Douglas Smith has been a social worker and community organizer for more than 40 years, in Chicago, Detroit, Ypsilanti, and now western Washtenaw County. His newest book of poetry is Social Work & Other Myths, a “poignant expression of compassion. These poems beseech us to identify with the humanity in the desperate, the afflicted, the abandoned, the evicted and the exiled.. Smith is a poet who creates an awareness that burrows into you and changes how you see.” (Brian Cox) .
The event begins with an Open Mic session when area poets can read their own work or share a favorite poem by another author in a welcoming atmosphere. This is part of a monthly series on the 2nd Thursday of most months in partnership withLes Go Social Media Marketing and Training. Signing to follow.
Tickets on sale now. Purchase here.
Literati Bookstore is honored to welcome renown, Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie to Rackham Auditorium on the campus of the University of Michigan in support of his latest novel, Quichotte. The author will be joined in conversation by Rich Fahle of PBS Books.
Tickets are general admission and include a pre-signed hardcover copy of Quichotte, to be picked up at the venue the evening of the event. Literati will have additional copies of Salman Rushdie’s previous titles available for purchase. Parking in downtown Ann Arbor on Thursday evenings can be difficult. Surface spots are sparse, but a detailed map of available parking structures can be found here.
About the book:
A dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age—a tour de force that is as much an homage to an immortal work of literature as it is to the quest for love and family, by Booker Prize–winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie
Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile, his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.
Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirize the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie’s work, the fully realized lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.
Salman Rushdie is the author of twelve novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and The Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, andTwo Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of nonfiction—Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line—and co-edited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.
Rich Fahle is Executive Producer of PBS Books and also the Chief Strategy Officer at 24G, a Detroit-based digital experience agency. He has worked with books and authors for more than 20 years. He was a Vice President at Borders Group, and prior to that, communications director at C-SPAN, where he helped launch Book TV.
Questions? Email John@literatibookstore.com
Amanda Goldblatt will join Elizabeth Ellen in conversation to discuss her debut title, Hard Mouth.
About the Book
For ten years, Denny’s father has battled cancer. The drawn-out loss has forged Denny into a dazed, antisocial young woman. On the clock, she works as a lab tech, readying fruit flies for experimentation. In her spare time, only her parents, an aggressively kind best friend, and her blowhard imaginary pal Gene—who she knows isn’t real—ornament her stale days in the DC suburbs.
Now her father’s cancer is back for a third time, and he’s rejecting treatment. Denny’s transgressive reaction is to flee. She begins to dismantle her life, constructing in its place the fantasy of perfect detachment. Unsure whether the impulse is monastic or suicidal, she rents a secluded cabin in the mountains. When she discovers life in the wilderness isn’t the perfect detachment she was expecting—and that she isn’t as alone as she’d hoped—Denny is forced to reckon with this failure while confronting a new life with its own set of pleasures and dangerous incursions.
Morbidly funny, subversive, and startling, Hard Mouth, the debut novel from 2018 NEA
Creative Writing Fellow Amanda Goldblatt, unpacks what it means to live while others are dying.
About the Author
AMANDA GOLDBLATT is a writer and teacher living in Chicago. She is a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and her fiction and essays have appeared in such journals as The Southern Review, NOON, Fence, Diagram, Hobart, and American Short Fiction. Hard Mouth is her debut novel.
About the Conversationalist
Elizabeth Ellen is the author of the novel Person/a, chosen by Lithub as a ‘best work of experimental literature’ for 2017. Her writing has been featured in such places as American Short Fiction, Salon, Bennington Review, BOMB, Joyland and Catapult. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for her story, “Teen Culture,” included in her most recent collection Saul Stories. In 2018, she published her poetry collection Elizabeth Ellen. She is the founder of Short Flight/Long Drive books (SF/LD) and is deputy editor at Hobart literary journal. Her first story collection—Fast Machine—is an indie cult classic. She lives in Ann Arbor.
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.
Missed “Millennials Are Killing” earlier this summer? Fabulous news! These murderous buds are bringing you two extra performances – same cast, same place, at Riverside Arts Center’s “Off Center” studio! Please note that we will be starting one half hour earlier than our previous performances, at 7:30 PM!
Five directionless twenty-somethings – high-maintenance free spirit Jess, impish heartbreaker Joshua, timid gossip Amanda, softhearted activist Nick, and strange newcomer Michael – are content to pass their evenings together in listless, alcoholic stupors. Surely they can have nothing to do with the series of terrible disappearances and deaths happening around their college town?
“Millennials Are Killing” is the newest play to be workshopped by Ann Arbor playwright and director Skyler Tarnas. Tickets will be $10 at the door, $7 for students. The “Off Center” studio can be accessed directly off of Huron Street in Ypsilanti, and is directly under the marquee! There will be a sign on the door and a chalkboard out front!
Show Dates and Times:
Friday, September 13th – 7:30 PM
Saturday, September 14th – 7:30 PM
CAST:
Jessica: Laurie Perrin
Joshua: Kyle Stefek
Amanda: Allison Burley
Nicholas: Sebastien Butler
Michael: Mitchell Salley
Mom: Grey Hendry
Join us for a 45-minute interdisciplinary musical performance that highlights the turning points in the history of physics.
