All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell.
Peter Ho Davies is the author of two novels, The Fortunes and The Welsh Girl (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and two short story collections, The Ugliest House in the World (winner of the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize) and Equal Love (A New York Times Notable Book).
His work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Guardian and Washington Post among others, and has been widely anthologized, including selections for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. In 2003 Granta magazine named him among its Best of Young British Novelists.
Davies is also a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a winner of the PEN/Malamud Award.
Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, he now makes his home in the US. He has taught at the University of Oregon and Emory University, and is currently on the faculty of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Aunt Agatha’s co-owner (and BookFest president) Robin Agnew discusses the 13th annual BookFest and introduces a new AADL exhibit organized in conjunction with the BookFest that showcases entries in its 9th annual Book Cover design contest for high school students, who were asked this year to design a cover for Andrea Hannah’s debut novel, the crime thriller Of Scars and Stardust. Agnew also announces the contest winners. The exhibit also features a brief history of the contest. Also, live music by harpist Deborah Gabrion and refreshments.
We are thrilled to welcome acclaimed journalist and author Peter Kornbluh, who accompanied President Obama on his historic visit to Cuba, to Literati Bookstore. Peter will be joined in conversation by the University of Michigan’s Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof. Refreshments will be provided thanks to UM’s Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, generous co-sponsors of this event.
About Back Channel to Cuba:
History is being made in U.S.-Cuban relations. Updated to tell the real story behind the stunning December 17, 2014 announcement by President Obama and President Castro of their move to restore full diplomatic relations, this powerful book is essential to understanding ongoing efforts toward normalization in a new era of engagement. Challenging the conventional wisdom of perpetual conflict and aggression between the United States and Cuba since 1959, Back Channel to Cuba chronicles a surprising, untold history of bilateral efforts toward rapprochement and reconciliation. William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh here present a remarkably new and relevant account, describing how, despite the intense political clamor surrounding efforts to improve relations with Havana, negotiations have been conducted by every presidential administration since Eisenhower’s through secret, back-channel diplomacy. From John F. Kennedy’s offering of an olive branch to Fidel Castro after the missile crisis, to Henry Kissinger’s top secret quest for normalization, to Barack Obama’s promise of a new approach, LeoGrande and Kornbluh uncovered hundreds of formerly secret U.S. documents and conducted interviews with dozens of negotiators, intermediaries, and policy makers, including Fidel Castro and Jimmy Carter. They reveal a fifty-year record of dialogue and negotiations, both open and furtive, that provides the historical foundation for the dramatic breakthrough in U.S.-Cuba ties.
Peter Kornbluh directs the Cuba Documentation Project and the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, and is co-author, with William M. LeoGrande, of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana. Kornbluh is also the author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountabilityand Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba. He writes regularly for The Nation.
Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof is Associate Professor of History, American Culture, and Latina/o Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York After 1950.
Sept. 14: All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share. Hosted by local poets and former college English teachers Joe Kelty and Ed Morin.
Literati is pleased to welcome Dr. Jeffrey Kutcher and journalist Joanne Gerstner for a discussion of Back in the Game: Why Concussion Doesn’t Have to End Your Athletic Career.
Back in the Game, co-authored by pioneering sports neurologist Jeffrey S. Kutcher and award-winning sports journalist Joanne C. Gerstner, is the definitive guide to sports and concussion for youth parents, coaches and athletes. The topic of concussion in youth sports was relatively unheard of 10 years ago. Today, concerned parents are considering removing their children from participation in contact sports such as football or soccer. Back in the Game is a real-world based discussion of concussion and youth sports, with Dr. Kutcher’s clinical expertise blended with Gerstner’s reporting. World Cup and Olympic champion Kate Markgraf, X Games superstar Ellery Hollingsworth, former NFL quarterback Eric Hipple and an array of today’s youth coaches, parents and athletes honestly discuss concussion.
Jeffrey S. Kutcher MD is an internationally recognized sports neurologist and pioneering physician researcher. He is a graduate of the Tulane University School of Medicine and the University of Michigan Neurology Residency program. He founded the American Academy of Neurology’s Sports Neurology Section and was the neurologist for Team USA at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. Kutcher is the national division chief of The Sports Neurology Clinic at The CORE Institute.
