One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. 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.
Readings by U-M creative writing grad students, including prose by Samantha Bares and poetry by Daniel Neff.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 764-6330
Literati is thrilled to welcome author Leif Enger who will reading and discussing his new novel Virgil Wander.
About Virgil Wander:
The first novel in ten years from award-winning, million-copy bestselling author Leif Enger, Virgil Wander is an enchanting and timeless all-American story that follows the inhabitants of a small Midwestern town in their quest to revive its flagging heart
Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is “cruising along at medium altitude” when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals–from Rune, a twinkling, pipe-smoking, kite-flying stranger investigating the mystery of his disappeared son; to Nadine, the reserved, enchanting wife of the vanished man, to Tom, a journalist and Virgil’s oldest friend; and various members of the Pea family who must confront tragedies of their own. Into this community returns a shimmering prodigal son who may hold the key to reviving their town.
With intelligent humor and captivating whimsy, Leif Enger conjures a remarkable portrait of a region and its residents, who, for reasons of choice or circumstance, never made it out of their defunct industrial district. Carried aloft by quotidian pleasures including movies, fishing, necking in parked cars, playing baseball and falling in love, Virgil Wander is a swift, full journey into the heart and heartache of an often overlooked American Upper Midwest by a “formidably gifted” ( Chicago Tribune) master storyteller.
Leif Enger was raised in Osakis, Minnesota, and worked as a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio before writing his bestselling debut novel Peace Like a River, which won the Independent Publisher Book Award and was one of the Los Angeles Times and Time Magazine’s Best Books of the Year. His second novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, was also a national bestseller, No. 8 on Amazon’s Top 100 Editors’ Picks and a Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award Honor Book for Fiction. He and his wife Robin live in Minnesota.
Literati is proud to welcome authors and faculty members at the University of Michigan Shachar Pinsker and Sara Blair who will be sharing and discussing their new books A Rich Brew: How Cafes Created Modern Jewish Culture and How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlives of Images.
About A Rich Brew:
A fascinating glimpse into the world of the coffeehouse and its role in shaping modern Jewish culture. Unlike the synagogue, the house of study, the community center, or the Jewish deli, the café is rarely considered a Jewish space. Yet, coffeehouses profoundly influenced the creation of modern Jewish culture from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. With roots stemming from the Ottoman Empire, the coffeehouse and its drinks gained increasing popularity in Europe. The “otherness,” and the mix of the national and transnational characteristics of the coffeehouse perhaps explains why many of these cafés were owned by Jews, why Jews became their most devoted habitués, and how cafés acquired associations with Jewishness. Examining the convergence of cafés, their urban milieu, and Jewish creativity, Shachar M. Pinsker argues that cafés anchored a silk road of modern Jewish culture. He uncovers a network of interconnected cafés that were central to the modern Jewish experience in a time of migration and urbanization, from Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, and Berlin to New York City and Tel Aviv. A Rich Brew explores the Jewish culture created in these social spaces, drawing on a vivid collection of newspaper articles, memoirs, archival documents, photographs, caricatures, and artwork, as well as stories, novels, and poems in many languages set in cafés. Pinsker shows how Jewish modernity was born in the café, nourished, and sent out into the world by way of print, politics, literature, art, and theater. What was experienced and created in the space of the coffeehouse touched thousands who read, saw, and imbibed a modern culture that redefined what it meant to be a Jew in the world.
About How the Other Half Looks:
How New York’s Lower East Side inspired new ways of seeing America
New York City’s Lower East Side, long viewed as the space of what Jacob Riis notoriously called the “other half,” was also a crucible for experimentation in photography, film, literature, and visual technologies. This book takes an unprecedented look at the practices of observation that emerged from this critical site of encounter, showing how they have informed literary and everyday narratives of America, its citizens, and its possible futures.
Taking readers from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Sara Blair traces the career of the Lower East Side as a place where image-makers, writers, and social reformers tested new techniques for apprehending America–and their subjects looked back, confronting the means used to represent them. This dynamic shaped the birth of American photojournalism, the writings of Stephen Crane and Abraham Cahan, and the forms of early cinema. During the 1930s, the emptying ghetto opened contested views of the modern city, animating the work of such writers and photographers as Henry Roth, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn. After World War II, the Lower East Side became a key resource for imagining poetic revolution, as in the work of Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones, and exploring dystopian futures, from Cold War atomic strikes to the death of print culture and the threat of climate change.