The show combines fragments (excerpts from writings by some of the most prominent physicists in history) read and interpreted by a narrator (a role played by Lynnae Lehfeldt in the premiere), with original songs, based on each fragment, composed by Alberto Rojo, and performed by Alberto Rojo (guitar and voice), Michael Gould (percussion), and Dave Haughey (cello). The project explores the intersection between the arts and the sciences, and postulates that art and science are not antagonistic alternatives in the search for truth; rather, there is a broad territory of coexistence.
The movements are as follows Galileo (The Book of the Universe); Isaac Newton (From the Principia); Pierre Maupertuis (Least Action); Rudolf Clausius (The Limiting Condition); Ludwig Boltzmann (Atomic movements); James Clerk Maxwell (From letters to Faraday); Marie Curie (Radioactivity); Albert Einstein (From the 1905 paper); Max Planck (The quantum of action); Werner Heisenberg (Analogies); J. S. Bell (Remote Instruments); Richard Feynman (Trees are made of air); Vera Rubin (Dark Matter)
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.
Michigan native, Sarah R. Baughman shares her debut novel – A Light in the Lake, a compassionate story about grief, family and the possibility of magic.
About the Book
Twelve-year-old Addie should avoid Maple Lake. After all, her twin brother Amos drowned there only a few months ago. But its crisp, clear water runs in her veins, and the notebook Amos left behind, filled with clues about a mysterious creature in the lake’s inky-blue depths, keeps calling her back. She never took Amos seriously when he was alive, but doesn’t she owe it to him to figure out, once and for all, if there’s really something out there? When she’s offered a Young Scientist position studying the lake for the summer, Addie accepts, yearning for the cool wind in her hair and that sparkle on the lake, despite her parent’s misgivings.
Addie promises her parents that she’ll remain under the scientists’ supervision and stick to her job of helping them measure water pollution levels, but she can’t resist the secrets of Maple Lake. Addie enlists Tai, the son of one of the visiting scientists, to help her sneak off and investigate Amos’s evidence of the creature. The more time Addie spends out on the water, the more she discovers the same deep-down feeling Amos had about the magic in Maple Lake. But when the scientists trace the pollution to surrounding dairy farms, including the one run by her beloved aunt and uncle, Addie finds herself caught between her family’s interests and Maple Lake’s future and between the science she has always prized and the magic that brings her closer to her brother.
Brimming with hope, the agony of a child’s first experience with death, the beauty and enchantment of a summer spent lakeside, and pleasantly punctuated with STEM appeal, The Light in the Lake is an inspiring coming-of-age novel for fans of The Thing About Jellyfish, When You Reach Me, and The Fourteenth Goldfish. Sarah Baughman’s middle grade voice is pitch-perfect, and rarely do we see a first-time author with such a firm grasp on emotion and character. The Light in the Lake buoys themes of grief and the afterlife, while empowering brave readers to explore possibilities and wonder.
About the Author
Sarah R. Baughman is a former middle and high school English teacher who now works as an educational consultant and author. She graduated from Grinnell College and the University of Michigan, then went on to teach English overseas in three different countries – China, Bolivia, and Germany. After six years in rural Vermont, Sarah now lives with her husband and two children in her home state of Michigan, where she spends as much time as possible in the woods and water. The Light in the Lake is her first novel.
Missed “Millennials Are Killing” earlier this summer? Fabulous news! These murderous buds are bringing you two extra performances – same cast, same place, at Riverside Arts Center’s “Off Center” studio! Please note that we will be starting one half hour earlier than our previous performances, at 7:30 PM!
Five directionless twenty-somethings – high-maintenance free spirit Jess, impish heartbreaker Joshua, timid gossip Amanda, softhearted activist Nick, and strange newcomer Michael – are content to pass their evenings together in listless, alcoholic stupors. Surely they can have nothing to do with the series of terrible disappearances and deaths happening around their college town?
“Millennials Are Killing” is the newest play to be workshopped by Ann Arbor playwright and director Skyler Tarnas. Tickets will be $10 at the door, $7 for students. The “Off Center” studio can be accessed directly off of Huron Street in Ypsilanti, and is directly under the marquee! There will be a sign on the door and a chalkboard out front!
Show Dates and Times:
Friday, September 13th – 7:30 PM
Saturday, September 14th – 7:30 PM
CAST:
Jessica: Laurie Perrin
Joshua: Kyle Stefek
Amanda: Allison Burley
Nicholas: Sebastien Butler
Michael: Mitchell Salley
Mom: Grey Hendry
Shachar Pinsker, professor, Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies, University of Michigan discusses his book A Rich Brew: How Cafes Created Modern Jewish Culture. The book explores the ways in which cafes provide a window into understanding modern Jewish culture and modernity. Through its focus on Jewish cafe culture in six cities: Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, New York, and Tel Aviv, we see how Jews who migrated to cities gravitated towards cafes as important spaces and sites for producing Jewish culture. It is a story of the global aspects of Jewish modernity, what it means to be part of the public sphere, and the ways in which cafes present an important backdrop to the changes and challenges of modernity.
This event includes a book signing and books will be for sale. This event is in partnership with the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor (CHAA), an organization of scholars, cooks, food writers, nutritionists, collectors, students, and others interested in the study of culinary history and gastronomy. Their mission is to promote the study of culinary history through regular programs open to members and guests, through the quarterly newsletter Repast, and through exchanges of information with other such organizations.
