RC Creative Writing alumnus Nicholas Petrie will be Writer in Residence at the RC October 12-13, and will read in Benzinger Library on the 13th. He is the author of The Drifter (2016) and Burning Bright (January 2017). Nicholas won a Hopwood for short fiction in 1991; he received his MFA in fiction from the University of Washington. His story “At the Laundromat” won the 2006 Short Story Contest in the The Seattle Review, a national literary journal. A husband and father, he runs a home-inspection business in Milwaukee.
Literati is pleased to welcome Jordan Zandi, reading from his collection Solarium. UM Zell Fellows in Poetry Amanda Rybin Koob and Hannah Webster will also read.
“Solarium is a completely original gem of a book. I have never met Jordan Zandi, but I would like to, for there is a sweet spirit haunting his guileless poems. His inner world is always interacting with the outer world, and as a result everything seems to be shining. ‘Walking across the binary field, / what does the young man see?’ Zandi asks, searching for signs with his subtle eyes. The answer seems to be the great opium of simply being content within oneself—with a heart that receives and watches (if a heart watches), while resisting the systems that hurt us—and remaining awake to experience.”—Henri Cole, from the Foreword
Jordan Zandi is the author of Solarium (Sarabande Books), which was chosen by Henri Cole as the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize. The New Yorker named it one of the twelve best poetry-related books of 2015, calling it, “A first book made eventful by the weirdness and clarity of Zandi’s mind.” He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Boston University, where he was an Elizabeth Leonard Fellow and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow to Bolivia, and his poems have appeared in The New Republic, Little Star, and Verse Daily, among others. He is founder and co-editor of Prodigal, an independent print and online journal of poetry and prose and currently lives in Indianapolis with his wife and their two rabbits.
Award-winning journalist Tom Carr discusses his lavishly illustrated new book.
Literati is delighted to be the bookseller for one of our favorite authors, Mary Roach, who’ll discuss her latest book, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, at the downtown branch of the Ann Arbor District Library.
Much of military science is necessarily preoccupied with the study of violence, the development of strategy, of weapons and armaments, of warfare. But not all the battles of war involve drone technology and Bradley Personnel Vehicle. On a daily basis, soldiers also fight more esoteric battles against less considered adversaries—for example, exhaustion, shock, panic, disease, extreme heat, cataclysmic noise, gastrointestinal distress, and assorted waterfowl. In Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, America’s favorite science writer Mary Roach explores those aspects of war that no one makes movies about–not the killing but the keeping alive.
Grunt salutes the scientists and surgeons running along in the wake of combat, lab coats flapping and celebrates the courage of people like Navy flight surgeon Angus Rupert, who flew blindfolded and upside down to test a vibrating suit designed to help pilots fly by feel should they become blinded or disoriented, and Captain Herschel Flowers of the Army Medical Research Laboratory, who injected himself with cobra venom to test the possibility of building immunity. With her characteristic sense of humor, her indefatigable enthusiasm, and her sharp eye for telling detail, Roach, as always, proves to be the ideal tour guide. When it comes to military history, not all heroes carry guns, and not all heroism happens in a burst of cinematic glory. In Grunt, the heroes engage in dizzying flights of unorthodox thinking. They experiment with flame-resistant textiles, zippers, earplugs, shark repellent, and erectile tissue. If necessary, they lob chickens at airplanes.
Mary Roach is the New York Times best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Packing For Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, and Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. She lives in Oakland, California.
Robert Justin Goldstein is emeritus professor of political science at Oakland University. His many books include Flag Burning and Free Speech: The Case of Texas v. Johnson and American Blacklist: The Attorney General s List of Subversive Organizations, both from Kansas.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Brit Bennett back to Ann Arbor in support of her debut novel, The Mothers, a staff pick and our Literati Cultura selection for October. Brit will be joined in conversation by Chris McCormick, the author of Desert Boys.
Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California, Brit Bennett’s mesmerizing first novel is an emotionally perceptive story about community, love, and ambition. It begins with a secret. “All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.”
It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother’s recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor’s son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it’s not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance—and the subsequent cover-up—will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt.
In entrancing, lyrical prose, The Mothers asks whether a “what if” can be more powerful than an experience itself. If, as time passes, we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves, to the communities that have parented us, and to the decisions we make that shape our lives forever.
Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Her work is featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.
Pulitzer-winning nonfiction writer Stacy Schiff discusses her widely acclaimed new book.
7-8:30 p.m., AADL multipurpose room (lower level), 343 S. Fifth Ave.
Reading by high school poets in the after-school program Citywide Poets Detroit,including members of the 2016 Detroit Youth Poetry Slam Team. The program begins with open mike readings.
Former Reagan deputy assistant James Rosebush discusses his new book based on his firsthand experience with the president. Reception, book sale, and signing follow.
7:30 p.m., Ford Library, 1000 Beal.
Literati is pleased to welcome Christine Sneed and Grace Tiffany, reading from their latest work.
Christine Sneed is the author, most recently, of The Virginity of Famous Men. Her story collection Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry won the Grace Paley Prize, Ploughshares’ John C. Zacharis Prize, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her debut novel Little Known Facts won the Society of Midland Authors award for best adult fiction and was named a top ten debut novel of 2013 by Booklist. Her latest novel is Paris, He Said. Sneed teaches at Northwestern University and DePaul University and lives in Evanston, Illinois.
Grace Tiffany is the author of six historical novels set in the Renaissance or Middle Ages, including Will (Berkley 2004), My Father Had a Daughter (Berkley 2003), Ariel (HarperCollins 2005), The Turquoise Ring (Berkley 2005), Paint (Bagwyn Books 2013), and Gunpowder Percy (ACMRS 2016). A Shakespeare scholar and editor, a professor of English at Western Michigan University, and the author of two nonfiction works on Renaissance literature and culture, Grace Tiffany uses fiction as an additional medium for exploring the early modern world
