Literati is delighted to welcome Thomas J. Kitson, translator for the novel Rapture by Iliazd
About Rapture
The draft dodger Laurence yearns to take control of his destiny. Having fled to the highlands, he asserts his independence by committing a string of robberies and murders. Then he happens upon Ivlita, a beautiful young woman trapped in an intricately carved mahogany house. Laurence does not hesitate to take her as well. Determined to drape his young bride in jewels, he plots ever more daring heists. Yet when Laurence finds himself casting bombs alongside members of a revolutionary cell, he must again ask: is he a free man or a pawn of history?
Rapture is a fast-paced adventure-romance and a literary treat of the highest order. The author, Iliazd, entertains, with a deceptively light hand, questions that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann once faced. How does the individual balance freedom and necessity, love and death, creativity and sterility? What is the role of violence in human history and culture? How does language both comfort and fail us in our postwar, post-Christian world?
Censored for decades in the Soviet Union, Rapture was a novel nearly lost to Russian and Western audiences. This English-language translation rescues Laurence’s surreal journey from the oblivion he, too, faces as he as he tries to outrun fate.
Thomas J. Kitson is a freelance translator in New York City.
Literati is pleased to welcome Sherry Stanfa-Stanley in support of her memoir, Finding My Badass Self: A Year of Truths and Dares.
Fighting midlife inertia, Sherry Stanfa-Stanley chose to stare down fear through The 52/52 Project: a year of weekly new experiences designed to push her far outside her comfort zone. These ranged from visiting a nude beach with her seventy-five-year-old mother in tow to taking a road trip with her ex-husband–and then another one with his girlfriend. She also went on a raid with a vice squad and SWAT team, exfoliated a rhinoceros (inadvertently giving him an erection), and crashed a wedding (where she accidentally caught the bouquet). While finding her courage in the most unlikely of circumstances, Sherry ultimately found herself.
For midlifers, fatigued parents, and anyone who may be discontent with their life and looking to shake things up, try new things, or just escape, Finding My Badass Self is proof it’s never too late to reinvent yourself–and that the best bucket list of all may be an unbucket list.
Sherry Stanfa-Stanley is a writer, humorist, and squeamish adventurer. She writes about her midlife escapades and other topics on Facebook (The 52 at 52 Project) and also blogs at www.sherrystanfa-stanley.com. By day, Sherry attempts to respectably represent her alma mater as a communication director at The University of Toledo. An empty nester after raising Son #1 and Son #2, she now indulges a menagerie of badly behaved pets.
Literati is pleased to welcome Chuck Carlise and Susanna Lang for the latest installment of Poetry at Literati.
Chuck Carlise is the author of the brand new collection, In One Version of the Story (New Issues Press 2016), as well as the chapbooks, A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs (winner of the Concrete Wolf Poetry Series 2011) and Casual Insomniac (Bateau, winner of the Boom Chapbook Prize 2011). His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets in both 2012 and 2014. He is currently a Lecturer in writing, rhetoric, and cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
In One Version of the Story is a lyric exploration of the ways human beings confront desire, loss and absence by creating stories. Its narrative situation begins with from the French folk legend of “l’Inconnue de la Seine”—the unidentified young woman who drowned herself in Paris in the 1880s, and whose (unauthorized) death mask was eventually cast as the face of Resusci-Anne CPR training dummies—but eventually the book encompasses a chronicle of personal loss, a history of photography, a study of the mechanics of breathing, and a solo climb to the rim of a Mediterranean volcano.
The book is a hybrid of narrative history, lyric meditation, and journalistic investigation, often implicating the speaker (and reader) in the act of mythmaking itself. It is story-making itself which is interrogated here, however the book seeks not to recreate narratives, but rather to understand why they matter—why and how we give them the meaning that we do.
