Calendar

Sep
12
Thu
Story Night for Grown Ups: Beverly Black, Steve Daut, Jill Halpern, and Laura Lee Hayes @ Crazy Wisdom
Sep 12 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Tellers will be Beverly Black, Steve Daut, Jill Halpern,and Laura Lee Hayes – Storytelling has power. Much more than just talking about personal experiences, today’s professional, passionate and playful storytellers can grab your attention and hold you spellbound with each word and each gesture. Hosted by Steve Daut and Laura Lee Hayes. Mark your calendars and join us for Story Night in the Crazy Wisdom Tea Room

 

 

Sep
13
Fri
Fiction at Literati: Christina Milletti: Choke Box: A Fem-Noir @ Literati
Sep 13 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome Christina Milletti to the store for a reading from her Juniper Prize-winning novel Choke Box: A Fem-Noir, part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati Series.  Free and open to the public, book signing to follow. 

About the book: When Edward Tamlin disappears while writing his memoir, Jane Tamlin (his wife and the mother of his young children) begins to write a secret, corrective “counter-memoir” of her own. Calling the book Choke Box, she reveals intimate, often irreverent, details about her family and marriage, rejecting — and occasionally celebrating — her suspected role in her husband’s disappearance.

Choke Box isn’t Jane’s first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. But the stories we tell may help us survive — if they don’t kill us first.

Christina Milletti is associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo and author of the short story collection The Religious & Other Fictions. Her work has appeared in the Iowa Review, Best New American Voices, the Masters Review, Denver Quarterly, the Cincinnati Review, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other outlets.

Sep
14
Sat
Maryesah Karelon: The Faith That Time Forgot @ Crazy Wisdom
Sep 14 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

So what is “the faith that time forgot”? Have you ever wondered if there is more to the Christian story than you were taught? Are you a seeker for the truth, a truth that may very well lead beyond the well-worn paths of traditional religion?  The Faith That Time Forgot presents new insights and alternative perspectives to many spiritual and theological issues, inviting you to come on a mystical, magical journey of self-discovery and spiritual growth. Go beyond your preconceived limitations and explore the reaches of the unknown. Much has been left in the shadows over the centuries. Much has been entombed, but not for eternity. Now is the time to bring light into this darkness and allow the silent shadows to speak. This is a quest for the Grail within yourself – your own Holy of Holies. Come join us! The journey continues! Books available for purchase in person or Kindle as well as paperback versions at Amazon. com.

 

 

Sep
16
Mon
Alexandra Minna Stern: Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate @ Literati
Sep 16 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome University of Michigan professor Alexandra Minna Stern to discuss her new book, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination, which Kirkus calls “An important study that extends the knowledge from other recent books that have demonstrated a stubbornly pervasive network of white nationalists.” 

About the book: What is the alt-right? What do they believe, and how did they take center stage in the American social and political consciousness?

From a loose movement that lurked in the shadows in the early 2000s, the alt-right has achieved a level of visibility that has allowed it to expand significantly throughout America’s cultural, political, and digital landscapes. Racist, sexist, and homophobic beliefs that were previously unspeakable have become commonplace, normalized, and accepted—endangering American democracy and society as a whole. Yet in order to dismantle the destructive movement that has invaded our public consciousness, we must first understand the core beliefs that drive the alt-right.

To help guide us through the contemporary moment, historian Alexandra Minna Stern excavates the alt-right memes and tropes that have erupted online and explores the alt-right’s central texts, narratives, constructs, and insider language. She digs to the root of the alt-right’s motivations: their deep-seated fear of an oncoming “white genocide” that can only be remedied through swift and aggressive action to reclaim white power. As the group makes concerted efforts to cast off the vestiges of neo-Nazism and normalize their appearance and their beliefs, the alt-right and their ideas can be hard to recognize. Through careful analysis, Stern brings awareness to the underlying concepts that guide the alt-right and animate its overlapping forms of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and anti-egalitarianism. She explains the key ideas of “red-pilling,” strategic trolling, gender essentialism, and the alt-right’s ultimate fantasy: a future where minorities have been removed and “cleansed” from the body politic and a white ethnostate is established in the United States. By unearthing the hidden mechanisms that power white nationalism, Stern reveals just how pervasive this movement truly is.

Professor Stern is the author of the prize-winning book Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, (University of California Press, 2005) and Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) is a Choice 2013 Outstanding Academic Title in Health Sciences.

Sep
17
Tue
Susan J. Douglas: Celebrity: A History of Fame @ Literati
Sep 17 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome University of Michigan Professor Susan J. Douglas in support of her new book, Celebrity: A History of Fame. Free and open to the public, book signing to follow.

