As part of Desiree Cooper’s two-day residency at the Residential College, she is be giving a reading, free and open to the public, in Benzinger Library. She will be reading from her new book of stories, Know the Mother.
Literat is excited to welcome history professor Rita Chin who will be sharing her latest book The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History
About The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe:
In 2010, the leaders of Germany, Britain, and France each declared that multiculturalism had failed in their countries. Over the past decade, a growing consensus in Europe has voiced similar decrees. But what do these ominous proclamations, from across the political spectrum, mean? From the influx of immigrants in the 1950s to contemporary worries about refugees and terrorism, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe examines the historical development of multiculturalism on the Continent. Rita Chin argues that there were few efforts to institute state-sponsored policies of multiculturalism, and those that emerged were pronounced failures virtually from their inception. She shows that today’s crisis of support for cultural pluralism isn’t new but actually has its roots in the 1980s.
Chin looks at the touchstones of European multiculturalism, from the urgent need for laborers after World War II to the public furor over the publication of The Satanic Verses and the question of French girls wearing headscarves to school. While many Muslim immigrants had lived in Europe for decades, in the 1980s they came to be defined by their religion and the public’s preoccupation with gender relations. Acceptance of sexual equality became the critical gauge of Muslims’ compatibility with Western values. The convergence of left and right around the defense of such personal freedoms against a putatively illiberal Islam has threatened to undermine commitment to pluralism as a core ideal. Chin contends that renouncing the principles of diversity brings social costs, particularly for the left, and she considers how Europe might construct an effective political engagement with its varied population.
Challenging the mounting opposition to a diverse society, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe presents a historical investigation into one continent’s troubled relationship with cultural difference.
Rita Chin is associate professor of history at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany and the coauthor of After the Nazi Racial State.
About Fight Songs
Fight Songs exposes the rusted underbelly of the American Midwest, as experienced by young men, brutal cops, suicide cases, junkies, lovers, and minorities seeking justice. At turns as stark and thrilling as a Stooges track, as brutally desolate as a burnt-out Detroit factory, this is also an elegy for Michigan’s vast and gorgeous wilderness. Freeman’s poetry is unsparingly lyrical, and ethically limned with ecological, political, and local concerns. This is the riposte to Trump’s vision we never expected–one that hails from the same husked landscape that elevated him, but this time, yearning for justice, hopeful of beauty among the bruised fighters leaning on frayed ropes.
Cal Freeman was born and raised in Detroit, MI. He is the author of the book Brother Of Leaving (Marick Press) and the pamphlet Heard Among The Windbreak (Eyewear Publishing). His writing has appeared in many journals including New Orleans Review, Passages North, The Journal, Commonweal, Drunken Boat and The Poetry Review. He is a recipient of The Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes); he has also been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and creative nonfiction. He regularly reviews collections of poetry for the radio program, Stateside, on Michigan Public Radio.
FRUIT is an independent, community-led reading and dialogue series for and by marginalized voices, hosted in Literati Bookstore. This month’s readers are Alise Alousi, Kamelya Youssef and Tariq Luthun.
FRUIT is a moment and a movement of reclamation. It is a space of and for literary artists representing the marginalized: the colored, the queer, the silenced, and the unseen. Each event showcases the work of fresh, revolutionary artists and features a conversation around their lives and their crafts. In this space, FRUIT strives to serve as a carefully curated reading and dialogue series for those who live at intersections ignored. This experience exists both physically and digitally in order to help those marginalized voices reclaim their flesh and plant their roots through short-form literature. Our goal is to create an experience that is intentional in its centering of the historically othered. Through this exploration of identity and craft, we hope to cultivate a platform in which the growth and sharing of radical joy— both encumbered and despite— happens in the presence of solidarity and healthy community.
Alise Alousi’s poetry has appeared in several journals and anthologies including, We are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War, Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You. In 2014, she was a Knight Arts Challenge Detroit awardee for From Detroit to Baghdad: Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a five month exhibit, workshop, and performance series commemorating the bombing of Baghdad’s centuries old street of booksellers. Alousi is the Associate Director of the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a nationally recognized writing program for K-12 students in metro Detroit.
