About The Invention of Ana:
With the infectious narration of Nick Hornby and the vibrant lyricism of Junot Díaz, this breathtaking debut brimming with youthful brio chronicles a young man’s friendship with a most peculiar artist.
On a rooftop in Brooklyn one spring night, a young intern and would-be writer, newly arrived from Copenhagen, meets the intriguing artist and mathematician Ana Ivan. Clever and funny, with an air of mystery and melancholia, Ana is living like a prime number: fierce and unbroken and divisible only by herself. She is also bad luck, she confesses; she is from a cursed Romanian lineage.
Before long, the intern finds himself seduced by Ana’s enthralling stories–of her unlucky countrymen, of her parents’ romance during the worst years of Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship, of a daylight savings transition gone horribly wrong. Ana also introduces him to her latest artistic endeavor: following the astronomical rather than the Gregorian calendar, she is trying to alter her sense of time–an experiment that will lead her to live in complete darkness for one month.
Descending into the blackness with Ana, the intern slowly loses touch with his own existence, entangling himself in the lives of Ana; her starry-eyed mother, Maria; and her obsessive math-prodigy father, Ciprian. Peeling back the layers of Ana’s past, he eventually discovers the perverse tragedy that has haunted her family for decades and has shaped her journey from the streets of Bucharest to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and finally to New York City.
The Invention of Ana blurs the lines between narrative and memory, perception and reality, identity and authenticity. In his stunning debut novel, Mikkel Rosengaard illuminates the profound power of stories to alter the world around us–and the lives of the ones we love.
About Come West and See:
Come West and See is a work both timely and timeless. Set in the Redoubt, an isolated triangle of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming where an armed occupation of a wildlife refuge escalates into a separatist uprising, these stories explore the loneliness, insecurity, and frustration inherent to love and heartbreak. A lakeside wedding drunkenly devolves into a cruel charade; an unemployed carpenter joins a militia after his wife leaves him; and a former soldier raises the daughter of a dead comrade in a bunker beneath an abandoned farm. Come West and See explores divisions both personal and political, offering startling insights into the wounds of the American people and a powerful new vision of the West.
Mikkel Rosengaard’s first novel, The Invention of Ana, has been published in five languages. He is a two-time recipient of the Danish Arts Foundation’s Literary Fellowship, and his work has appeared in the Architectural Review, PBS’s Art21, Hyperallergic, and many other publications. He grew up in Elsinore, Denmark, and lives in New York City.
A graduate of New York University’s MFA program, Maxim Loskutoff has been honored with the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Global Writing Fellowship in Abu Dhabi, and the M Literary Fellowship in Bangalore. He lives in western Montana.
Poetry workshop. All writers welcome to share and discuss their poetry or short fiction.
BRING ABOUT SIX COPIES OF YOUR WORK. COPIES WILL BE RETURNED TO YOU.
Hosted by Joe Kelty, Ed Morin, and Dave Jibson
see our blog at Facebook/Crazy Wisdom Poetry Series
Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room, 114 S. Main St. Free. 7346652757.info@crazywisdom.net www.crazywisdom.net
Literati is excited to welcome artist and stylist Lauren Friedman who will be presenting her latest book 50 Ways to Wear Accessories.
About 50 Ways to Wear Accessories:
This sparkling celebration of accessories from the author of the 50 Ways to Wear series offers top-notch tips for rocking statement pieces–think earrings, bracelets, hats, belts, purses, and more–in unexpected ways. Learn how to accessorize any outfit for a snowy day, a fancy event, a job interview. With fun illustrations that show how to achieve each look, advice on different ways to wear each featured item and style, and tips on mixing and matching different items, patterns, and prints, 50 Ways to Wear Accessories is a must-have resource to optimize any wardrobe and head out the door with panache.
