Readings by U-M creative writing grad students, including fiction writers Michelle Cheever and poet Colin Walker.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 764-6330
The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends – a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
Nov. 4 & 18. All adults and teens in grade 9 & up invited to work on their novel for this nonprofit promotion (also known as National Novel Writing Month) challenging teens and adults to write a 50,000-word novel by the end of November.
1-3 p.m., AADL Westgate Branch West Side Room, Westgate shopping center, 2503 Jackson. Free. 327-8301.
Readings by 9 authors being published by the AADL’s new imprint. Books and authors include Rebecca G. Biber’s Technical Solace (poetry), Virginia Ford’s Ginger Stands Her Ground (memoir), R.J Fox’s Tales From the Dork Side (memoir), Meg Gower’s Michigan Moon (picture book), Jeff Kass’s Takedown (murder mystery), Carolyn Nowak’s Chad Agamemnon (locally set graphic novel), Rich Retyi’s The Book of Ann Arbor: An Extremely Serious History Book, Emily Siwek’s A Monster on Main Street (locally set picture book), and Judy Patterson Wenzel’s Light from the Cage: 25 Years in a Prison Classroom.
1-3 p.m., AADL 3rd floor, 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free. 327-4555.
Performance by this Spokane-based spoken word poet, a 2017 grad of Eastern Washington University with a B.A. in theatre, who has published 2 chapbooks. His stage persona is easygoing, and his poems are humorous and self-deprecating. Preceded by a poetry open mike.
7 p.m. Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry.
U-M percussion professor Michael Gould performs his compositions, inspired by recently retired RC instructor Ken Mikolowski’s poems, that revolve around his own experiences with loss, illness, and recovery. With narration by U-M theater professor Malcolm Tulip, and dance accompaniment by the Berlin-based Tangente Dance Company choreographed by U-M dance professor Amy Chavasse. The project title takes its inspiration from the “Dido’s Lament” aria from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Local mezzo-soprano Deanna Relyea opens the program with a performance of the aria, accompanied by cellist Katri Ervamaa.
7 p.m., U-M Residential College Keene Theater, East Quad, 701 East University. Free. 763-0176
Literati is excited to host a discussion of German author Siegfried Kracauer’s novel Georg. We will be joined by the translator Carl Skoggard, publisher Patrick KIley, and Chair of the Department of German Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan, Johannes von Moltke
About Georg:
Best remembered today for his brilliant study of early German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film, and for his involvement with the Frankfurt School (he mentored Theodor Adorno), Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was the editor for cultural affairs at Germany’s leading liberal newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, during the Weimar Republic until its disastrous end.
His novel Georg is a panorama of those years, as seen through the eyes of a rookie reporter working for the fictional Morgenbote (Morning Herald). In a defeated nation seething with extremism right and left, young Georg is looking for something to believe in. For him, the past has become unusable; for nearly everyone he meets, paradise seems just around the corner. But which paradise? Kracauer’s grimly funny novel takes on a confused and dangerous time which may remind us of our own.
Carl Skoggard was trained as a musicologist and for many years served as an editor for the music bibliography Repértoire International de la Littérature Musicale (RILM), New York, where he was responsible for German materials. His translation of Ein Jahr in Arkadien, an 1805 gay fiction by Duke August of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg, appeared in 1999 as Year in Arcadia. More recently he was also the staff writer for Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, an award-winning magazine created by his partner Joseph Holtzman. Over the last decade Skoggard has prepared translations with extensive commentary for the three major autobiographically-oriented writings of the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. These include Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood circa 1900), Berliner Chronik (The ‘Berlin Chronicle’ Notices), and a bilingual edition of Benjamin’s Sonnets, which has made this little-known but important body of poetry available to readers of English for the first time. Skoggard’s latest project, is a translation of Siegfried Kracauer’s Weimar novel Georg. This is a brilliantly cinematic, darkly comic evocation of that troubled era. Skoggard lives in Valatie, New York, with Holtzman and assorted animals.
Patrick Kiley is a UofM Grad (English, ’02) and has served as a research curator and writer for books and exhibitions at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the New York Public Library. In 2014 he opened Publication Studio Hudson, one of several in a network of on-demand book publishers in the Americas and Europe. PS Hudson focuses especially on prose, poetry, artist books and translation. PS Hudson and Patrick have since moved slightly north to Troy, New York.
Johannes von Moltke is the Chair of the German Department at U-M and the author, most recently, of The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America.
