Literati is excited to welcome author Mark Beyer who will be reading and discussing his new novel, Hired Man.
About Hired Man:
What would you do if a dying stranger begged you to save his daughter and then paid you seven figures to do it? When suburban dad Terry Holbrook stops to help the quickly dying driver of an icy car wreck on a dark, lonely country road, he can’t believe the bloody check thrust into his hands is worth the paper it’s printed on. Yet, in no time, Terry and his family are swept into a dangerous vortex of powerful Detroit drug dealers, vicious blackmailers, homicidal white supremacists and the dead man’s vengeful family. Enter Pearce Butler, a “ghost” who operates both inside and outside the law. But is his true motive to mete out justice? Or simply to get to the money first? From word one, Hired Man speeds like a bullet train through ever-tightening coils of suspense toward a climax as riveting as any in crime fiction.
Mark Beyer is a Detroit-based writer, creative director, and video producer. He and his wife, Linda, live in Beverly Hills, MI. His fiction has been published in the L.A. Reader. Hired Man is his first nove
All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell.
2-4 p.m., AADL Downtown 3rd-floor freespace rm., 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free. annarborstorytelling.org, 997-5388
This local husband-and-wife writing team reads from ‘Til Death: Marriage Poems, their jointly written collection exploring the ups and downs of suburban monogamy from their dual perspectives. The program begins with open mike readings.
7-8:30 p.m., Sweetwaters, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663.
Literati Bookstore is excited to welcome author Fatima Farheen Mirza, who will read and discuss her debut novel, A Place for Us.
About A Place for Us:
Fatima Farheen Mirza’s masterful debut novel gathers together the lives of an Indian Muslim family in California on the eve of its eldest daughter’s wedding. As Hadia’s marriage—one chosen of love, not tradition—brings the family back together, her parents, Rafiq and Layla, must come to terms with the choices that their two daughters, and their estranged son, Amar, have made.
In a narrative that spans decades and sees family life through the eyes of each member, A Place for Us charts the crucial moments in the family’s past, from the bonds that hold them together to the differences that pull them apart.
And as Hadia, Huda, and Amar attempt to carve out lives for themselves, they must reconcile their present culture with their parents’ faith, tread a path between the old world and the new, and learn how the smallest decisions can lead to the deepest of betrayals.
This is a deeply moving and resonant story for our times: a masterful novel of love, identity, and belonging—one that eloquently examines what it means to be both American and Muslim—and announces Fatima Farheen Mirza as a major new literary talent.
Fatima Farheen Mirza was born and raised in the Bay Area, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a teaching-writing fellow. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
Widely-published Detroit poet Lauren Bernstein-Machlay reads from her latest book, Travelers, a collection of autobiographical poems. Foreword (Traverse City) writer Susan Waggoner notes “it’s through the bravery of the concept-going back to the place where you grew up to plant your flag in uncertain turf-that the book most delivers. Poised between sinking back into nature and leaping forward to revival, flashing glimpses of Detroit stand out.” Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757.
Literati is pleased to welcome journalist Edward McClelland who will be discussing his new book book Folktales and Legends of the Middle West.
About Folktales and Legends of the Middle West:
America’s first superheroes lived in the Midwest. There was Nanabozho, the Ojibway man-god who conquered the King of Fish, took control of the North Wind, and inspired Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. Paul Bunyan, the larger-than-life North Woods lumberjack, created Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes with his giant footsteps. More recently, Pittsburgh steelworker Joe Magerac squeezed out rails between his fingers, and Rosie the Riveter churned out the planes that won the world’s most terrible war. In Folktales and Legends of the Middle West, Edward McClelland collects these stories and more. Readers will learn the sea shanties of the Great Lakes sailors and the spirituals of the slaves following the North Star across the Ohio River, and be frightened by tales of the Lake Erie Monster and Wisconsin’s dangerous Hodag. A history of the region as told through its folklore, music, and legends, this is a book every Midwestern family should own.
Edward McClelland is a journalist. His writing has appeared in publications such as the Columbia Journalism Review, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Salon. He is the author of How to Speak Midwestern, Nothin’ But Blue Skies and Young Mr. Obama. He lives in Chicago
Join us for a special Storytime event with author Robert Burleigh who will be reading from his new book: Trapped! a Whale’s Rescue.
About Trapped!
In the icy waters of the Pacific, a massive humpback whale unexpectedly finds herself tangled in a net abandoned by fishermen. When a rescue boat and a convoy of divers arrive to help the struggling humpback, a realistic and moving encounter bridges the human and aquatic worlds.