Lauren Friedman is an artist, stylist, and the author/illustrator of 50 Ways to Wear a Scarf (2014), 50 Ways to Wear Denim (2016), and her newest title, 50 Ways to Wear Accessories, released in Fall 2018, all published by Chronicle Books. She is also the creator of the My Closet in Sketches project, an illustrated style blog launched in 2010. Lauren’s work as a professional illustrator has appeared in numerous publications, including Lucky Magazine, Travel and Leisure Magazine, and The Washington Post. When she is not working, you can find Lauren reading, dancing, and taking long walks in the woods. A native of Ann Arbor, Lauren returned to her home town in May of 2017 and lives on the West Side.
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 Rachel Girty and poetry by Lorenzo Diaz-Cruz.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 764-6330
About Half-Gods:
A startlingly beautiful debut, Half Gods brings together the exiled, the disappeared, the seekers. Following the fractured origins and destines of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of the past in their lives. These ten interlinked stories redraw the map of our world in surprising ways: following an act of violence, a baby girl is renamed after a Hindu goddess but raised as a Muslim; a lonely butcher from Angola finds solace in a family of refugees in New Jersey; a gentle entomologist, in Sri Lanka, discovers unexpected reserves of courage while searching for his missing son.
By turns heartbreaking and fiercely inventive, Half Gods reveals with sharp clarity the ways that parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.
Akil Kumarasamy is a writer from New Jersey. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia. Half Gods is her first book.
Literati is proud to be partnering with the Helen Zell Writers Program to host authors Esmé Weijun Wang and Danielle Lazarin at the University of Michigan Art Museum Helmet Stern Auditorium.
Danielle Lazarin’s debut collection of short stories, Back Talk, has been praised for its ability to bend form and turn the story into something that is temporally and emotionally elastic. A New York Times pick for a 2018 special book review issue on women, Lazarin is a graduate of Oberlin College’s creative writing program, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where her stories and essays won Hopwood Awards.
Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017, won the Whiting Award in 2018, and is the recipient of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for her forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco.
This year’s Rasa Festival reading features poets Samiah Haque, Ashwini Bhasi, Zilka Joseph, and Inam Kang.
Samiah Haque speaks in fluid tones, with an acute clarity of voice. Her hobbies include jaywalking, whistling in the company of passers-by, and skipping to the lou. Recently, she has taken to advising young soldiers on the subject of hygiene and proper table manners. She lives in a swollen field outside of Madrid.
Ashwini Bhasi lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan and writes poems to make sense of the mind-body connection of trauma and chronic pain, life in India, and the duality of her experiences as a data analyst and poet. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Room Magazine, Rogue Agent, Bear River Review, Yellow Chair Review, The Feminist Wire, and Driftwood Press among others. Her poem about the 2016 presidential election was nominated for a Pushcart prize.
Zilka Joseph teaches creative writing and is an independent editor and manuscript coach. Her chapbooks, Lands I Live In and What Dread, were nominated for a PEN America and a Pushcart award, respectively. She was awarded a Zell Fellowship, a Hopwood Prize, and the Elsie Choy Lee Scholarship (Center for the Education of Women) from the University of Michigan.
Inam Kang is a Pakistani-born Muslim poet, student, curator and researcher currently living in Cleveland, OH as an MS candidate in Medical Physiology at Case Western Reserve University. He is also a former Ann Arbor Poetry & Slam finalist. Currently, he is a co-curator for the POC-centered reading and dialogue series FRUIT in Ann Arbor, MI. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Freezeray Poetry and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others.
All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell.