How the Other Half Looks reveals how the Lower East Side has inspired new ways of looking–and looking back–that have shaped literary and popular expression as well as American modernity.
Shachar M. Pinsker is Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature and Culture at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe.
Sara Blair is the Patricia S. Yaeger Collegiate Professor of English and a faculty associate in the Department of American Culture and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Her books includeHarlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton) and Trauma and Documentary Photography of the FSA.
Ann Arbor Storytellers Guild members host a storytelling program. Audience members are encouraged to bring a 5-minute story to tell.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom Tea Room, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Ann Arbor Storytellers Guild members host a storytelling program. Audience members are encouraged to bring a 5-minute story to tell.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom Tea Room, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757.
Join us for an exciting evening of conversation and live musical performances from the multi-Award-winning team behind the musical, “Dear Evan Hansen.” University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance alumni Benj Pasek and Justin Paul will present Dear Evan Hansen: The Novel, an expansion of the characters and story popularized by the musical that has been praised as “one of the most remarkable shows in musical theater history” by The Washington Post. This is a general admission, ticketed event and a purchase of Dear Evan Hansen: The Novel is necessary for entry. The book is included with the ticket purchase, and books will be picked up at the venue the evening of the event. Your book will be pre-signed.
At the event, fans will additionally receive a raffle ticket inside of their book. Raffle tickets enter fans into a drawing for an exclusive meet & greet with the authors immediately following the event. The authors will choose 5 lucky readers (+1 guest each) to meet them after to snap photos and have their books personalized. Fans have the option to donate one of their purchased copies to University of Michigan’s Counseling and Psychological Services at a table near the entrance.
Click here to purchase tickets!
About Dear Evan Hansen (The Novel):
From the show’s creators comes the groundbreaking novel inspired by the hit Broadway show Dear Evan Hansen.
When a letter that was never meant to be seen by anyone draws high school senior Evan Hansen into a family’s grief over the loss of their son, he is given the chance of a lifetime: to belong. He just has to stick to a lie he never meant to tell, that the notoriously troubled Connor Murphy was his secret best friend. Suddenly, Evan isn’t invisible anymore–even to the girl of his dreams. And Connor Murphy’s parents, with their beautiful home on the other side of town, have taken him in like he was their own, desperate to know more about their enigmatic son from his closest friend. As Evan gets pulled deeper into their swirl of anger, regret, and confusion, he knows that what he’s doing can’t be right, but if he’s helping people, how wrong can it be? No longer tangled in his once-incapacitating anxiety, this new Evan has a purpose. And a website. He’s confident. He’s a viral phenomenon. Every day is amazing. Until everything is in danger of unraveling and he comes face to face with his greatest obstacle: himself. A simple lie leads to complicated truths in this big-hearted coming-of-age story of grief, authenticity and the struggle to belong in an age of instant connectivity and profound isolation.
About Pasek and Paul:
Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are the Tony, Oscar® and Golden Globe–winning songwriting team behind the Broadway musicals Dear Evan Hansen (Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Helen Hayes Award) and A Christmas Story, The Musical (Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle Award nominations). Other musicals include Dogfight, (Lucille Lortel Award winner, Drama League, Outer Critics Circle, London Evening Standard Awards nominations), James and the Giant Peach, and Edges. Film projects include: La La Land (Lionsgate); Trolls (Dreamworks Animation); The Greatest Showman (FOX). Upcoming film projects include Snow White (Walt Disney Pictures); Medusa(Sony Pictures Animation); Aladdin (Walt Disney Pictures). TV credits include Smash, Sesame Street, The Flash and Johnny and the Sprites, and Fox’s A Christmas Story live musical. Additional honors: Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theatre (American Academy of Arts and Letters); ASCAP Foundation Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award; Jonathan Larson Award. Both are graduates of the University of Michigan Musical Theatre program and members of the Dramatists Guild of America, Inc.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Roy Scranton, author of War Porn and Learning to Die in the Anthropecne, who will be sharing his latest book We’re Doomed. Now What?
