Literati is excited to welcome author Ann Pearlman who will be sharing her new memoir Infidelity.
About Infidelity:
“Thirty years. Thirty years of my life have been gifted to this man. How do I prevent making the rest of my life a testament to his infidelity? If I leave him, it’s because of this. If I stay, I will always think of it. How do I make my story different from Mother’s, from Lala’s? How do I make it right for me?”
She thought they were the perfect couple. She authored Keep the Home Fires Burning: How to Have an Affair with Your Spouse and appeared on Oprah, Donahue, and Sally Jessy Raphael as an expert on the joys of sexual monogamy. She was a marriage and family therapist who counseled patients coping with cheating spouses. She believed she had escaped her family legacy of marital infidelity. She was wrong. After thirty years of marriage and three children, Ann Pearlman discovered her husband’s affair with another woman.
In Infidelity, Pearlman tells the true story of the devastating effect of adultery across three generations of American women, beginning with her grandmother, Lala, whose husband fell in love with another woman during the Depression and maintained the relationship until his death. The unfortunate legacy continued with Lala’s daughter, Nora, who wed a womanizing entrepreneur, Pearlman’s father. An award-winning author, columnist, psychotherapist, marriage and family therapist, Pearlman draws on sociological and anthropological works as well as her own experience to write out her rage, pain, depression, doubts, and, eventually, her journey back to confidence and strength.
Ann Pearlman has won vast critical and commercial success for her fiction and nonfiction books. Keep the Home Fires Burning: How to Have an Affair With Your Spouse garnered the attention of the Oprah Winfrey Show and was featured on many other talk shows. Her memoir, Infidelity, was nominated for National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and made into a Lifetime movie by Lionsgate. Inside the Crips, with a foreword by Ice T, took readers into the life of a Crip gang member and the California Prison system. Her first novel, The Christmas Cookie Club, became an international bestseller, spawning cookie exchanges and a follow-up cookbook. A Gift for My Sister won first place in the Sharp Writ Book Awards, 2013. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI.
Talk by local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal. For all fiction & nonfiction writers grade 6-adult. Also, Kourvo & Neal host an open house for writers to connect with one another and/or work on their projects at 7 p.m. on Sept. 24.
7-8:45 p.m., AADL Westgate. Free. 327-4200.
Kurdish Community of America (Moorhead, MN) founder/director Newzad Brifki reads from his memoir about his family’s flight from Kurdistan in 1988 to spend 4 years in a refugee camp in Turkey before coming to the U.S.
7-8:30 p.m., AADL Downtown 4th-floor meeting rm. Free. 327-4200.
Poet and memoirist Carmen Bugan was born in Romania and emigrated to the United States in 1989. She earned a BA from the University of Michigan Residential College, an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, and a MA and PhD, both in English Literature, from Oxford University. Bugan’s work reckons with the legacy of totalitarianism, including the crippling effects of the culture of surveillance that existed under Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Her visit is co-sponsored by the LSA Honors Program and the Residential College.
About The Invention of Ana:
With the infectious narration of Nick Hornby and the vibrant lyricism of Junot Díaz, this breathtaking debut brimming with youthful brio chronicles a young man’s friendship with a most peculiar artist.
On a rooftop in Brooklyn one spring night, a young intern and would-be writer, newly arrived from Copenhagen, meets the intriguing artist and mathematician Ana Ivan. Clever and funny, with an air of mystery and melancholia, Ana is living like a prime number: fierce and unbroken and divisible only by herself. She is also bad luck, she confesses; she is from a cursed Romanian lineage.
Before long, the intern finds himself seduced by Ana’s enthralling stories–of her unlucky countrymen, of her parents’ romance during the worst years of Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship, of a daylight savings transition gone horribly wrong. Ana also introduces him to her latest artistic endeavor: following the astronomical rather than the Gregorian calendar, she is trying to alter her sense of time–an experiment that will lead her to live in complete darkness for one month.
Descending into the blackness with Ana, the intern slowly loses touch with his own existence, entangling himself in the lives of Ana; her starry-eyed mother, Maria; and her obsessive math-prodigy father, Ciprian. Peeling back the layers of Ana’s past, he eventually discovers the perverse tragedy that has haunted her family for decades and has shaped her journey from the streets of Bucharest to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and finally to New York City.