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Susanna Lang was born in New York and raised in college towns where her father taught in Kansas, Michigan and Connecticut. Her first collection of poems, Even Now, was published by The Backwaters Press in 2008, and her chapbook, Two by Two, came out with Finishing Line Press in 2011. A full-length collection, Tracing the Lines, was published by Brick Road Poetry Press in spring 2013. Words in Stone, her translation of poems by Yves Bonnefoy, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1976; The Origin of Language, prose poems by Yves Bonnefoy, was published by George Nama in 1979. She won a 1999 Illinois Arts Council Award and the Inkwell Poetry Competition in 2009, was a 2010 and 2015 Hambidge Fellow, and received an 2011 Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. A longtime educator in the Chicago area, she has taught literacy and literature in grades 5-12, and led adult poetry workshops in public libraries and for organizations such as the Illinois Writing Project, Northwest Cultural Council, and others. Her most recent book is Travel Notes from the River Styx (Terrapin, 2017).
In the earnest and beautiful Travel Notes from the River Styx, Susanna Lang peers into the tiny mirrors of a river’s current, the mirror her father cannot see himself in, the rearview mirror in which she spies sandhill cranes on an afternoon drive as she interrogates the natural and, at times, unnatural world. The result is a collection of double images: the moon a “copper coin with the sheen worn off,” “the flag [that] slips down the pole,” the country where her grandmother was born once called Russia, now Ukraine. As clear in its language as it is rich in argument, there’s something for everyone in Travel Notes, for travelers are exactly what this poet proclaims we are. It’s impossible to read this collection without wondering what doubles wait/lurk/reside beneath the skin of our bodies and of our world.
—Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
We are thrilled to host a panel discussion of contributors for the new collection And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017
About And Here:
Upper Peninsula literature has traditionally been suppressed or minimized in Michigan anthologies and Michigan literature as a whole. Even the Upper Peninsula itself has been omitted from maps, creating a people and a place that have become in many ways “ungeographic.” These people and this place are strongly made up of traditionally marginalized groups such as the working class, the rural poor, and Native Americans, which adds even more insult to the exclusion and forced oppressive silence. And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917–2017, gives voice to Upper Peninsula writers, ensuring that they are included in Michigan’s rich literary history. Ambitiously, And Here includes great U.P. writing from every decade spanning from the 1910s to the 2010s, starting with Lew R. Sarett’s (a.k.a. Lone Caribou) “The Blue Duck: A Chippewa Medicine Dance” and ending with Margaret Noodin’s “Babejianjisemigad” and Sally Brunk’s “KBIC.” Taken as a whole, the anthology forcefully insists on the geographic and literary inclusion of the U.P.—on both the map and the page.
Ronald Riekki is an award-winning poet, novelist, and playwright. Since 2010, he has headed the U.P./MI Book Tour, which has scheduled literary events throughout the state of Michigan, particularly in rural communities.
Sue Harrison is the author of six critically acclaimed bestselling novels. Mother Earth Father Sky, My Sister the Moon, and Brother Wind make up The Ivory Carver Trilogy, an epic adventure set in prehistoric Alaska. Song of the River, Cry of the Wind, and Call Down the Stars comprise The Storyteller Trilogy. Sue has also written a young adult book, SISU, released by Thunder Bay Press.
Gordon Henry is an Anishinabe poet and novelist, and an enrolled member of the White Earth Chippewa Tribe of Minnesota. His poetry has been published in anthologies such as Songs From This Earth On Turtle’s Back: Contemporary American Indian Poetry (1983) and Returning the Gift: Poetry and Prose from the First Native American Writers (1994). His novel, The Light People (1994), was awarded The American Book Award in 1995. He has also co-authored the textbook, The Ojibway (2004), to which he contributed a number of essays on Native American culture. He currently teaches at Michigan State University.
M.L. Liebler is an award-winning poet, literary arts activist, and professor. He is the author of several books of poetry, including I Want to Be Once (Wayne State University Press, 2016), and editor of the anthology Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams(Coffee House Press, 2010). He is also co-editor of Bob Seger’s House and Other Stories (Wayne State University Press, 2016). He has taught at Wayne State University since 1980.
William Olsen is the author of six poetry collections, four of them published by Northwestern University Press: Sand Theory(2011), Avenue of Vanishing (2007), Trouble Lights (2002), and Vision of a Storm Cloud (1996). Olsen teaches at Western Michigan University and Vermont College. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Phillip Sterling is the author of Mutual Shores and three chapbook-length series of poems: Abeyance (winner of the Frank Cat Press Chapbook Award 2007), Quatrains, and Significant Others. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, two Fulbright Lectureships, and a P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Award, he is also the editor of Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange and founding coordinator of the Literature in Person (LIP) Reading Series at Ferris State University, where he has taught writing and literature since 1987. His new collection of poems, And Then Snow, is now available from Main Street Rag Publishing.
