White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination (Graywok Press, August 2019) is a meditation on whiteness in American fiction and culture from the end of the civil rights movement to the present. At the heart of this collection of essays, Jess Row ties “white flight”—the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, whether in suburbs or newly gentrified downtowns—to white writers setting their stories in isolated or emotionally insulated landscapes, from the mountains of Idaho in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping to the claustrophobic households in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Row uses brilliant close readings of work from well-known writers such as Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, and David Foster Wallace to examine the ways these and other writers have sought imaginative space for themselves at the expense of engaging with race.
White Flights aims to move fiction to a more inclusive place, and Row looks beyond criticism to consider writing as a reparative act. What would it mean, he asks, if writers used fiction “to approach each other again”? Row turns to the work of James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison, and James Alan McPherson to discuss interracial love in fiction, while also examining his own family heritage as a way to interrogate his position. A moving and provocative book that includes music, film, and literature in its arguments, White Flights is an essential work of cultural and literary criticism.
In addition to White Flights, Jess Row is the author of two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost, and a novel, Your Face in Mine. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. In 2007, he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, among other venues. He teaches full time at The College of New Jersey and occasionally also at NYU. He lives in New York City with his wife and their two children. A student of Zen for 25 years, he is an ordained senior dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen.
For any questions about the event or to share accommodation needs, please email asbates@umich.edu– we are eager to help ensure that this event is inclusive to you. The building, event space, and restrooms are wheelchair accessible. A lactation room (Angell Hall #5209), reflection room (Haven Hall #1506), and gender-inclusive restroom (Angell Hall 5th floor) are available on site. ASL interpreters and CART services are available upon request; please email asbates@umich.edu at least two weeks prior to the event.
Pamela Reynolds will speak about her book The Uncaring, Intricate World: A Field Diary, Zambezi Valley, 1984-85 (Duke 2019). Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town, Reynolds is author of War in Worcester: Youth and the Apartheid State. As U-M Presidential Professor she conducted the 2001-02 Mellon Seminar: Contested Childhood in a Changing Global Order. Following her talk, she is available for further conversation at a reception and book signing held in her honor. Reception RSVP at lizgoode@umich.edu
We welcome Benedek Totth as part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati series, in support of his debut Dead Heat. Book signing to follow. Free and open to the public.
About the book: In a nameless Hungarian town, teenagers on a competitive swim team occupy their after-training hours with hard drinking and fast cars, hash cigarettes and marathons of Grand Theft Auto, the meaningless sex and late-night exploits of a world defined by self-gratification and all its attendant recklessness. Invisible to their parents and subject to the whims of an abusive coach, the crucible of competition pushes them again and again into dangerous choices. When a deadly accident leaves them second-guessing one another, they’re driven even deeper into violence.
Brilliantly translated into breakneck English by Ildikó Noémi Nagy, Dead Heat is a blistering debut and an unforgettable story about young men coming of age in an abandoned generation.
Born in Hungary in 1977, Benedek Totth studied American literature and now works as an editor and translator in Budapest. His translations into Hungarian include works by Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, Hunter S. Thompson and William S. Burroughs. Dead Heat, his first novel, caused a sensation in Hungary, where it won the Margó Prize for best first novel of the year. It has been published in translation in France and Slovakia.
Literati is pleased to be on hand to sell books as the Neutral Zone welcomes poet Shira Erlichman in support of her debut collection of poetry, Odes to Lithium. Free and open to the public. Book signing to follow.
About the collection: In this remarkable debut, Shira Erlichman pens a love letter to Lithium, her medication for Bipolar Disorder. With inventiveness, compassion, and humor, she thrusts us into a world of unconventional praise. From an unexpected encounter with her grandmother’s ghost, to a bubble bath with Bjӧrk, to her plumber’s confession that he, too, has Bipolar, Erlichman buoyantly topples stigma against the mentally ill. These are necessary odes to self-acceptance, resilience, and the jagged path toward healing. With startling language, and accompanied by her bold drawings and collages,she gives us a sparkling, original view into what makes us human.
Shira Erlichman is a poet, musician, and visual artist. She was born in Israel and immigrated to the US when she was six. Her poems explore recovery – of language, of home, of mind – and value the “scattered wholeness” of healing. She earned her BA at Hampshire College and has been awarded the James Merrill Fellowship by the Vermont Studio Center, the Visions of Wellbeing Focus Fellowship at AIR Serenbe, as well as a residency by the Millay Colony. Her debut poetry book, Odesto Lithium, is out in September 2019. She is also the author and illustrator of the picture book Be/Hold. When not on tour, she lives in Brooklyn where she teaches writing and creates.
Tickets available now. Click here to purchase.
Literati Bookstore is thrilled to welcome Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout to First United Methodist Church of Ann Arbor in support of her latest, Olive, Again. The event will feature a conversation with Literati bookseller and host of Literati’s podcast Shelf Talking, Sam Krowchenko.
Tickets are general admission and include a hardcover copy of Olive, Again, to be picked up at the venue the evening of the event. Literati will have additional copies of Elizabeth Strout’s previous titles available for sale.
Signing details to be announced. A detailed map of available parking structures in downtown Ann Arbor can be found here.
