work showing that sometimes the recovery is more gripping than the addiction
With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction–both her own and others’–and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.
At the heart of the book is Jamison’s ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, as well as brilliant lesser-known figures such as George Cain, lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here. Through its unvarnished relation of Jamison’s own ordeals, The Recovering also becomes a book about a different kind of dependency: the way our desires can make us all, as she puts it, “broken spigots of need.” It’s about the particular loneliness of the human experience-the craving for love that both devours us and shapes who we are.
For her striking language and piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.
Leslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller, and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and the Oxford American, among others, and she is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Lillian Li received her BA from Princeton and her MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Hopwood Award in Short Fiction, as well as Glimmer Train‘s New Writer Award. Her work has been featured inGuernica, Granta , and Jezebel. She is from the D.C. metro area and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Readings by these 2 Michigan poets. Joseph’s 2016 collection, Sharp Blue Search of Flame, includes dark and brooding poems that reflect her Jewish Indian roots and her personal experiences living in Eastern and Western cultures. Fanning’s Our Sudden Museum is a 2017 collection of elegiac poems that explore what sustains us in loss. Signing.
7 p.m., Bookbound, Courtyard Shops. Free. 369-4345.
Literati is excited to welcome novelist Christina Lynch who will be sharing with us her new book The Italian Party.
About The Italian Party:
Newly married, Scottie and Michael are seduced by Tuscany’s famous beauty. But the secrets they are keeping from each other force them beneath the splendid surface to a more complex view of ltaly, America and each other.
When Scottie’s Italian teacher–a teenager with secrets of his own–disappears, her search for him leads her to discover other, darker truths about herself, her husband and her country. Michael’s dedication to saving the world from communism crumbles as he begins to see that he is a pawn in a much different game. Driven apart by lies, Michael and Scottie must find their way through a maze of history, memory, hate and love to a new kind of complicated truth.
Half glamorous fun, half an examination of America’s role in the world, and filled with sun-dappled pasta lunches, prosecco, charming spies and horse racing, The Italian Party is a smart pleasure.
Christina Lynch’s picaresque journey includes chapters in Chicago and at Harvard, where she was an editor on the Harvard Lampoon. She was the Milan correspondent for W magazine and Women’s Wear Daily, and disappeared for four years in Tuscany. In L.A. she was on the writing staff of Unhappily Ever After; Encore, Encore; The Dead Zone and Wildfire. She now lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. She is the co-author of two novels under the pen name Magnus Flyte. She teaches at College of the Sequoias. The Italian Party is her debut novel under her own name.
A walk to various Chelsea locations to hear readings by different writers. Detroit-born Georgetown University sociology professor Michael Eric Dyson, an ordained Baptist minister, reads from Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, which made several “best of the year” lists in 2017. Kentucky-based poet Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things was a 2015 National Book Award finalist, and her forthcoming (in August) The Carrying is one of NPR’s “most anticipated books of 2018.” NYC-based Will Schwalbe reads from Books for Living, his new book about the power of books to shape lives.
1-5 p.m., various downtown locations, Chelsea. Free. 475-8732.
Ann Arbor District Library communications & marketing manager Richard Retyi discusses and reads from his book, a collection of 41 stories highlighting colorful moments in local history that’s one of the inaugural releases of the AADL Fifth Avenue Press. Part of Independent Bookstore Day, which features treats, giveaways, and surprises throughout the day.
4 p.m., Nicola’s, Westgate shopping center. Free. 662-0600
L.A. writer Caleb Roehrig discusses his new young adult thriller about 16-year-old Rufus, who begrudgingly joins forces with his ex-boyfriend to help Rufus’s sister when she’s suspected of murder. Signing.
3 p.m., Nicola’s, Westgate shopping center. Free. 662-0600.
Literati is excited to welcome authors Thomas Bailey and Katherine Joslin who will be sharing their new biography Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life.
About Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life
Of all the many biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, none has presented the twenty-sixth president as he saw himself: as a man of letters. This fascinating account traces Roosevelt’s lifelong engagement with books and discusses his writings from childhood journals to his final editorial, finished just hours before his death. His most famous book, The Rough Riders–part memoir, part war adventure–barely begins to suggest the dynamism of his literary output. Roosevelt read widely and deeply, and worked tirelessly on his writing. Along with speeches, essays, reviews, and letters, he wrote history, autobiography, and tales of exploration and discovery. In this thoroughly original biography, Roosevelt is revealed at his most vulnerable–and his most human.
Thomas Bailey is professor emeritus of English and environmental studies at Western Michigan University.
Katherine Joslin is the author of Jane Addams, A Writer’s Life and Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion, winner of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award.
We are thrilled to welcome award winning author Weike Wang to Literati Bookstore for the paperback release of her novel Chemistry. She will be joined for a post-reading discussion with author Lillian Li.
About Chemisty:
At first glance, the quirky, overworked narrator of Weike Wang’s debut novel seems to be on the cusp of a perfect life: she is studying for a prestigious PhD in chemistry that will make her Chinese parents proud (or at least satisfied), and her successful, supportive boyfriend has just proposed to her. But instead of feeling hopeful, she is wracked with ambivalence: the long, demanding hours at the lab have created an exquisite pressure cooker, and she doesn’t know how to answer the marriage question. When it all becomes too much and her life plan veers off course, she finds herself on a new path of discoveries about everything she thought she knew. Smart, moving, and always funny, this unique coming-of-age story is certain to evoke a winning reaction.
Weike Wang is a graduate of Harvard University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry and her doctorate in public health. She received her MFA from Boston University. Her fiction has been published in literary magazines, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, and Ploughshares , which also named Chemistry the winner of its John C. Zacharis Award. A “5 Under 35” honoree of the National Book Foundation, Weike currently lives in New York City.
Lillian Li received her BA from Princeton and her MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Hopwood Award in Short Fiction, as well as Glimmer Train‘s New Writer Award. Her work has been featured inGuernica, Granta , and Jezebel. She is from the D.C. metro area and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Number One Chinese Restaurant is her first novel.
FALLING: Falling stars, dropping temperatures, klutzes, leaves, stock markets, parachutes, depression, madness, bungee cords and of course, love. Prepare a five-minute story about losing your footing, plunging in willy-nilly and waiting for impact.
*Tickets for this event are available one week before the show, at 3pm ET.
*Seating is not guaranteed and is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please be sure to arrive at least 10 minutes before the show. Admission is not guaranteed for late arrivals. All sales final.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), Greyline, 100 N. Ashley. $8. 764-5118.