The Invention of Ana blurs the lines between narrative and memory, perception and reality, identity and authenticity. In his stunning debut novel, Mikkel Rosengaard illuminates the profound power of stories to alter the world around us–and the lives of the ones we love.
About Come West and See:
Come West and See is a work both timely and timeless. Set in the Redoubt, an isolated triangle of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming where an armed occupation of a wildlife refuge escalates into a separatist uprising, these stories explore the loneliness, insecurity, and frustration inherent to love and heartbreak. A lakeside wedding drunkenly devolves into a cruel charade; an unemployed carpenter joins a militia after his wife leaves him; and a former soldier raises the daughter of a dead comrade in a bunker beneath an abandoned farm. Come West and See explores divisions both personal and political, offering startling insights into the wounds of the American people and a powerful new vision of the West.
Mikkel Rosengaard’s first novel, The Invention of Ana, has been published in five languages. He is a two-time recipient of the Danish Arts Foundation’s Literary Fellowship, and his work has appeared in the Architectural Review, PBS’s Art21, Hyperallergic, and many other publications. He grew up in Elsinore, Denmark, and lives in New York City.
A graduate of New York University’s MFA program, Maxim Loskutoff has been honored with the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Global Writing Fellowship in Abu Dhabi, and the M Literary Fellowship in Bangalore. He lives in western Montana.
Bestselling writer Lisa McCubbin discusses her new biography based on interviews with Betty Ford’s family, friends, and colleagues. Book sale, signing, and reception follow.
7 p.m., Ford Library, 1000 Beal. Free. 205-0555.
MSU pediatrics professor Mona Hanna-Attisha discusses her new book about the research she conducted to prove that Flint children were being exposed to lead. O: The Oprah Magazine says it’s told “with the gripping intrigue of a Grisham thriller.” Book sale & signing.
7 p.m., Rackham Auditorium. Free, but tickets required at literatibookstore.com/event/dr-mona-hanna-attisha. 585-5567, 764-6453.
Poetry workshop. All writers welcome to share and discuss their poetry or short fiction.
BRING ABOUT SIX COPIES OF YOUR WORK. COPIES WILL BE RETURNED TO YOU.
Hosted by Joe Kelty, Ed Morin, and Dave Jibson
see our blog at Facebook/Crazy Wisdom Poetry Series
Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room, 114 S. Main St. Free. 7346652757.info@crazywisdom.net www.crazywisdom.net
ToastMasters at SweetWaters is an opportunity to practice your personal and/or professional speaking as well as Leadership in a fun friendly atmosphere.
The club is open to everyone. Attendees have the opportunity to speak, give and receive feedback about speaking, presentations and current events.
We typically have 2-4 prepared speeches followed by (Kind and constructive evaluations) to provide feedback and growth. Attendees will have an opportunity for impromptu speaking as well.
Sweetwaters Cafe, 123 W Washington. Free. chrisjriley@hotmail.com
Literati is excited to welcome artist and stylist Lauren Friedman who will be presenting her latest book 50 Ways to Wear Accessories.
About 50 Ways to Wear Accessories:
This sparkling celebration of accessories from the author of the 50 Ways to Wear series offers top-notch tips for rocking statement pieces–think earrings, bracelets, hats, belts, purses, and more–in unexpected ways. Learn how to accessorize any outfit for a snowy day, a fancy event, a job interview. With fun illustrations that show how to achieve each look, advice on different ways to wear each featured item and style, and tips on mixing and matching different items, patterns, and prints, 50 Ways to Wear Accessories is a must-have resource to optimize any wardrobe and head out the door with panache.
Lauren Friedman is an artist, stylist, and the author/illustrator of 50 Ways to Wear a Scarf (2014), 50 Ways to Wear Denim (2016), and her newest title, 50 Ways to Wear Accessories, released in Fall 2018, all published by Chronicle Books. She is also the creator of the My Closet in Sketches project, an illustrated style blog launched in 2010. Lauren’s work as a professional illustrator has appeared in numerous publications, including Lucky Magazine, Travel and Leisure Magazine, and The Washington Post. When she is not working, you can find Lauren reading, dancing, and taking long walks in the woods. A native of Ann Arbor, Lauren returned to her home town in May of 2017 and lives on the West Side.
