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Garth Greenwell will read from his debut novel, What Belongs to You.

On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he’s forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as he learns more of Mitko’s own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and want.

What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.

“Garth Greenwell takes us deep inside a specific Bulgarian subculture to examine the universal: the disparity between the uninhibited lives we desire and the bearable lives we choose. I began reading What Belongs to You in admiration; I ended in tears. An exquisite debut.” –Jamie Quatro, author of I Want to Show You More.

Garth Greenwell is the author of Mitko, which won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction Award and a Lambda Award. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, he holds graduate degrees from Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Arts Fellow. His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and A Public Space. What Belongs to You is his first novel.

Michigan native Travis Mulhauser will read from his debut novel Sweetgirl.

“SWEETGIRL is a gritty, compelling novel of a world where even a sixteen-year-old must confront what Edith Wharton called ‘the hard considerations of the poor.’ Mulhauser depicts his people and their landscape with uncompromising fidelity.” —Ron Rash

In his uncompromising and evocative debut novel, SWEETGIRL (Ecco; February 2, 2016), Travis Mulhauser takes readers deep into the heart and mind of an unforgettable young girl—a fearless and headstrong teenager navigating the hard luck terrain of northern Michigan as she looks for her mother, an addict who has gone missing. Percy James’s search launches a complicated series of events, triggered by an unexpected discovery that threatens her very survival. “There’s a big old neon heart pulsing on every page of SWEETGIRL, like the sign to a bar you can’t help but enter,” says Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls and Don’t Kiss Me. “I felt thrilled and shocked, and I couldn’t stop turning the pages. Travis Mulhauser is a writer to be reckoned with.”

Nine days after Mama disappeared I heard she was throwing down with Shelton Potter. As a blizzard bears down, Percy James sets off to find her troubled mother. For years, Percy has had to take care of herself and Mama—a woman who’s been unraveling for as long as her daughter can remember. In a drug-ravaged farmhouse, Percy finds a neglected infant, and risks everything to save her. But, her decision puts her on the wrong side of Potter, a volatile ex-con who puts a bounty on the young girl’s head. As Percy disappears into the surrounding, isolated hill country, she will face a journey requiring plenty of courage and ingenuity, even as she confronts the nature of her mother’s affliction and the realities of life in a community devastated by meth addiction and the desperation that accompanies it.

“Percy actually started as a supporting character in another book, which I basically scrapped when I realized she was the one I was really interested in writing about,” Mulhauser says of the genesis of SWEETGIRL. “I think her story really came together through her voice, which I would say is heavily influenced by two experiences: a few years working with addict and ‘at risk teens’ in northern Michigan and seven years teaching at a small community college in North Carolina. Both of these experiences exposed me to really tough, vibrant kids who spoke with conviction and bluster, who were often hopeful despite difficult circumstances, and who, generally, did not imbue their very harrowing life experiences with much self-pity or melodrama.”

Travis Mulhauser was born and raised in Northern Michigan, the insular and remote setting of the fictional Cutler County of the novel. Currently, Mulhauser lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife and two children, where he teaches at North Carolina State University. He earned his MFA from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

“A riveting novel… far, far funnier than it has any right to be,” adds Brock Clarke, author of The Happiest People in the World. “If you’re a fan of Charles Portis and Denis Johnson… then this book is exactly what you’ve been wanting, what you’ve been waiting for.”

Young-adult author Ruta Sepetys reads from her latest novel, Salt to the Sea.

Salt to the Sea is a masterful work of historical fiction inspired by the single greatest maritime disaster in history: the real-life tragedy that was the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff (far more deadly than the sinkings of the Titanic and the Lusitania combined). Just as she did in her award-winning novel Between Shades of Gray, Ruta unearths a shockingly little-known casualty of a gruesome war, and proves that humanity can prevail, even in the darkest of hours.

