Readings by U-M creative writing grad students, including Rwandan fiction writer Clarisse Baleja Saidi, who writes about homes and faithfulness, and Academy of American Poets Prize winner Courtney Faye Taylor.
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.
All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell.
Literati is thrilled to welcome artist Michele Oka Doner in support of her most recent work, Into the Mysterium, a book that reveals the wondrous marine creatures deep in the heart of the endangered oceans that cover most of our planet.
With the oceans covering over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, our planet can be called a marine planet. Beneath the waves are millions of remarkable creatures—beautiful big whales, dangerous jellyfish, legions of phytoplankton—but also, perhaps least known, are the marine invertebrates who make up an essential part of marine life. At the University of Miami, Florida, one museum is devoted to the study of Atlantic and Eastern Pacific marine invertebrates—over 93,000 specimens. Many of them were pulled from the Gulf of Panama, throughout the Caribbean, the Florida Keys, and the eastern Pacific over the last fifty years. They represent creatures that may never be seen again as the oceans grow ever more polluted and as global warming wreaks havoc on these ecosystems. Here, in lavishly beautifully photographs, nearly 100 of the rarest, most wondrous, mystifying, and entrancing specimens are brought into the light. From rare seahorses to now extinct corals, these invertebrates leave one gasping again at the extraordinary beauty and mystery of our world.
Michele Oka Doner is an internationally renowned artist whose career spans four decades. The breadth of her artistic production encompasses sculpture, furniture, jewelry, public art, functional objects, video, as well as costume and set design. She is well-known for creating numerous public art installations throughout the United States, including Radiant Site at New York’s Herald Square subway, Flight at Washington’s Reagan International Airport, and A Walk on the Beach at the Miami International Airport. Her artwork can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Louvre, the Yale Art Gallery, the Princeton University Art Museum, and many others. (Author photo: Bruce Weber.)
Oct. 26: Readings by Kalamazoo Valley Community College English teacher Robert Haight, the author of 3 poetry collections, and Joy Gaines-Friedler, a widely published Detroit-area poet who has released 2 collections, Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
Literati is pleased to welcome poets Troy Jollimore and Heather Altfeld for a reading and signing.
Troy Jollimore’s most recent collection of poetry, Syllabus of Errors, was chosen by the New York Times as one of the best poetry books of 2015. His previous poetry books are At Lake Scugog (2011) and Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for 2006. He teaches philosophy at California State University, Chico, and is the author of two philosophical works,Love’s Vision and On Loyalty. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Heather Altfeld is the author of The Disappearing Theatre, chosen by Stephen Dunn for the Poets at Work prize. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, ZYZZYVA, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, The Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Watershed, and others, and she has written essays for North American Review, Superstition Review, and Poetry Northwest. Her research and areas of interest include Children’s Literature, Anthropology and Poetry, Waldorf Education for K-12, and things that have vanished. She has taught in Juvenile Hall, California Poets-in the Schools, Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York City, and various campuses in the North State.
Literati welcomes Bill Ayers to Ann Arbor in support of his latest book, Demand the Impossible!: A Radical Manifesto.
Demand the Impossible! is a manifesto for movement-makers. In an era defined by mass incarceration, endless war, economic crisis, catastrophic environmental destruction, and a political system offering more of the same, radical social transformation has never been more urgent. Demand the Impossible! urges us to imagine a world beyond what this rotten system would have us believe is possible. In critiquing the world around us, insurgent educator and activist Bill Ayers uncovers cracks in the system, raising our sights for radical change, and envisioning strategies for building a movement to create a more humane, balanced, and peaceful world.
Bill Ayers is a social justice activist, teacher, Distinguished Professor of Education (retired) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and author of two memoirs, Fugitive Days and Public Enemy.
Literati is pleased to host Anne Carson for a special event celebrating her latest work, FLOAT.
Due to space limitations at our store and expected demand, Literati will be ticketing this event. The ticket can be redeemed for $5 dollars off a hardcover copy of the book.
Currently, Literati plans on hosting this event in our second floor events space, which is only accessible by staircase. If you wish to attend but cannot traverse the stairs, please let us know by reaching out to events@literatibookstore.com, and we will make main floor arrangements.
From the renowned classicist and MacArthur Prize winner: a new collection that explores myth and memory, beauty and loss, all the while playing with–and pushing–the limits of language and form.
Anne Carson consistently dazzles with her inventive, shape-shifting work and the vividness of her imagination. FLOAT reaches an even greater level of brilliance and surprise.
Presented in an arrestingly original format–individual chapbooks that can be read in any order, and that float inside a transparent case–this collection conjures a mix of voices, time periods, and structures to explore what makes people, memories, and stories “maddeningly attractive” when observed in spaces that are suggestively in-between.
One can begin with Carson contemplating Proust on a frozen Icelandic plain, or on the art-saturated streets of downtown New York City. Or journey to the peak of Mount Olympus, where Zeus ponders his own afterlife. Or find a chorus of Gertrude Steins performing an essay about falling–a piece that also unearths poignant memories of Carson’s own father and great-uncle in rural Canada. And a poem called “Wildly Constant” piercingly explores the highs and lows of marriage and monogamy, distilled in a wife’s waking up her husband from the darkness of night, and asking him to make them eggs for breakfast.
Exquisite, heartbreaking, disarmingly funny, FLOAT kaleidoscopically illuminates the uncanny magic that comes with letting go of expectations and boundaries. It is Carson’s most intellectually electrifying, emotionally engaging book to date.