About the book: Today, celebrity culture is an inescapable part of our media landscape and our everyday lives. This was not always the case. Over the past century, media technologies have increasingly expanded the production and proliferation of fame. Celebrity explores this revolution and its often under-estimated impact on American culture. Using numerous precedent-setting examples spanning more than one hundred years of media history, Douglas and McDonnell trace the dynamic relationship between celebrity and the technologies of mass communication that have shaped the nature of fame in the United States.

Susan J. Douglas is the Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Michigan. She is the author of five books, including The Rise of Enlightened Sexism (2010), Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (1999) and Where The Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (1994).

Sep
19
Thu
Zell Visiting Writers: Wayetu Moore: Reading and Book Signing @ U-M Museum of Art Stern Auditorium
Sep 19 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm

Wayétu Moore’s debut novel She Would Be King reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years. It was named a best book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly & BuzzFeed.

Moore is the founder of One Moore Book, a non-profit organization that creates and distributes culturally relevant books for underrepresented readers. Her first bookstore opened in Monrovia, Liberia in 2015. Her writing can be found in The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Guernica, The Atlantic Magazine and other publications. She has been featured in The Economist Magazine, NPR, NBC, BET and ABC, among others, for her work in advocacy for diversity in children’s literature.

She is a graduate of Howard University, University of Southern California and Columbia University. Moore is a founding faculty member of Randolph College MFA program and a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Syracuse University.

This event is free and open to the public.

The Zell Visiting Writers Series brings outstanding writers to campus each semester. The Series is made possible through a generous gift from U-M alumna Helen Zell (BA ’64, LLDHon ’13). For more information, please visit the Zell Visiting Writers Program webpage: https://lsa.umich.edu/writers

For any questions about the event or to share accommodation needs, please email asbates@umich.edu– we are eager to help ensure that this event is inclusive to you. The building, event space, and restrooms are wheelchair accessible. A lactation room (Angell Hall #5209), reflection room (Haven Hall #1506), and gender-inclusive restroom (Angell Hall 5th floor) are available on site. ASL interpreters and CART services are available upon request; please email asbates@umich.edu at least two weeks prior to the event.

Jonathan Safran Foer in Conversation @ Rackham Auditorium
Sep 19 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Please register your attendance here.

The University of Michigan School for Environtment, Sustainbale Food Systems Initiative and Literati Bookstore are thrilled to welcome Jonathan Safran Foer to Rackham Auditorium on the campus of the University of Michigan in support of his landmark book We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast.

Join New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) to learn how saving the planet begins on our breakfast plates. With a reading and discussion of his new book, We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, Safran Foer will highlight small behavioral changes that could help move the needle on climate change.

Literati Bookstore will be on-hand to sell copies of the book.

Sep
20
Fri
Poetry at Literati: Michael Dickman: Days and Days @ Literati
Sep 20 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome acclaimed poet Michael Dickman to the store for a reading from his most recent collection, Days & Days, as part of our ongoing Poetry at Literati series. Free and open to the public, signing to follow.

About the collection: Michael Dickman’s intuitive, agile verse captures us in its unusual pulse. Image-driven and shape-driven, the poems of Days & Days touch on parenthood, childhood, local natural habitats, graffiti culture, roses, and romantic love. Dickman considers both the internal and external vistas that open before him in the course of a day, the memories and the immediate quandaries. The long centerpiece poem, “Lakes Rivers Streams,” is a reverie that picks up the flotsam of parenting days on its current. Other poems account for hotel days, or days spent watching TV, taking prescription drugs, watching butterflies. Throughout, we feel the dazzling originality of Dickman’s awareness; he meets the brutality, banality, and strange beauty of the quotidian with a level gaze, and with an urgent musicality that carries us beyond these lines and pages.

Michael Dickman is the author of three books of poems, The End of the West (2009), Flies (2011, winner of the James Laughlin Award), and Green Migraine (2015), and coauthor, with his twin brother of 50 American Plays (Poems) (2012), and Brother (2016). He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is on the faculty at Princeton University.

Sep
22
Sun
Ann Arbor Storytellers Guild @ AADL Downtown (3rd floor, Freespace)
Sep 22 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell, at the AASG monthly meeting.

 

 

 

 

 

Sep
24
Tue
Fiction at Literati: J. Ryan Stradal: The Lager Queen of Minnesota @ Literati
Sep 24 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome J. Ryan Stradal back to Literati for a reading in support of his latest, widely acclaimed novel, The Lager Queen of Minnesota, as part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati series. Free and open to the public, book signing to follow.

About the book: A novel of family, Midwestern values, hard work, fate and the secrets of making a world-class beer, from the bestselling author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest.

 

[The Lager Queen of Minnesota has] complex female characters, sudden tragedies, culinary descriptions that awaken all your senses.” –Entertainment Weekly

 

J. Ryan Stradal is a contributing editor at TASTE Magazine. His bestselling debut, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, won the 2016 American Booksellers Association Indie’s Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year and also the 2016 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for debut fiction. Born and raised in Minnesota, he now lives in Los Angeles.

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