Based on an event that took place near San Francisco in 2005, this picture book depicts a humpback whale swimming, diving, and feeding freely until she becomes entangled in abandoned, drifting nets. Her struggles draw the ropes tighter until, trapped, she stops and lies still. Boats bring rescuers to the scene. Five divers cut the lines, one by one, until the whale can swim again. “She moves among the cheering rescuers, softly nudging each one, as if saying thanks.” The whale breaches and swims away. In Minor’s beautifully composed gouache paintings, the whale is a silent but enormously empathetic character. Several appended pages offer more information about the actual event, whale rescues in general, and humpback whales in particular. Adults reading the book aloud may want to introduce words such as spyhop, lobtail, fluke, and krill before beginning,to avoid breaking the cadence of the writing once the story is underway. Like the stately illustrations, the precise prose has a dignity that is worthy of its subject and unusual in a picture book for preschool and primary-grade children. Although the episode of the whale’s entrapment and release is short, it will linger in young listeners’ minds long after the book is closed.
– Booklist, *starred review
Robert Burleigh is the author of many books for children, including Night Flight: Amelia Earhart Crosses the Atlantic illustrated by Wendell Minor (Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books, 2011); Fly, Cher Ami, Fly!: The Pigeon Who Saved the Lost Battalion (Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2008); and Homerun: The Story of Babe Ruth (Sandpiper, 2003).
Literati is pleased to welcome author Anna-Lisa Cox who will be sharing her new book The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality.
About The Bone and Sinew of the Land:
The long-hidden stories of America’s black pioneers, the frontier they settled, and their fight for the heart of the nation
When black settlers Keziah and Charles Grier started clearing their frontier land in 1818, they couldn’t know that they were part of the nation’s earliest struggle for equality; they were just looking to build a better life. But within a few years, the Griers would become early Underground Railroad conductors, joining with fellow pioneers and other allies to confront the growing tyranny of bondage and injustice.
The Bone and Sinew of the Land tells the Griers’ story and the stories of many others like them: the lost history of the nation’s first Great Migration. In building hundreds of settlements on the frontier, these black pioneers were making a stand for equality and freedom. Their new home, the Northwest Territory–the wild region that would become present-day Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin–was the first territory to ban slavery and have equal voting rights for all men. Though forgotten today, in their own time the successes of these pioneers made them the targets of racist backlash. Political and even armed battles soon ensued, tearing apart families and communities long before the Civil War. This groundbreaking work of research reveals America’s forgotten frontier, where these settlers were inspired by the belief that all men are created equal and a brighter future was possible.
Anna-Lisa Cox is the author of A Stronger Kinship: One Town’s Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith, and an award-winning historian. Currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, she also recently helped create two historical exhibits based on her original research at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, including one on black pioneers. She lives in Michigan.
Literati is pleased to welcome author Brooks Rexroat who will be sharing his collection Thrift Store Coats.
About Thrift Store Coats:
Brooks Rexroat’s Thrift Store Coats transports readers to the postindustrial Midwest and explores the lives of those living on its quiet edge. Interwoven with themes of love, lineage, poverty, and survival, the characters in these stories grapple with the idea of identity — not only of where they fit into the world, but of how their origins impact their place in the future.
The collection’s titular story of focuses on a couple’s navigation of poverty after the recession leaves each of them suddenly unemployed. In “Waiting Out the Apocalypse”, characters from all walks of life are forced into action by that which is out of their control: the decisions of local lawmakers, and the devastating effects of a hurricane’s landfall. “Five Meals in Paris” explores themes of solitude and circumstance by following a factory worker from Ohio as he fulfills his lifelong dream of traveling to Paris, France.
While Brooks Rexroat’s prose possesses the power to break the hearts of readers, he establishes himself as a voice to be heard by masterfully repairing what has been broken — with unflinching honesty, and with a stunning sense of empathy.
Brooks Rexroat was raised near Cincinnati, Ohio at the intersection of the Rust Belt and Appalachia: the crossing point of mountain and farm field, boarded mine and shuttered factory, the water that splits north from south. The importance of place has always surrounded him, and it deeply inhabits his characters.
After earning a Master of Fine Arts Degree in creative prose from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, he embarked on a journey in higher education that has included teaching opportunities at open enrollment community colleges, regional public universities, and rigorous private liberal arts colleges. Now based at Brescia University in Western Kentucky, Rexroat spent the 2016-2017 academic year as a Fulbright U.S. Teaching and Research Scholar at Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University in Siberia, Russia. He was a 2014 Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellow in Cassis, France and his stories and essays have appeared in more than 30 journals and magazines on three continents.