It’s 1945 in East Prussia. World War II is drawing to a close as Russian forces overtake the Germans, and thousands of refugees are on a frantic trek toward freedom, almost all of them with something to hide. Among the throngs of people seeking safety are Joana, Emilia, and Florian: each one borne of a different homeland, yet equally desperate to escape a life marked by brutality and war. As their paths converge en route to the Wilhelm Gustloff–the former cruise ship that promises each character’s salvation and future just beyond the Baltic Sea–the three are forced by circumstance to unite, and with each step closer toward safety, their strength, courage, and trust in each other are tested. Yet just when it seems freedom is within their grasp, Russian torpedoes strike the massive ship. Not country, nor culture, nor status matter as all ten thousand people aboard must fight for the same thing: survival. Most will not make it.

“With exquisite prose, Sepetys plumbs the depths of her quartet of characters, bringing each to the breaking point and back, shaping a narrative that is as much about the intricacies of human nature as it is about a historical catastrophe. Nominated for both the Morris Award and the Carnegie Medal for her first novel, Between Shades of Gray (2011), Sepetys returns to those roots with another harrowing, impeccably researched story of hardship and survival in Eastern Europe…This haunting gem of a novel begs to be remembered, and in turn, it tries to remember the thousands of real people its fictional characters represent.”—Booklist, starred review

“Sepetys delivers another knockout historical novel…Sepetys excels in shining light on lost chapters of history, and this visceral novel proves a memorable testament to strength and resilience in the face of war and cruelty.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“With the same lyrical prose, eye for detail, and breath-stopping ability to unfold delicate layers of characterization and theme with skillfully paced revelations, the author of Between Shades of Gray (2011) and Out of the Easy (2013) presents a fictionalized World War II story based on a true tragedy…Observations of war and loss, human cruelty, and hatred, are unflinching. But through the horror and heartbreak shine rays of hope: love, kindness, courage, and sacrifice. Verdict: Artfully told and sensitively crafted, Sepetys’ s exploration of this little-known piece of history will leave readers weeping.” —School Library Journal, starred review

Ruta Sepetys (www.rutasepetys.com) was born and raised in Michigan in a family of artists, readers, and music lovers. She is the award-winning, bestselling author of Between Shades of Gray and Out of the Easy. Ruta lives with her family in Nashville, Tennessee. Follow her on Twitter at @RutaSepetys.

NoViolet Bulawayo won the 2014 PEN-Hemingway Award, the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, and the inaugural Etisalat Prize for Literature in 2014. We Need New Names was a finalist for numerous other awards, including the Man Booker Prize. NoViolet earned her MFA at Cornell University where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she now teaches as a Jones Lecturer in Fiction. NoViolet grew up in Zimbabwe.

David Joy will read from his latest novel, Where All Light Tends to Go.

Reading with David will be special guest and Man Booker nominated author Chigozie Obioma. Author and Midwestern Gothic co-founder Robert James Russell will be moderatind a post-reading discussion, followed by an audience Q&A.

In the meth-dealing McNeely family, killing a man is a rite of passage, but when eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely botches a murder, he is torn between appeasing his kingpin father and leaving the mountains with the girl he loves. The area surrounding Cashiers, North Carolina is home to people of all kinds, but the world that Jacob lives in is crueler than most. His father runs a methodically organized meth ring, with local authorities on the dime to turn a blind eye to his dealings. Having dropped out of high school, subsequently cutting himself off from his peers, Jacob has been working for this father for years, all on the promise that his payday will come eventually. The only joy he finds comes from reuniting with Maggie, his first love, and a girl clearly bound for bigger and better things than their hardscrabble town. The world that Jacob inhabits is bleak and unrelenting in its violence and disregard for human life, and having known nothing more, Jacob wonders if he can muster the strength to rise above it.

