Calendar

Literati is pleased to welcome Katie Chase, reading from her story collection, Man and Wife.

Fiction. From Twilight Zone suburbia to cities on fire to post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, these award-winning stories range over unexpected landscapes—and land squarely in the wildness of the human heart.

Katie Chase‘s short fiction has appeared in the Missouri Review, Five Chapters, the Literary Review, Narrative, Prairie Schooner,  ZYZZYVA, Mississippi Review, and the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of a Teaching-Writing Fellowship, a Provost’s Postgraduate Writing Fellowship, and a Michener- Copernicus Award. She has also been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University. Born and raised outside Detroit, Michigan, she lives currently in Portland, Oregon.

Literati is pleased to welcome Josh MacIvor-Andersen in support of his memoir, On Heights & Hunger.

On Heights & Hunger is a memoir of two professional and competitive tree-climbing brothers, both hungry for transcendence and adventure, coming to terms with their relationship to the divine, the family that first provided a framework for faith, and their own obsessions, victories, and failures.

Josh MacIvor-Andersen is a former Tennessee-state tree climbing champion, the author of the memoir On Heights & Hunger, and the editor of Rooted, An Anthology of Arboreal Nonfiction. His essays, reviews, and reportage have won numerous awards and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, and can be found in journals and magazines such as Gulf Coast, Paris Review Daily, Fourth Genre, Arts and Letters, Sycamore Review, Sojourners, Geez, Ruminate, Rock and Sling, National Geographic/Glimpse, Diagram, The Drum, The Collagist, Garden and Gun, Memoir (and), New Millennium Writings, Our State, Prism, and The Northwest Review, among others.

Literati is thrilled to welcome Derek Palacio in support of his novel, The Mortifications.

Derek Palacio’s stunning, mythic novel marks the arrival of a fresh voice and a new chapter in the history of 21st century Cuban-American literature.

In 1980, a rural Cuban family is torn apart during the Mariel Boatlift. Uxbal Encarnación—father, husband, political insurgent—refuses to leave behind the revolutionary ideals and lush tomato farms of his sun-soaked homeland. His wife Soledad takes young Isabel and Ulises hostage and flees with them to America, leaving behind Uxbal for the promise of a better life. But instead of settling with fellow Cuban immigrants in Miami’s familiar heat, Soledad pushes further north into the stark, wintry landscape of Hartford, Connecticut. There, in the long shadow of their estranged patriarch, now just a distant memory, the exiled mother and her children begin a process of growth and transformation.

Each struggles and flourishes in their own way: Isabel, spiritually hungry and desperate for higher purpose, finds herself tethered to death and the dying in uncanny ways. Ulises is bookish and awkwardly tall, like his father, whose memory haunts and shapes the boy’s thoughts and desires. Presiding over them both is Soledad. Once consumed by her love for her husband, she begins a tempestuous new relationship with a Dutch tobacco farmer. But just as the Encarnacións begin to cultivate their strange new way of life, Cuba calls them back. Uxbal is alive, and waiting.

Breathtaking, soulful, and profound, The Mortifications is an intoxicating family saga and a timely, urgent expression of longing for one’s true homeland.

Derek Palacio received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. His short story “Sugarcane” appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, and his novella How to Shake the Other Man was published by Nouvella Books. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, MI, is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, and serves as a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program.

This event will take place on Literati’s main floor.

Literat is pleased to welcome Edward Dusinberre, author of Beethoven For a Later Age, in conversation with Steven Whiting, professor of musicology at the University of Michigan. This event is being held in conjunction with the UMS presentation of the Takács Quartet on October 8 and 9, at Rackham Auditorium. For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit ums.org.

‘They are not for you but for a later age!’ -Ludwig van Beethoven, on the Opus 59 quartets

Beethoven’s sixteen string quartets are some of the most extraordinary and challenging pieces of music ever written. They have inspired artists of all kinds – not only musicians – and have been subject to endless reinterpretation. What does it feel like to be a musician taking on these iconic works? And how do the four string players who make up a quartet interact, both musically and personally?

The Takács is one of the world’s pre-eminent string quartets. Performances of Beethoven have shaped their work together for over forty years. Using the history of both the Takács Quartet and the Beethoven quartets as the backbone to his story, Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the Takács since 1993, recounts the exhilarating challenge of tackling these pieces. Beethoven for a Later Age takes the reader inside the daily life of a quartet, vividly showing the necessary creative tension between individual and group expression and how four people can enjoy making music together over a long period of time.

The key, the author argues, is in balancing continuity with change and experimentation – a theme that lies at the heart of Beethoven’s remarkable compositions. No other composer has posed so many questions about the form and emotional content of a string quartet, and come up with so many different answers. In an accessible style, suitable for novices and chamber music enthusiasts alike, Dusinberre illuminates the variety and inherent contradictions of Beethoven’s quartets, composed against the turbulent backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath, and shows that engaging with this radical music continues to be as invigorating now as it was for its first performers and audiences.

Edward Dusinberre was born in 1968 in Leamington Spa, England, and has enjoyed playing the violin from a young age. His early experiences as concertmaster of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain encouraged him to choose music as a profession. He studied with the Ukrainian violinist Felix Andrievsky at the Royal College of Music in London and at the Juilliard School with Dorothy DeLay and Piotr Milewski. In 1990 he won the British Violin Recital Prize and gave his debut recital in London at the Purcell Room, South Bank Centre. Upon completion of his studies at Juilliard Dusinberre auditioned for the Takács Quartet, which he joined in 1993 as first violin.

Steven Whiting, a native of Chicago, graduated from Macalester College in 1975 with a major in music (voice, piano) and a minor in German.He studied musicology at Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet in Kiel, Germany, on a Fulbright grant (1975–77) and sang for a season with the Chicago Symphony Chorus before pursuing graduate work at the University of Illinois. There he took an M.M. in Musicology with a thesis on “Erik Satie and Parisian Musical Entertainment,” and his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Beethoven’s early variations (“To the ‘New Manner’ Born”). Between degrees, he spent four years as a desk editor at A-R Editions of Madison, Wisconsin, sang with several early music groups, and performed in contemporary music ensembles. After teaching for two years at the University of Illinois, he came to the University of Michigan in 1991 as a visiting assistant professor.