About We’re Doomed. Now What?
An American Orwell for the age of Trump, Roy Scranton faces the unpleasant facts of our day with fierce insight and honesty. We’re Doomed. Now What? penetrates to the very heart of our time.
Our moment is one of alarming and bewildering change–the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe. Now what?
We’re Doomed. Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss, from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation. Whether writing about sailing through the melting Arctic, preparing for Houston’s next big storm, watching Star Wars, or going back to the streets of Baghdad he once patrolled as a soldier, Roy Scranton handles his subjects with the same electric, philosophical, demotic touch that he brought to his groundbreaking New York Times essay, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.”
Roy Scranton is the author of War Porn and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, and co-editor of Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. His journalism, essays, and fiction have been published in The Nation, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in English from Princeton and an MA from the New School for Social Research, and teaches in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame.
Literati is thrilled to welcome poet Lawrence Joseph who will reading from his new collection So Where Are We? After the reading he will be joined in conversation with author Cody Walker
About So Where Are We?:
So where are we?” asks Lawrence Joseph in the title poem of his powerful and moving sixth book of poetry.
Beginning where his acclaimed collection Into It left off, amid the worldwide violence unleashed by the World Trade Center terrorist attack, Joseph’s poems–global and historic in scope–boldly encounter the imaginative challenges of our time: issues of political economy, labor and capital, racism and war, and “the point at which / violence becomes ontology, / these endless ambitious experiments in destruction, / a species grief.”
Against these realities, Joseph presents an intimate, sensuous language of beauty and love, “a separate / palette kept for each poem,” a constant shifting and fluid play of sound and tone. With incisive intensity, intelligence, emotional force, and fierce, uncompromising vision, Joseph speaks from deep within the truths of poetry’s common language. So Where Are We? is extraordinary new work from one of our most distinctive poets.
Lawrence Joseph is the author of five previous books of poetry, including Into It; Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993, and Before Our Eyes. He is also the author of two books of prose: Lawyerland, a novel, and The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose. He is the Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law, and he has taught creative writing at Princeton. He is married to the painter Nancy Van Goethem and lives in New York City.
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 is thrilled to welcome poets Megan Levad and Franny Choi for a special reading from their latest collections What Have I to Say to You and Death by Sex Machine.
Selected as Tavern Books’ 2014 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series poet, Levad is the author of WHY WE LIVE IN THE DARK AGES (Tavern Books, 2015). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Denver Quarterly, Fence, Mantis, and Tin House, among others, and in the Everyman’s Library anthology Killer Verse. She also writes lyrics for composers Tucker Fuller and Kristin Kuster. Her debut libretto Kept: A Ghost Story premiered at the Virginia Arts Festival in May 2017. Levad lives in San Francisco.
Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her second collection, Soft Science, is forthcoming from Alice James Books.
Literati is proud to be partnering with the Helen Zell Writers Program to host author Karan Mahajan and poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi at the University of Michigan Art Museum Helmet Stern Auditorium.
Born in central Connecticut, Gabrielle Calvocoressi grew up in a family that owned movie theaters in several small towns across the state. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College and earned her MFA from Columbia University. Calvocoressi’s first book, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (Persea Books, 2005), was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award and won the 2006 Connecticut Book Award in Poetry. Her second collection, Apocalyptic Swing (Persea Books, 2009), was a finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is also the author of Rocket Fantastic (Persea Books, 2017). Calvocoressi has been praised for “moving beyond the popular poetry of ‘self’ in an effort to understand other perspectives in this original and riveting collection.” Her awards and honors include a Stegner Fellowship, a Jones Lectureship at Stanford University and a Rona Jaffe Women Writers’ Award. Her poem “Circus Fire, 1944” received The Paris Review‘s Bernard F. Connors Prize.
Karan Mahajan grew up in New Delhi, India and moved to the US for college. Since then, he has lived in San Francisco, New Delhi, New York, Bangalore, and Austin. His first novel, “Family Planning” (2008), was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. It was published in nine countries. His second novel, “The Association of Small Bombs” (2016), was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Awards and was named one of the “10 Best Books of 2016” by The New York Times. Mahajan’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker Online, The New Republic and other venues.