Kamelya Youssef is a Detroit-based poet, organizer, student, and teacher. She is a member of the Z Collective and a board member of the Radius of Arab American Writers Inc (RAWI). Her poetry and essays have been published in Mizna and Bitch Magazine and she has shared her work on stages across the US. You can find her on Fridays hosting open mic nights at The Bottom Line Coffeehouse right near what will always be called the Cass Corridor. She’s a daughter of Lebanese immigrants with a special love for 90s freestyle and she makes a mean pecan pie.
Tariq Luthun is a Palestinian-American data strategist, community organizer, and Emmy Award-winning poet from Detroit, MI. He is currently an MFA candidate for poetry in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Amidst other things, Luthun is the Social Director of Organic Weapon Arts Press and a co-founder of the PoC-dedicated literary arts series FRUIT. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vinyl Poetry, The Offing, Winter Tangerine Review, and Button Poetry, among other credentials. He is a deep dish pizza evangelist, and can best be described as the end-result of Drake falsetto-rapping Edward Said’s Orientalism.
HOWARD MARKEL, M.D., Ph.D., is the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan, and editor in chief of The Milbank Quarterly. His books include Quarantine!, When Germs Travel, and An Anatomy of Addiction. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The New England Journal of Medicine. Markel is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Book:
The Kelloggs: Battling Brothers of Battle Creek
From the much admired medical historian (“Markel shows just how compelling the medical history can be”–Andrea Barrett) and author of An Anatomy of Addiction (“Absorbing, vivid”–Sherwin Nuland, The New York Times Book Review, front page)–the story of America’s empire builders: John and Will Kellogg. John Harvey Kellogg was one of America’s most beloved physicians; a best-selling author, lecturer, and health-magazine publisher; founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium; and patron saint of the pursuit of wellness. His youngest brother, Will, was the founder of the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which revolutionized the mass production of food and what we eat for breakfast. In The Kelloggs, Howard Markel tells the sweeping saga of these two extraordinary men, whose lifelong competition and enmity toward one another changed America’s notion of health and wellness from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and who helped change the course of American medicine, nutrition, wellness, and diet.
Ann Arbor Community of Christ Congregation is hosting a book signing for Elaine Stienon’s newest historical novel, Children of a Northern Kingdom: A Story of the Strangite Mormons in Wisconsin and on Beaver Island, MI.
Elaine will have copies of this latest book available for purchase. She will be happy to sign this and any of her preceding publications you would bring from your home library. This and her previous books can be purchased through authorHOUSE, Amazon and Barnes & Noble. There will be remarks from the author and an opportunity for questions.
Literati Bookstore is thrilled to partner with the JCC of Ann Arbor as part of their annual Jewish Book Fest and welcome author Nathan Englander to Zingerman’s Greyline in support of his new novel Dinner at the Center of the Earth. Zingerman’s Greyline will have food and drinks available for purchase! General Admission is the cost of the hardcover with tax, and books will be picked up at the event. Buy tickets now:
About the book: A prisoner in a secret cell. The guard who has watched over him a dozen years. An American waitress in Paris. A young Palestinian man in Berlin who strikes up an odd friendship with a wealthy Canadian businessman. And The General, Israel’s most controversial leader, who lies dying in a hospital, the only man who knows of the prisoner’s existence. From these vastly different lives Nathan Englander has woven a portrait of a nation riven by insoluble conflict, even as the lives of its citizens become fatefully and inextricably entwined
About the author: Nathan Englander is the author of the novel The Ministry of Special Cases, and the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His short fiction has been widely anthologized, most recently in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. Englander’s play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at The Public Theater in 2012. He also translated the New American Haggadah and co-translated Etgar Keret’s Suddenly a Knock on the Door. He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University, and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.
