Jane Austen Book Club Discussion at Nicola’s Books – Associated event of the University of Michigan Graduate Library ‘The Life and Times of Lizzy Bennet’ Exhibit.
With the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, the Grad Library is showcasing not only significant early editions of Austen’s works held in the Special Collections Library, but a much broader swath of materials revealing the historical milieu in which she and her characters lived. This lead to a discussion about books about or written by Austen that reflected these times; out of that the Jane Austen Book Club Discussion was created. There will be three discussion events, February 7th, 28th and March 7th.
Kathleen A. Flynn is an editor at the New York Times, where she works at “The Upshot.” She holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.A. from the University of North Carolina. She has taught English in Hong Kong, washed dishes on Nantucket, and is a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their shy fox terrier, Olive.
The Jane Austen Project: Perfect for fans of Jane Austen, this engrossing debut novel offers an unusual twist on the legacy of one of the world’s most celebrated and beloved authors: two researchers from the future are sent back in time to meet Jane and recover a suspected unpublished novel.
London, 1815: Two travelers–Rachel Katzman and Liam Finucane–arrive in a field in rural England, disheveled and weighed down with hidden money. Turned away at a nearby inn, they are forced to travel by coach all night to London. They are not what they seem, but rather colleagues who have come back in time from a technologically advanced future, posing as wealthy West Indies planters–a doctor and his spinster sister. While Rachel and Liam aren’t the first team from the future to “go back,” their mission is by far the most audacious: meet, befriend, and steal from Jane Austen herself.
Carefully selected and rigorously trained by The Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics, disaster-relief doctor Rachel and actor-turned-scholar Liam have little in common besides the extraordinary circumstances they find themselves in. Circumstances that call for Rachel to stifle her independent nature and let Liam take the lead as they infiltrate Austen’s circle via her favorite brother, Henry.
But diagnosing Jane’s fatal illness and obtaining an unpublished novel hinted at in her letters pose enough of a challenge without the continuous convolutions of living a lie. While her friendship with Jane deepens and her relationship with Liam grows complicated, Rachel fights to reconcile the woman she is with the proper lady nineteenth-century society expects her to be. As their portal to the future prepares to close, Rachel and Liam struggle with their directive to leave history intact and exactly as they found it…however heartbreaking that may prove.
Laura Hulthen Thomas’s short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany, and Witness. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
Books will be available through Nicola’s Books – contact the store directly 734-662-0600 or come in to the store (2513 Jackson Avenue – Westgate Shopping Center.) Nicola’s Books will offer a 15% discount for the purchase of this title when you tell them that the book is for the Jane Austen Book Club. You may also check with the AADL for availability of the title.
Literati is proud to partner with the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies to welcome author and activist Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman to Ann Arbor for a talk on their new book Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia. This lecture will occur at the Weiser Hall on the University of Michigan campus.
About Never Remember:
The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than half a century after the end of Stalinist terror, the geography of the Gulag has been barely sketched and the number of its victims remains unknown. Has the Gulag been forgotten? Writer Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman set out across Russia in search of the memory of the Gulag. They journey from Moscow to Sandarmokh, a forested site of mass executions during Stalin’s Great Terror; to the only Gulag camp turned into a museum, outside of the city of Perm in the Urals; and to Kolyma, where prisoners worked in deadly mines in the remote reaches of the Far East. They find that in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where Stalin is remembered as a great leader, Soviet terror has not been forgotten: it was never remembered in the first place.
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin. Gessen’s books include The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She is the recipient of numerous other awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Fellowship, and her work appears regularly in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and Slate. A longtime resident of Moscow, Gessen now lives in New York City.
Misha Friedman regularly photographs for The New Yorker, Time, Der Spiegel, GQ, Le Monde, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Sports Illustrated, Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders. His work has received numerous awards, including grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. He was born in Moldova and graduated from Binghamton University and the London School of Economics. He taught himself photography while working in humanitarian medical aid. He lives in New York City.
