2-4 p.m., Ann Arbor District Library Freespace (3rd floor). Free. 971-5763.
Join the Dexter District Library in welcoming back professional storytellers, Jane Fink and Steve Daut as they share the wit and wisdom of American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer, Mark Twain and American cartoonist, author, humorist, journalist, playwright, and celebrated wit, James Grover Thurber. This fun filled performance is sure to amuse and entertain. Register at the Adult Service Desk or call the library at 734-426-4477.
Contact: lryan@dexter.lib.mi.us
Location: Dexter District Library – Lower Level
Literati is thrilled to welcome poet Diane Seuss who will be reading from her new collection Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. Diane will be joined by fellow poet Laura Kasischke for conversation after the reading.
About Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl:
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl takes its title from Rembrandt’s painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer’s own troubled gaze. In Diane Seuss’s new collection, the notion of the still life is shattered and Rembrandt’s painting is presented across the book in pieces–details that hide more than they reveal until they’re assembled into a whole. With invention and irreverence, these poems escape gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Instead, Seuss invites in the alienated, the washed-up, the ugly, and the freakish–the overlooked many of us who might more often stand in a Walmart parking lot than before the canvases of Pollock, O’Keeffe, and Rothko. Rendered with precision and profound empathy, this extraordinary gallery of lives in shards shows us that “our memories are local, acute, and unrelenting.”
Diane Seuss is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, winner of the Juniper Prize. She lives in Michigan.
Laura Kasischke is a poet and novelist whose fiction has been made into several feature-length films. Her book of poems, Space, in Chains, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Chelsea, Michigan.
Literati is thrilled to be celebrating the work and formal career of the poet and close friend of the store, Keith Taylor. Keith will be retiring from the University of Michigan at the end of the Winter 2018 Semester. Keith will be joined by fellow poet Cody Walker for a discussion of his work.
Poet and writer Keith Taylor teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs in creative writing at the University of Michigan, directs the Bear River Writer’s Conference, and is the former poetry editor for Michigan Quarterly Review. His sixteenth collection, The Bird-while, was published by Wayne State University Press February 2017. Fidelities was published in 2015 by Alice Greene & Co. Keith’s work has appeared in such publications as Story, The Los Angeles Times, Alternative Press, The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, The Iowa Review, Witness, Chicago Tribune, and Hanging Loose. Other books are Marginalia for a Natural History published by Black Lawrence Press, and Ghost Writers, a collection of ghost stories co-edited with Laura Kasischke, published by Wayne State University Press.
Cody Walker is the author of The Self-Styled No-Child (Waywiser, 2016) and Shuffle and Breakdown (Waywiser, 2008). His poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Yale Review, Slate, Salon, and The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2007); his essays have appeared online in The New Yorker and the Kenyon Review. The former Poet Populist of Seattle, he now lives with his family in Ann Arbor, where he directs the creative writing minor at the University of Michigan. His new collection, The Trumpiad (Waywiser, 2017), was released last April.
Literati Bookstore is thrilled to partner with the Ann Arbor Distric Library to welcome Gene Luen Yang! This event includes a book signing and books will be on sale. The event will take place in the Downtown Library’s multipurpose room.
Cartoonist Gene Luen Yang gives a talk about Reading Without Walls: exploring books about characters who look or live differently than you, topics you haven’t discovered, or formats that you haven’t tried. Drawing on his own experiences as a reader and author, Yang promotes diversity and opens readers’ eyes to new ideas and experiences.
Learn more about the Reading Without Walls Initiative here.
Gene Luen Yang is the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He began drawing comic books in the fifth grade, and in 1997 he received a Xeric Grant for his first comic, Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks. He has since written and drawn a number of titles, including Duncan’s Kingdom, The Rosary Comic Book, Prime Baby and Animal Crackers. American Born Chinese, his first graphic novel from First Second, was a National Book Award finalist, as well as the winner of the Printz Award and an Eisner Award. He also won an Eisner for The Eternal Smile, a collaboration with Derek Kirk Kim. He is the author of the Secret Coders series (with artist Mike Holmes) and has written for the hit comics Avatar: The Last Airbender and Superman. Yang lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Literati is pleased to host historian and writer Maura Elizabeth Cunningham who will be discussing her new book China in the 21st Century.
About China in the 21st Century:
In this fully revised and updated third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know(R), Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Maura Elizabeth Cunningham provide cogent answers to urgent questions regarding the world’s newest superpower and offer a framework for understanding China’s meteoric rise from developing country to superpower. Framing their answers through the historical legacies – Confucian thought, Western and Japanese imperialism, the Mao era, and the Tiananmen Square massacre – that largely define China’s present-day trajectory, Wasserstrom and Cunningham introduce readers to the Chinese Communist Party, the building boom in Shanghai, and the environmental fallout of rapid Chinese industrialization. They also explain unique aspects of Chinese culture, such as the one-child policy, and provide insight into Chinese-American relations, a subject that has become increasingly fraught during the Trump era. As Wasserstrom and Cunningham draw parallels between China and other industrialized nations during their periods of development, in particular the United States during its rapid industrialization in the 19th century, they also predict how we might expect China to act in the future vis-a-vis the United States, Russia, India, and its East Asian neighbors.