Keith Taylor teaches at the University of Michigan. He has published many books over the years: collections of poetry, a collection of very short stories, co-edited volumes of essays and fiction, and a volume of poetry translated from Modern Greek.
Literati is excited to be a part of Rasa Festival! Tonight we are hosting readings from poets Ashwini Bhasi, Tarfia Faizullah, and Ambalila Hemsell
Ashwini Bhasi is from Kerala, India and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She writes poems to make sense of the mind-body connection of trauma and chronic pain, and the duality of her experiences as a genomic data analyst and poet. Her poems have appeared in Room Magazine, Rogue Agent, Bear River Review, Yellow Chair Review, The Feminist Wire, and Driftwood Press among others. She was nominated for a Pushcart prize for a poem she wrote about the 2016 presidential election.
Tarfia Faizullah is a poet, editor, and educator from Brooklyn, NY and raised in West Texas. She received an MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University and is the author of Seam (SIU 2014), which US poet laureate Natasha Trethewey calls “beautiful and necessary,” as well as Registers of Illuminated Villages, (forthcoming from Graywolf 2017).
Ambalila Hemsell is a writer, educator, and musician from Colorado. She holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Wrtiers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she is currently a Zell Fellow. She was a 2015/2016 Writer-in-Residence at InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit. Her poetry can be found in Riprap and is forthcoming in The American Literary Review.
The explosive account of how Republican legislators and political operatives fundamentally rigged our American democracy through redistricting.
With Barack Obama’s historic election in 2008, pundits proclaimed the Republicans as dead as the Whigs of yesteryear. Yet even as Democrats swooned, a small cadre of Republican operatives, including Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie, and Chris Jankowski began plotting their comeback with a simple yet ingenious plan. These men had devised a way to take a tradition of dirty tricks—known to political insiders as “ratf**king”—to a whole new, unprecedented level. Flooding state races with a gold rush of dark money made possible by Citizens United, the Republicans reshaped state legislatures, where the power to redistrict is held. Reconstructing this never- told-before story, David Daley examines the far-reaching effects of this so-called REDMAP program, which has radically altered America’s electoral map and created a firewall in the House, insulating the party and its wealthy donors from popular democracy. Ratf**ked pulls back the curtain on one of the greatest heists in American political history.
“Daley’s book provides a blow-by-blow account of how this happened. He draws on investigative reports, interviews and court documents to give readers an eye-opening tour of a process that many Americans never see….What Daley makes clear is that ruthless partisan gerrymandering is not good for democracy and makes it that much more difficult to wrestle control of the House away from the GOP. Democrats should read this book.” – Julian E. Zelizer, Washington Post
“The way dark money was translated into congressional majorities is one of the great, sinister stories of our time. But in David Daley the shadow figures have finally met their match.” – Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas
David Daley is the editor in chief of Salon and the Digital Media Fellow for the Wilson Center for Humanities and the Arts and the Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Literati is excited to welcome Kathryn Remlinger and her new book Yooper Talk: Dialect as Identity in Michigan’s Upper Penisula
About Yooper Talk:
Yooper Talk is a fresh and significant contribution to understanding regional language and culture in North America. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan—known as “the UP”—is historically, geographically, and culturally distinct. Struggles over land, labor, and language during the last 150 years have shaped the variety of English spoken by resident Yoopers, as well as how they are viewed by outsiders.
Drawing on sixteen years of fieldwork, including interviews with seventy-five lifelong residents of the UP, Kathryn Remlinger examines how the idea of a unique Yooper dialect emerged. Considering UP English in relation to other regional dialects and their speakers, she looks at local identity, literacy practices, media representations, language attitudes, notions of authenticity, economic factors, tourism, and contact with immigrant and Native American languages. The book also explores how a dialect becomes a recognizable and valuable commodity: Yooper talk (or “Yoopanese”) is emblazoned on t-shirts, flags, postcards, coffee mugs, and bumper stickers.