Tad Schmaltz (philosophy) and George Hoffman (French) discuss Schmaltz’s new book “Early Modern Cartesianisms.”
About the book:
“There is a general sense that the philosophy of Descartes was a dominant force in early modern thought. Since the work in the nineteenth century of French historians of Cartesian philosophy, however, there has been no fully contextualized comparative examination of the various receptions of Descartes in different portions of early modern Europe.
“This study addresses the need for a more current understanding of these receptions by considering the different constructions of Descartes’s thought that emerged in the Calvinist United Provinces (Netherlands) and Catholic France, the two main centers for early modern Cartesianism, during the period dating from the last decades of his life to the century or so following his death in 1650. It turns out that we must speak not of a single early modern Cartesianism rigidly defined in terms of Descartes’s own authorial intentions, but rather of a loose collection of early modern Cartesianisms that involve a range of different positions on various sets of issues.
“Though more or less rooted in Descartes’s somewhat open-ended views, these Cartesianisms evolved in different ways over time in response to different intellectual and social pressures. Chapters of this study are devoted to: the early modern Catholic and Calvinist condemnations of Descartes and the incompatible Cartesian responses to these; conflicting attitudes among early modern Cartesians toward ancient thought and modernity; competing early modern attempts to combine Descartes’s views with those of Augustine; the different occasionalist accounts of causation within early modern Cartesianism; and the impact of various forms of early modern Cartesianism on both Dutch medicine and French physics.”
Maya Barzilai (modern Herbrew and Jewish culture) and Kathryn Babayan (Iranian history and culture) discuss Barzilai’s new book Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters, a monster tour of the Golem narrative across various cultural and historical landscapes.
About the book:
“In the 1910s and 1920s, a “golem cult” swept across Europe and the U.S., later surfacing in Israel. Why did this story of a powerful clay monster molded and animated by a rabbi to protect his community become so popular and pervasive? The golem has appeared in a remarkable range of popular media: from the Yiddish theater to American comic books, from German silent film to Quentin Tarantino movies. This book showcases how the golem was remolded, throughout the war-torn twentieth century, as a muscular protector, injured combatant, and even murderous avenger. This evolution of the golem narrative is made comprehensible by, and also helps us to better understand, one of the defining aspects of the last one hundred years: mass warfare and its ancillary technologies.
Neutral Zone literary arts director and award-winning local slam poet Molly Raynor discusses writing poetry from initial idea through final revisions. For adult and teen (grade 6 & up) fiction and nonfiction writers. Also, local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal host an open house for writers to connect with one another and/or work on their projects at 7 p.m. on Apr 16.
7-8:45 p.m., AADL Westgate. Free. 327-8301.
Former deputy assistant Attorney General Jim Turner, who served under 7 consecutive presidents, discusses his new book about the landmark case that ended with the conviction of klansmen, despite 2 all-white juries who refused to convict.
4 p.m., 100 U-M Hatcher Grad Library Gallery, enter from the Diag. Free. 936-2314
Detroit children’s book writer Jack Cheng, author of See You in the Cosmos, discusses the art of writing and presents awards to the winners of the AADL short story contest for 3rd-5th graders.
1-2 p.m., AADL Westgate. Free. 327-4200.
U-M sociology professor Geneviève Zubrzycki and U-M anthropology professor Andrew Shryock discuss Zubrzycki’s book examining the importance of the annual Feast of St. John the Baptist to Quebecois national identity.
5:30 p.m., 100 U-M Hatcher Grad Library Gallery, enter from the Diag. Free. 763-8994.
Jim May STORYTELLING WORKSHOP. 1-3 pm. No charge, but you must register for this event as participation is limited.
Several Detroit writers discuss their contributions to this essay collection about Detroit neighborhoods, edited by Detroit native Aaron Foley, author of How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass. Signing.
4 p.m., Nicola’s, Westgate shopping center. Free. 662-0600.