Anne Carson was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.
Literati is delighted to welcome Matt Bell back to Ann Arbor in support of his most recent work, A Tree or a Person or a Wall.
Here we have Matt Bell at his most inventive and uncanny: parents and children, murderers and monsters, wild renditions of the past, and stunning visions of the present, all of which build to a virtuoso reimagining of our world. A 19th-century minister builds an elaborate motor that will bring about the Second Coming. A man with rough hands locks a boy in a room with an albino ape. An apocalyptic army falls under a veil of forgetfulness. The story of Red Riding Hood is run through a potentially endless series of iterations. A father invents an elaborate, consuming game for his hospitalized son. Indexes, maps, a checkered shirt buried beneath a blanket of snow: they are scattered through these pages as clues to mysteries that may never be solved, ingering evidence of the violence and unknowability of the world. A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Bell’s previously published shorter fiction—the story collection How They Were Found and the acclaimed novella Cataclysm Baby—along with seven dark and disturbing new stories, to create a collection of singular power.
“These fables plumb the depths of human longing… a collection that resonates like a tuning fork, lingering after the book is closed.”—Publishers Weekly
“A clutch of stories with a flavor of the experimental, the apocalyptic, and often both…Admirable efforts to strip familiarity and sentiment from stories of humanity at its worst.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Told in a mythic, omniscient voice, some of these pieces read like cruel fairy tales… Imagine a tale from Lydia Davis on a bad trip… smart and edgy.”—Library Journal
Matt Bell is the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, which was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, a Michigan Notable Book, and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor Recipient, as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. His writing has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Tin House, The New York Times, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, The American Reader, and many other publications. Born in Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Literati is thrilled to be the bookseller for the Zell Visiting Writers Series at the University of Michigan. More information about the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, including a full calendar of visiting writers, can be found here. The November 3rd installment of ZVWS will feature alumni Donovan Hohn and Rachel Richardson.
Donovan Hohn is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, A National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Knight-Wallace Fellowship. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside, among other publications. His book, Moby-Duck, was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Prize for Excellence in Journalism, and runner-up for both the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. A former features editor of GQ and contributing editor of Harper’s, Hohn now teaches creative writing at Wayne State University and lives with his family in Ann Arbor, where he is working on his second book.
Rachel Richardson is the author of two books of poetry, Copperhead (2011) andHundred-Year Wave (2016), both selections in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, the Poetry Foundation website, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Richardson is a contributing editor at Memorious and directs poetry programming for the Bay Area Book Festival. She lives with the writer David Roderick and their two children in Berkeley, California.
Literati is pleased to welcome Julia Sonnevend in support of her book Stories without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event. Julia will be joined in conversation by Professor William Uricchio.
How do stories of particular events turn into global myths, while others fade away? What becomes known and seen as a global iconic event? In Stories without Borders, Julia Sonnevend considers the ways in which we recount and remember news stories of historic significance. Focusing on journalists covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and on subsequent retellings of the event in a variety of ways – from Legoland reenactments to slabs of the Berlin Wall installed in global cities – Sonnevend discusses how certain events become built up so that people in many parts of the world remember them for long periods of time. She argues that five dimensions determine the viability and longevity of international news events. First, a foundational narrative must be established with certain preconditions. Next, the established narrative becomes universalized and a mythical message developed. This message is then condensed and encapsulated in a simple phrase, a short narrative, and a recognizable visual scene. Counter-narratives emerge that reinterpret events and in turn facilitate their diffusion across multiple media platforms and changing social and political contexts. Sonnevend examines these five elements through the developments of November 9, 1989 – what came to be known as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Stories Without Borders concludes with a discussion of how global iconic events have an enduring effect on individuals and societies, pointing out that after common currencies, military alliances, and international courts have failed, stories may be all that we have to bring hope and unity.
Julia Sonnevend is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. She was a Lady Davis Fellow at the Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace in Israel in 2014 and a Leibniz Fellow at the Center for Contemporary History in Germany in 2015. She is co-editor of Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future (forthcoming with MIT Press in 2016). She is author and co-author of articles published in journals including Journalism Studies, Columbia Journalism Review and The New Everyday. Her work also appears in edited collections including Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (Ed. Benjamin Peters, Princeton University Press, forthcoming in 2016),Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life (Eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline (Eds. James Elkins et al, Routledge, 2012). She received her Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University, her Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School and her Juris Doctorate and Master of Arts degrees in German Studies and Aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
William Uricchio revisits the histories of old media when they were new; explores interactive and participatory documentary; writes about the past and future of television; thinks a lot about algorithms and archives; and researches cultural identities and the question of “Americanization” in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and faculty director of the MISTI-Netherlands Program. He is also Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has held visiting professorships at the Freie Universität Berlin, Stockholm University, the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Lichtenberg-Kolleg), China University of Science and Technology, and in Denmark where he was DREAM professor. He has been awarded Guggenheim, Humboldt and Fulbright fellowships and the Berlin Prize; and is currently Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. His publications include Reframing Culture (Princeton); We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (Chicago/Intellect); Media Cultures(Heidelberg); hundreds of essays and book chapters … and, timed to coincide with the Batman-Superman big screen face-off, a forthcoming collection entitled Many More Lives of the Batman (BFI/Palgrave). He is currently completing a book on new forms of documentary; and another on games and playing with history and historiography after post-structuralism.