Literati is excited to welcome author Lynn Comella who will be discussing her book Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure. Lynn will be joined by University of Michigan Professor Katherine Sender
About Vibrator Nation:
Lynn Comella tells the fascinating history of how feminist sex-toy stores such as Eve’s Garden, Good Vibrations and Babeland raised sexual consciousness, redefined the adult industry, provided educational and community resources, and changed the way sex was talked about, had, and enjoyed.
In the 1970s a group of pioneering feminist entrepreneurs launched a movement that ultimately changed the way sex was talked about, had, and enjoyed. Boldly reimagining who sex shops were for and the kinds of spaces they could be, these entrepreneurs opened sex-toy stores like Eve’s Garden, Good Vibrations, and Babeland not just as commercial enterprises, but to provide educational and community resources as well. In Vibrator Nation Lynn Comella tells the fascinating history of how these stores raised sexual consciousness, redefined the adult industry, and changed women’s lives. Comella describes a world where sex-positive retailers double as social activists, where products are framed as tools of liberation, and where consumers are willing to pay for the promise of better living—one conversation, vibrator, and orgasm at a time.
Lynn Comella is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and coeditor of New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law.
Katherine Sender is professor of media and sexuality in Communication Studies at the University of Michigan.
Meijer supermarket company cochairman Hank Meijer discusses his new biography of the Republican senator from Grand Rapids who was instrumental in creating the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the U.N. Book sale, signing, and reception.
7 p.m., Ford Library, 1000 Beal. Free. 205-0555.
Literati is thrilled to host author Daniel Wolff who will be sharing his new book Grown-up Anger. Daniel will be joined in conversation with fellow music writer David Marsh and there will be a special musical performance from Chris Buhalis!
About Grown-up Anger:
A tour de force of storytelling years in the making: a dual biography of two of the greatest songwriters, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, that is also murder mystery and a history of labor relations and socialism, big business and greed in twentieth-century America—all woven together in one epic saga that holds meaning for all working Americans today
When thirteen-year-old Daniel Wolff first heard Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” it ignited a life-long interest with understanding the rock poet’s anger. When he later discovered “Song to Woody,” Dylan’s tribute to his hero, Woody Guthrie, Wolff believed he’d uncovered one source of Dylan’s rage. Sifting through Guthrie’s recordings, Wolff found “1913 Massacre”—a song which told the story of a union Christmas party during a strike in Calumet, Michigan, in 1913 that ended in horrific tragedy.
Following the trail from Dylan to Guthrie to an event that claimed the lives of seventy-four men, women, and children a century ago, Wolff found himself tracing the history of an anger that has been passed down for decades. From America’s early industrialized days, an epic battle to determine the country’s direction has been waged, pitting bosses against workers, big business against the labor movement. In Guthrie’s eyes, the owners ultimately won; the 1913 Michigan tragedy was just one example of a larger, lost history purposely distorted and buried in time.
In this magnificent cultural study, Wolff braids three disparate strands—Calumet, Guthrie, and Dylan—together to create a devastating revisionist history of twentieth-century America. Grown-Up Anger chronicles the struggles between the haves and have-nots, the impact changing labor relations had on industrial America, and the way two musicians used their fury to illuminate economic injustice and inspire change.
Daniel Wolff is the author of The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back; How Lincoln Learned to Read; 4th of July/Asbury Park; and You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. He has been nominated for a Grammy and was named Literary Artist of 2013 for Rockland County, New York. A poet, songwriter, and essayist, he has helped produce a number of documentary films with director Jonathan Demme. He lives in Nyack, New York.
Dave Marsh is the author of the bestselling Bruce Springsteen biographies, Born to Run and Glory Days, and over a dozen other books, including Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who, Louie, Louie: The History and Myth, and The New Book of Rock Lists. A former editor of Creem and Rolling Stone, he currently edits the newsletter Rock & Roll Confidential.
Chris Buhalis is a singer and songwriter from Ann Arbor, MI