Yooper Talk explains linguistic concepts with entertaining examples for general readers and also contributes to interdisciplinary discussions of dialect and identity in sociolinguistics, anthropology, dialectology, and folklore.
“Although humorous songs poke fun at Yoopers’ words and customs, Remlinger takes this place and its people very seriously. She explains how history, ethnicity, environment, economic changes, tourism, and especially language have created a colorful and distinctive regional dialect and identity.” —Larry Lankton,Hollowed Ground: Copper Mining and Community Building on Lake Superior
Kathryn A. Remlinger is a professor of linguistics in the Department of English at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan.
Literati is excited to welcome Amos N. Guiora and his new book The Crime of Complicity
Complicity is a ground-breaking examination of the legal culpability of the bystander told through the lens of the author’s family experiences in the Holocaust. It provides an exploration of three distinct events: the death marches; the German occupation of Holland; and the German occupation of Hungary, all of which allow an in-depth discussion of the role of the bystander in varied circumstances. Through a narrative of his parents’ stories, Amos Guiora, Professor of Law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, author, and former Lieutenant Colonel in the Israel Defense Force, poses the question of whether there can and should be legal liability in deciding not to act to aid another person in distress. It draws upon a wide range of historical, psychological, sociological and archival material in an effort to determine the legal and moral responsibility of the bystander.
Amos N. Guiora is Professor of Law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, the University of Utah and Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) in the Israel Defense Force. He is actively involved in the effort to legislate Holocaust-Genocide education in Utah public schools. He is the author of several books, including Freedom from Religion: Rights and National Security (2009) and Tolerating Intolerance: The Price of Protecting Extremism (2014).
Literati is thrilled to welcome designer Oliver Uberti and his new book Where the Animals Go.
For thousands of years, tracking animals meant following footprints. Now satellites, drones, camera traps, cellphone networks, and accelerometers reveal the natural world as never before. Where the Animals Go is the first book to offer a comprehensive, data-driven portrait of how creatures like ants, otters, owls, turtles, and sharks navigate the world. Based on pioneering research by scientists at the forefront of the animal-tracking revolution, James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti’s stunning, four-color charts and maps tell fascinating stories of animal behavior. These astonishing infographics explain how warblers detect incoming storms using sonic vibrations, how baboons make decisions, and why storks prefer garbage dumps to wild forage; they follow pythons racing through the Everglades, a lovelorn wolf traversing the Alps, and humpback whales visiting undersea mountains. Where the Animals Go is a triumph of technology, data science, and design, bringing broad perspective and intimate detail to our understanding of the animal kingdom
“Where the Animals Go is beautiful and thrilling, a combination of the best in science and exposition, and a joy to study cover to cover.”—Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University
“This book is beautiful as well as informative and inspiring. There is no doubt it will help in our fight to save wildlife and wild habitats.” – Jane Goodall
Oliver Uberti is an award-winning designer and visual journalist and was previously senior design editor at National Geographic. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Tonight Literati is thrilled to host author and translator Clayton Eshleman in conversation with Keith Taylor on the work of Aimé Césaire
The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire gathers all of Cesaire’s celebrated verse into one bilingual edition. The French portion is comprised of newly established first editions of Césaire’s poetic œuvre made available in French in 2014 under the title Poésie, Théâtre, Essais et Discours, edited by A. J. Arnold and an international team of specialists. To prepare the English translations, the translators started afresh from this French edition. Included here are translations of first editions of the poet’s early work, prior to political interventions in the texts after 1955, revealing a new understanding of Cesaire’s aesthetic and political trajectory. A truly comprehensive picture of Cesaire’s poetry and poetics is made possible thanks to a thorough set of notes covering variants, historical and cultural references, and recurring figures and structures, a scholarly introduction and a glossary. This book provides a new cornerstone for readers and scholars in 20th century poetry, African diasporic literature, and postcolonial studies.
Clayton Eshleman is the author of over one hundred books, and the major American translator of Césaire
Keith Taylor teaches at the University of Michigan. He has published many books over the years: collections of poetry, a collection of very short stories, co-edited volumes of essays and fiction, and a volume of poetry translated from Modern Greek.