“Remarkable… This isn’t your ordinary coming-of-age novel, but with his bone-cutting insights into these men and the region that bred them, Joy makes it an extraordinarily intimate experience.” — New York Times Book Review

“Bound to draw comparisons to Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone…[Joy’s] moments of poetic cognizance are the stuff of fine fiction, lyrical sweets that will keep readers turning pages…’Where All Light Tends To Go’ is a book that discloses itself gradually, like a sunrise peeking over a distant mountain range…If [Joy’s next novel] is anything like his first, it’ll be worth the wait.” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“[Joy] has studied his forebears in Southern gothic: Where All Light Tends to Go mixes Flannery O’Connor’s twisted religion with Cormac McCarthy’s mythopoetic violence…Jacob’s narrative voice mixes these poetic passages with down-home colloquialisms in sequences that are occasionally jarring, though nothing stands in the way of the story’s momentum. Readers turn through pages of darkness hoping that, against the odds, Jacob can find his way to the light.” — Memphis Commercial-Appeal

“[A] gripping first novel…[a] tragic, absorbing plot. Engaging characters, a well-realized setting, and poetic prose establish Joy as a novelist worth watching.” — Publishers Weekly

“Joy’s first novel is an uncompromising noir, its downward thrust pulling like quicksand on both the characters and the reader. And, yet, there is poetry here, too, as there is in Daniel Woodrell’s novels, the kind of poetry that draws its power from a doomed character’s grit in the face of disaster…This is the start of a very promising fiction-writing career.” — Booklist

David Joy lives in a more remote part of North Carolina (Webster) and has great knowledge of the area and its people, the real-life inspirations for what he’s coined an “Appalachian noir.” David was born in Charlotte, N.C., in 1983, and moved to Cullowhee in 2003 to study literature at Western Carolina University mentoring under Ron Rash, Deidre Elliott, and Pamela Duncan. He is the author of Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey, which was a finalist for the Reed Environmental Writing Award and the Ragan Old North State Award for Creative Nonfiction. His stories and creative non-fiction have appeared in Drafthorse Literary Journal, Smoky Mountain Living, Wilderness House Literary Review, Bird Watcher’s Digest, Pisgah Review, and Flycatcher.

Chigozie Obioma was born in Nigeria. He has lived in Cyprus, Turkey and now the United States where he is a professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A recipient of Hopwood Awards in fiction and poetry, his fiction has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review and Transition. His novel, The Fishermen, will be published originally in English by ONE/Pushkin Press (UK), Little, Brown (US/Canada), Scribe (Australia/NZ), Cassava Republic (Nigeria) and in 24 languages beginning from Spring 2015. Go to ‘International Editions’ section of the website for a list of editions and publishers’ pages. His debut novel, THE FISHERMEN, is a winner of the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize 2015.

A born and bred Michigander, Robert James Russell is the co-founding editor of the literary journal Midwestern Gothic, which aims to catalog the very best fiction of the Midwestern United States (an area he believes is ripe with its own mythologies and tall tales, yet often overlooked), as well as the micro-press MG Press. In 2013 he launched the online literary journal CHEAP POP, which publishes micro-fiction, 500 words or less. Fascinated by regionalist literature and the intersection of place and relationships, his work has appeared in numerous publications, both print and online. His first novel, Sea of Trees, was published by Winter Goose Publishing in 2012. His first collection of stories, Don’t Ask Me to Spell It Out, was released in April 2015 by WhiskeyPaper Press. His Western novel, Mesilla, was released in September 2015 by Dock Street Press. He’s been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize, and was awarded an artist residency with the University Musical Society for the 2014-2015 performance season.

Born in 1989 and currently living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Z.G. Tomaszewski is a poet, rambler, handyman, and musician as well as co-director of Lamp Light Musical Festival and a founding member of Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters. His first book, All Things Dusk, was selected by Li-Young Lee as the 2014 International Poetry Prize winner and published by Hong Kong University Press.

Dennis Hinrichsen’s most recent works are Skin Music, co-winner of the 2014 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press, and Electrocution, A Partial History, winner of the Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Prize from Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art. His previous books include Rip-tooth (2010 Tampa Poetry Prize) and Kurosawa’s Dog (2008FIELD Poetry Prize). An earlier work Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights received the 1999 Akron Poetry Prize. Poems of his can be found in a number of recent anthologies includingPoetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry, New Poetry From the Midwest 2014, Clash by Night (an anthology inspired by The Clash’s London Calling), and Best of the Net 2014. He lives in Lansing, Michigan.