Updated to include perspectives on Hong Kong’s shifting political status, as well as an expanded discussion of President Xi Jinping’s time in office, China in the 21st Century provides a concise and insightful introduction to this significant global power.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham is an Associate at the University of Michigan’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. She has written on modern Chinese history for the Wall Street Journal and the LA Review of Books.
Join us for a celebration of authors, books, art, and bratwurst.
Booktoberfest will feature industry experts from around the country, offering advice and insight for authors, as well as fun and educational activities for the whole family.
Authors can even pitch their books to a panel of experts for a chance to win a publishing package from Thomson-Shore! (Must sign up for the pitch contest ahead of time by visiting thomsonshore.com/booktoberfest.)
Enjoy a day of music, food, and fun, while learning about the ever-changing world of publishing and bookmaking. A portion of proceeds will benefit 826 Michigan.
About Half-Gods:
A startlingly beautiful debut, Half Gods brings together the exiled, the disappeared, the seekers. Following the fractured origins and destines of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of the past in their lives. These ten interlinked stories redraw the map of our world in surprising ways: following an act of violence, a baby girl is renamed after a Hindu goddess but raised as a Muslim; a lonely butcher from Angola finds solace in a family of refugees in New Jersey; a gentle entomologist, in Sri Lanka, discovers unexpected reserves of courage while searching for his missing son.
By turns heartbreaking and fiercely inventive, Half Gods reveals with sharp clarity the ways that parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.
Akil Kumarasamy is a writer from New Jersey. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia. Half Gods is her first book.
About Little Wonder:
Kat Gardiner’s debut collection of microfiction, Little Wonder, springs from the year she spent in Anacortes, Washington. Young and idealistic, she and her husband moved to town to open a café and music venue in the hopes of finding a home there.
The experiment lasted exactly one year.
In interconnected fragments, Little Wonder reads like a series of love notes to a former self. Characters navigate frustration, loss, heartbreak, but they also come into new versions of themselves. Little Wonder sheds light on the idea that joy and pain are often two sides of the same coin — and that being alive in this world can necessitate embracing both.
“I can see the sun sinking down over Anacortes at the end of every page. Little Wonder has the ache of Raymond Carver, the honesty, the vulnerability. It’s so melancholic and honest and beautiful.” — Kyle Field (Little Wings)
Born in Oklahoma, raised in the Pacific Northwest, and based in Detroit, Kat Gardiner carries a restlessness through her writing that’s been honed by a lifelong search for roots. Her debut collection of short fiction, Little Wonder, springs from the year Gardiner spent in Anacortes, Washington, during her early twenties. Young and idealistic, she opened a coffee shop and music venue with her husband in the hopes of finding a home in the city’s artistic community. The experiment lasted exactly one year. Gardiner closed the coffee shop and moved away from Anacortes, ending a stressful and dreamlike chapter in her life.
Gardiner studied creative writing at Bennington College in Vermont, and later took workshops with Tom Spanbauer, the creator of the technique known as Dangerous Writing, in Portland, Oregon. In developing her craft, she found herself drawn to microfiction, citing Lydia Davis as a touchstone. “There’s something powerful in succinct details,” Gardiner says. Writing in short, interconnected fragments enabled her to revisit the year spent in Anacortes with a new sense of perspective. Little Wonder reads like a series of love notes to a former self, or a collection of Polaroids made golden with age. Gardiner’s characters navigate frustration, loss, and heartbreak, but they also come into new versions of themselves, a transformation they may not recognize in the moment. Through poignant vignettes furnished generously with detail, Gardiner looks into what it means to enter the world and realize that the world is not nearly as amenable to change as an optimistic young person might think. “It’s been liberating to make art out of both the painful and the joyous parts of that experience,” she says. With Little Wonder, she’s shed light on the idea that joy and pain are often two sides of the same coin — and that being alive in this world can necessitate embracing both.
Literati is excited to welcome author kim d. hunter who will be sharing his new story collection, The Official Report on Human Activity.
About The Official Report on Human Activity:
The Official Report on Human Activity by kim d. hunter, which is neither official nor a report, is a collection of long stories that are linked by reoccurring characters and their personal struggles in societies rife with bigotry, in which media technology and capitalism have run amok. These stories approach the holy trinity of gender, race, and class at a slant. They are concerned with the process and role of writing intertwined with the roles of music and sound.
The four stories range from the utterly surreal-a factory worker seeking recognition for his writing gives birth to a small black elephant with a mysterious message on its hide-to the utterly real-a nerdy black teen’s summer away from home takes a turn when he encounters half-white twins on the run from the police. Prominently known as a Detroit poet, hunter creates illusions and magic while pulling back the curtain to reveal humanity-the good, bad, and absurd. Readers will find their minds expanded and their conversations flowing after finishing The Official Report on Human Activity.
The Official Report on Human Activity is sure to appeal to readers of literary fiction, particularly those interested in postmodernism and social justice.
kim d. hunter has published two collections of poetry: borne on slow knives and edge of the time zone. His poetry appears in Rainbow Darkness, What I Say, Black Renaissance Noire, 6X6 #35, and elsewhere. He received a 2012 Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Literary Arts and he works in Detroit providing media support to social justice groups.
