Meet Tobias Buckell, bestselling sci-fi author of Halo: The Cole Protocol and the Xenowealth series, as he talks about his newest fantasy novel, The Tangled Lands, co-written with Hugo Award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi!
In four interrelated parts, The Tangled Lands is an evocative and epic story of resistance and heroic sacrifice in the twisted remains surrounding the last great city of Khaim. Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell have created a fantasy for our times about a decadent and rotting empire facing environmental collapse from within—and yet hope emerges from unlikely places with women warriors and alchemical solutions.
Called “Violent, poetic and compulsively readable” by Maclean’s, science fiction author Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling writer born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, and the islands he lived on influence much of his work.
His Xenowealth series begins with Crystal Rain. Along with other stand-alone novels and his over 50 stories, his works have been translated into 18 different languages. He has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. His latest novel is Hurricane Fever, a follow up to the successful Arctic Rising that NPR says will ‘give you the shivers.’
He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs. He can be found online at www.TobiasBuckell.com
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.
Literati is excited to host author Laura Jean Baker who will be sharing and discussing her latest, The Motherhood Affidavits: A Memoir.
About The Motherhood Affidavits:
With the birth of her first child, Laura Jean Baker found herself electrified by oxytocin, the “love drug”–the first effective antidote to her lifelong depression. Again and again over the next eight years, Baker finds herself craving the intense highs of childbearing–cravings that, she realizes, align her much more closely with her public defender husband’s desperate, drug-addled clients than with their middle-class peers. As Ryan’s roster of defendants increases, so too does their family–nearly to the point of collapse.
Brilliantly crafted, impeccably written, intensely personal, The Motherhood Affidavits portrays a woman, a marriage, a family, caught in an impossible bind. Its heartbreaking resolution raises profound questions about whether we, as a society, are governed by morals or by laws–and whether either is an adequate measure of any one person’s ability to parent and capacity for love.
Laura Jean Baker earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and teaches English and writing at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. She has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Oshkosh, WI, with her husband and five wildly inspiring children.
Reading by Franny Choi, a U-M creative writing grad student whose new chapbook, Death by Sex Machine, imagines the inner monologues of different femme cyborgs featured in movies and manga. The program begins with open mike readings.
7-8:30 p.m., Sweetwaters, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663.
U-M Flint English professor emeritus Thomas Foster discusses his new primer that elucidates poetry by everyone from Lord Byron to the Beatles. Signing.
7 p.m., Nicola’s, Westgate shopping center. Free. 662-0600.
Reading by East Village Magazine (Flint) editor Jan Worth-Nelson. Her short stories and poems have been featured in numerous publications, and her 2016 poem “The Hilarious Funeral in LA” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
Wilson College (PA) political science professor Jill Abraham Hummer discusses her new book exploring how presidential wives have reflected the changing place of women in American society over the last century. Book sale, signing, and reception follow.
7 p.m., Ford Library, 1000 Beal. Free. 205-0555.
Wilson College (PA) political science professor Jill Abraham Hummer discusses her new book exploring how presidential wives have reflected the changing place of women in American society over the last century. Book sale, signing, and reception follow.
7 p.m., Ford Library, 1000 Beal. Free. 205-0555.
Literati is thrilled to welcome back author and essayist Leslie Jamison who will share and discuss her latest book The Recovering. Leslie will be joined for a post-reading discussion with author Lillian Li.
About The Recovering:
One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2018: Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Elle, Newsday, The Millions, Huffington Post, Nylon, Bustle, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Bitch, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, Boston Globe, The Week
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams, a transformative work showing that sometimes the recovery is more gripping than the addiction
With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction–both her own and others’–and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.
At the heart of the book is Jamison’s ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, as well as brilliant lesser-known figures such as George Cain, lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here. Through its unvarnished relation of Jamison’s own ordeals, The Recovering also becomes a book about a different kind of dependency: the way our desires can make us all, as she puts it, “broken spigots of need.” It’s about the particular loneliness of the human experience-the craving for love that both devours us and shapes who we are.
For her striking language and piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.
Leslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller, and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and the Oxford American, among others, and she is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Lillian Li received her BA from Princeton and her MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Hopwood Award in Short Fiction, as well as Glimmer Train‘s New Writer Award. Her work has been featured inGuernica, Granta , and Jezebel. She is from the D.C. metro area and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Readings by these 2 Michigan poets. Joseph’s 2016 collection, Sharp Blue Search of Flame, includes dark and brooding poems that reflect her Jewish Indian roots and her personal experiences living in Eastern and Western cultures. Fanning’s Our Sudden Museum is a 2017 collection of elegiac poems that explore what sustains us in loss. Signing.
7 p.m., Bookbound, Courtyard Shops. Free. 369-4345.