Alexandra Zapruder reads from Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, her new book which traces the personal trials of her grandfather, Abraham Zapruder, who made the notorious home movie of the Kennedy assassination and his descendents. “Zapruder is a gifted writer and storyteller who delicately unravels a minor mystery few people know or care about, but that she makes human, complex and quite interesting,” notes the New York Times review. 7-8:30 p.m., AADL 4th-floor meeting room, 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free.
We are excited to welcome author Helen Benedict who will be reading and discussing her new novel Wolf Season
About Wolf Season
After a hurricane devastates a small town in upstate New York, the lives of three women and their young children are irrevocably changed. Rin, an Iraq War veteran, tries to protect her blind daughter and the three wolves under her care. Naema, a widowed doctor who fled Iraq with her wounded son, faces life-threatening injuries. Beth, who is raising a troubled son, waits out her Marine husband’s deployment in Afghanistan, equally afraid of him coming home and of him never returning at all. As they struggle to maintain their humanity and find hope, their war-torn lives collide in a way that will affect their entire community.
“No one writes with more authority or cool-eyed compassion about the experience of women in war both on and off the battlefield than Helen Benedict. In Wolf Season, she shows us the complicated ways in which the lives of those who serve and those who don’t intertwine and how—regardless of whether you are a soldier, the family of a soldier, or a refugee—the war follows you and your children for generations. Wolf Season is more than a novel for our times; it should be required reading.” —Elissa Schappell, author of Use Me and Blueprints for Building Better Girls
Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia University, writes frequently about justice, women, soldiers, and war. She is the author of seven novels, including Wolf Season (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press) and Sand Queen, a Publishers Weekly “Best Contemporary War Novel.” A recipient of both the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Benedict is also the author of five works of nonfiction and the play The Lonely Soldier Monologues: Women at War in Iraq. She lives in New York.
Literati is thrilled to launch the latest book from New York Times-betselling author John U. Bacon, The Great Halifax Explosion. This event, on November 7th, 2017, at 7pm in Rackham Audiotorium, is free and open to the public. Literati Bookstore will be on hand to sell copies of the book, which is releasing the day of the event. Following the book talk will be a Q&A and signing. There are no tickets associated with this free event, but we encourage you to RSVP on Facebook.
About the Book: On Monday, December 3, 1917, the French freighter SS Mont-Blanc set sail from Brooklyn carrying the largest cache of explosives ever loaded onto a ship, including 2,300 tons of picric acid, an unstable, poisonous chemical more powerful than TNT. The U.S. had just recently entered World War I, and the ordnance was bound for the battlefields of France, to help the Allies break the grueling stalemate that had protracted the fighting for nearly four demoralizing years. The explosives were so dangerous that Captain Aimé Le Medec took unprecedented safety measures, including banning the crew from smoking, lighting matches, or even touching a drop of liquor.
Sailing north, the Mont-Blanc faced deadly danger, enduring a terrifying snowstorm off the coast of Maine and evading stealthy enemy U-boats hunting the waters of the Atlantic. But it was in Nova Scotia that an extraordinary disaster awaited. As the Mont-Blanc waited to dock in Halifax, it was struck by a Norwegian relief ship, the Imo, charging out of port. A small fire on the freighter’s deck caused by the impact ignited the explosives below, resulting in a horrific blast that, in one fifteenth of a second, leveled 325 acres of Halifax—killing more than 1,000 people and wounding 9,000 more.
In this definitive account, Bacon combines research and eyewitness accounts to re-create the tragedy and its aftermath, including the international effort to rebuild the devastated port city. As he brings to light one of the most dramatic incidents of the twentieth century, Bacon explores the long shadow this first “weapon of mass destruction” would cast on the future of nuclear warfare— crucial insights and understanding relevant to us today.
About John U. Bacon: John U. Bacon is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Three and Out (“An epic piece of reporting” — New York magazine); Fourth and Long (“Wonderfully reported, engagingly written, and utterly persuasive.”— Daniel Okrent), and Endzone. He appears often on NPR and national TV, and teaches at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan. He lives in Ann Arbor, with his wife and son.
Nov. 7 & 21. Monthly open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. Nov. themes: “Promises” (Nov. 7) & “Revelations” (Nov. 21). The 3 teams of judges are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Space limited, so it’s smart to arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), Greyline, 100 N. Ashley. $8. 764-5118.