2-4 p.m., AADL Downtown 3rd-floor freespace rm., 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free. annarborstorytelling.org, 997-5388
We are so excited to welcome back to Ann Arbor food writer Julia Turshen who will be sharing with us her latest cookbook Now & Again: Go-To Recipies, Inspired Menus + Endless Ideas for Reinventing Leftovers. Julia will be in conversation with Chef Kate Williams of Lady of the House restaurant in Detroit and journalist Ashley Woods
About Now & Again:
Small Victories, one of the most beloved cookbooks of 2016, introduced us to the lovely Julia Turshen and her mastery of show-stopping home cooking, and her second book, Feed the Resistance, moved a nation, winning Eater Cookbook of the Year in 2017. In Now & Again, the follow-up to what Real Simple called “an inspiring addition to any kitchen bookshelf,” more than 125 delicious and doable recipes and 20 creative menu ideas help cooks of any skill level to gather friends and family around the table to share a meal (or many!) together. This cookbook comes to life with Julia’s funny and encouraging voice and is brimming with good stuff, including:
– can’t-get-enough-of-it recipes
– inspiring menus for social gatherings, holidays and more
– helpful timelines for flawlessly throwing a party
– oh-so-helpful “It’s Me Again” recipes, which show how to use leftovers in new and delicious ways
– tips on how to be smartly thrifty with food choices
Now & Again will change the way we gather, eat, and think about leftovers, and, like the name suggests, you’ll find yourself reaching for its pages time and time again.
JULIA TURSHEN is the bestselling author of Feed the Resistance, named the Best Cookbook of 2017 by Eater, and Small Victories, named one of the Best Cookbooks of 2016 by the New York Times and NPR. Her latest book, Now & Again, will be out in September, 2018. She has coauthored numerous cookbooks and hosted the first two seasons of Radio Cherry Bombe. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, and Saveur. Epicurious has called her one of the ‘100 Greatest Home Cooks of All Time’ and she sits on the Advisory Board of the National Museum of American History’s Kitchen Cabinet. She is the founder of Equity At The Table (EATT), an inclusive digital directory of women and non-binary individuals in food. Julia lives in the Hudson Valley with her wife and pets.
KATE WILLIAMS is the owner and executive chef of Lady of the House. With the opening of Lady of the House, Williams brought a new breed of progressive, vibrant and dynamic cooking to Detroit’s Corktown district. In its first year of opening, Lady of the House was named James Beard Foundation semi-finalist for “Best New Restaurant” 2017, GQ “Best New Restaurant in America, 2018”, and was profiled twice in the New York Times. In May 2018 Williams received the honor of Food & Wine“Best New Chef 2018”. Passionate about highlighting local farms, Williams focuses on #uglyfood, which minimizes food waste on farms to feed more people and encourage them to grow their own food. An extension of the Slow Food movement, it’s meant to beautifully prepare food that would otherwise be thrown away on the farm.
ASHLEY WOODS is the founder of Detour Media, a digital content publisher and agency based in Detroit, which publishes the Detour newsletter to thousands of engaged subscribers in the Motor City. She is a member of The Information Accelerator, a Silicon Valley-based initiative to fund the next generation of subscription-based news publications. Ashley was also a 2018 Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Before startup life, Ashley led digital strategy and consumer experience at the Detroit Free Press, and was a reporter and editor for Detroit-based publications like HuffPost Detroit, MLive, Issue Media Group and Real Detroit Weekly, specializing in entrepreneurism, culture and city life.
Literati is so excited to welcome author Wayétu Moore who will be reading and sharing her debut novel She Would Be King.
About She Would Be King:
A novel of exhilarating range, magical realism, and history–a dazzling retelling of Liberia’s formation
Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him. When the three meet in the settlement of Monrovia, their gifts help them salvage the tense relationship between the African American settlers and the indigenous tribes, as a new nation forms around them.
Moore’s intermingling of history and magical realism finds voice not just in these three characters but also in the fleeting spirit of the wind, who embodies an ancient wisdom. “If she was not a woman,” the wind says of Gbessa, “she would be king.” In this vibrant story of the African diaspora, Moore, a talented storyteller and a daring writer, illuminates with radiant and exacting prose the tumultuous roots of a country inextricably bound to the United States. She Would Be King is a novel of profound depth set against a vast canvas and a transcendent debut from a major new author.
Wayétu Moore is the founder of One Moore Book and is a graduate of Howard University, Columbia University, and the University of Southern California. She teaches at the City University of New York’s John Jay College and lives in Brooklyn.