Joanne C. Gerstner is an award-winning multimedia sports journalist, who focuses on sports and medicine. Her work has appeared on ESPN.com, in the The New York Times, USA Today, Detroit News, and other publications. She is a graduate of the Medill School at Northwestern University, a 2012 University of Michigan Knight-Wallace Fellow, and 2015 Jacobs Foundation Neuroscience Fellow. Gerstner is a professor of sports journalism in the School of Journalism at Michigan State University.
This 2-time Olympic gold medalist soccer player discusses her new memoir, Forward. Signing.
7 p.m., Rackham. $10 ($30 includes the book) in advance at literatibookstore.com. 585-5567.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Eileen Pollack back to the store in support of her latest book, A Perfect Life.
Love and science converge in Eileen Pollack’s luminous new novel, A Perfect Life. With singular insight and narrative grace, Pollack explores the moral complexities of scientific discovery through the story of a brilliant research biologist facing heartrending decisions about her personal life and the fate that genetics may have preordained for her.
Jane Weiss is a young post doc at MIT who is obsessed with finding the genetic marker for Valentine’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that killed her mother. With the clear vision of a scientist, she knows that she and her sister each stand a fifty percent chance of inheriting the disease, and her research is fueled by a need to discover if they are genetic carriers. Having witnessed the devastating effect that Valentine’s had on her parents’ marriage, Jane has vowed to steer clear of love unless she is sure she is free of the disease, refusing to become a burden on anyone else. But that determination is upended when she meets and falls in love with Willie, whose own father died of Valentine’s. Suddenly, with the very real possibility of their relationship ending in tragedy, her research takes on a new ferocity.
“A Perfect Life probes how we live in the face of uncertainty and the ways risk can both disable and empower us. Eileen Pollack has crafted a tender exploration of family love that is as smart and thought-provoking as it is moving.”–Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You
“Like Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations and Allegra Goodman’s Intuition, Eileen Pollack’s compelling novel offers an intimate portrait of scientists engaged in research with the potential to change all our lives—and equally engaged in relationships that change their own lives.”–Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and Servants of the Map
“A tense scientific mystery propels this gripping novel, but what resonates most powerfully are the keenly observed discoveries Jane makes about even deeper mysteries: the risks and pleasures of being human, and the nuances—as well as the costs—of love.”–Kim Edwards, author of The Memory-Keeper’s Daughter
With both an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BS in physics from Yale,Eileen Pollack is uniquely positioned to have written A Perfect Life, bringing both a fiction-writer’s sensibility and a scientific background to the novel. She is the author of two previous novels, two story collections, and two books of nonfiction, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michener Foundation and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her work has been included in both the Best American Short Stories and the Best American Essays series. Pollack has been a professor at the Helen Zell MFA Program at the University of Michigan since 1999, and was a director of the program for five years. She now divides her time between Ann Arbor and Manhattan.
L
Literati is delighted to partner with the University of Michigan’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures to celebrate new work by their esteemed faculty. Authors include:
Johannes von Moltke is Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures and Professor and Chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. He is the author of No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema and the editor of two volumes of writings by and about Siegfried Kracauer. His most recent book is The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America.
Helmut Puff is Professor of German and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the co-editor of Cultures of Communication: Theologies of Media in Early Modern Europe and Beyond, forthcoming in December.
Scott Spector is Professor of History, German Studies, and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern central Europe, focusing on the interplay of ideology and culture in its many forms. He is the author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (2000), and co-editor, with Helmut Puff and Dagmar Herzog, of After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies With and Beyond Foucault (2012). Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914 is a study of understandings of urban sex and crime in scientific, police, and popular press representations, and in the articulations of criminal and sexual subjects themselves.
Silke-Maria Weineck is particularly interested in the many ways in which classical literature and philosophy continue to reverberate in the modern world. Her first book,The Abyss Above traces the figure of the mad poet through writings by Plato, Hölderlin and Nietzsche. The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West looks at the tensions that have characterized the concept of fatherhood from Sophocles and the Bible over Hobbes to Kleist and Freud. Our Ancient Wars, co-edited with Victor Caston, explores the presence of classical war writing in contemporary cultural production. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Irony Monster: First and Last Deity.
Sept. 28:Readings by Leah Zazulyer, author of a recent collection of translations of Yiddish poems by Soviet refugee Israel Emiot, and Mitzi Alvin, a veteran Detroit poet whose poems have been described as “jewels of loss and renewal.” Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