About the book: Prickly, wry, resistant to change yet ruthlessly honest and deeply empathetic, Olive Kitteridge is “a compelling life force” (San Francisco Chronicle). The New Yorker has said that Elizabeth Strout “animates the ordinary with an astonishing force,” and she has never done so more clearly than in these pages, where the iconic Olive struggles to understand not only herself and her own life but the lives of those around her in the town of Crosby, Maine. Whether with a teenager coming to terms with the loss of her father, a young woman about to give birth during a hilariously inopportune moment, a nurse who confesses a secret high school crush, or a lawyer who struggles with an inheritance she does not want to accept, the unforgettable Olive will continue to startle us, to move us, and to inspire moments of transcendent grace.
Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge; the #1 New York Times bestseller My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys, a New York Times bestseller; Abide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick; and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine. Elizabeth Strout lives in New York City.
Sam Krowchenko is the host of Literati Bookstore’s podcast Shelf Talking. His work has appeared in Salon, Full Stop, and The Michigan Quarterly Review. He received an MFA in Fiction from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program.
Additional questions? Email John@literatibookstore.com
Author Jill Grunenwald will read from her new book Reading Behind Bars: a True Story of Literature, Law, and Life as a Prison Librarian. After graduating with a Masters in Library and Information Science, Jill returned to Northeast Ohio and took a job as a librarian at an all-male, minimum security prison on the far west side of Cleveland. Reading Behind Bars is the true account of her experiences there.
This event includes a signing with books for sale.
This event will be recorded
If you’ve ever thought about writing a novel, join us at the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) Kick Off Party! Hosted by Ann Arbor municipal liaison Hilary Braley, you’ll find fellow first-time and experienced writers to get inspired! This event includes light refreshments.
National Novel Writing Month is a non-profit event that encourages teens and adults to tackle the challenge of writing a novel during the month of November. Participants begin writing on November 1 with the goal of writing a 50,000-word (approximately 175 page) novel by 11:59:59 pm, November 30.
Official NaNoWriMo writing sessions will be held at AADL during November, but get a head start and celebrate with this great kick off party!
We welcome award-winning author Ayelet Tsabari in support of her acclaimed memoir, The Art of Leaving. A book signing will follow. The event is free and open to the public.
About the book: An intimate memoir in essays by an award-winning Israeli writer who travels the world, from New York to India, searching for love, belonging, and an escape from grief following the death of her father when she was a young girl.
This searching collection opens with the death of Ayelet Tsabari’s father when she was just nine years old. His passing left her feeling rootless, devastated, and driven to question her complex identity as an Israeli of Yemeni descent in a country that suppressed and devalued her ancestors’ traditions.
In The Art of Leaving, Tsabari tells her story, from her early love of writing and words, to her rebellion during her mandatory service in the Israeli army. She travels from Israel to New York, Canada, Thailand, and India, falling in and out of love with countries, men and women, drugs and alcohol, running away from responsibilities and refusing to settle in one place. She recounts her first marriage, her struggle to define herself as a writer in a new language, her decision to become a mother, and finally her rediscovery and embrace of her family history–a history marked by generations of headstrong women who struggled to choose between their hearts and their homes. Eventually, she realizes that she must reconcile the memories of her father and the sadness of her past if she is ever going to come to terms with herself.
With fierce, emotional prose, Ayelet Tsabari crafts a beautiful meditation about the lengths we will travel to try to escape our grief, the universal search to find a place where we belong, and the sense of home we eventually find within ourselves.
Ayelet Tsabari was born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. After serving in the Israeli army, she traveled extensively throughout Southeast Asia and North America, and now lives in Tel Aviv. She teaches creative writing at the University of King’s College’s MFA Program in Creative Nonfiction and at Tel Aviv University. Tsabari’s first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction, and was nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. It was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick and included in Kirkus Reviews‘ Best Debut Fiction of 2016. Essays from this book have also won several awards, including a National Magazine Award. In addition to writing, Tsabari has worked as a photographer and a journalist.
Detroit is home to gargoyles, grotesques, and guardians that silently watch over the city from their posts high above the sidewalks and streets. Author and photographer Jeff Morrison will discuss the symbolism behind the ornamentation and hear some of the untold stories of the artists, artisans, and architects involved in its creation, all drawn from his book The Guardians of Detroit: Architectural Sculpture in the Motor City. Copies of the book and coloring book will be available for purchase before and after the presentation.
Ellen Muehlberger (history, classical studies, Middle East studies) and Deborah Dash Moore (Judaic studies, history) discuss Muehlberger’s latest book, followed by Q & A.
Late antiquity saw a proliferation of Christian texts dwelling on the emotions and physical sensations of dying—not as a heroic martyr in a public square or a judge’s court but as an individual, at home in a bed or in a private room. In sermons, letters, and ascetic traditions, late ancient Christians imagined the last minutes of life and the events that followed death in elaborate detail. This book traces how, in late ancient Christianity, death came to be thought of as a moment of reckoning: a physical ordeal whose pain is followed by an immediate judgment of one’s actions by angels and demons and, after that, fitting punishment. This emphasis on the experience of death ushered in a new ethical sensibility among Christians, in which one’s death was to be imagined frequently and anticipated in detail. This was initially meant as a tool for individuals: preachers counted on the fact that becoming aware of a judgment arriving at the end of one’s life tends to sharpen one’s scruples. But, as this book argues, the change in Christian sensibility toward death did not just affect individuals. Death imagined as the moment of reckoning created a fund of images and ideas within late ancient Christian culture about just what constituted a human being and how variances in human morality should be treated. This had significant effects on the Christian adoption of power in late antiquity, especially in the case of power’s heaviest baggage: the capacity to authorize violence against others
