Literati is pleased to partner with the University of Michigan to present Theodoris Chiotis, editor of the anthology Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis.
Futures features some of the most daring new voices in Greek poetry, together with international poets with Greek connections. These bold, impassioned and critically aware texts stake new poetic and political ground: they articulate what it means to live in a time when capitalism is buckling under its own weight and new ways of living and thinking seem to be emerging. In a time of crisis, Futures calls for solidarity, resistance and poetry as a political paradigm.
Contributors: Dimitris Allos, Orfeas Apergis, Vassilis Amanatidis, Marios Chatziprokopiou, Theodoros Chiotis, Emily Critchley, Yiannis Doukas, Nikos Erinakis, Phoebe Giannisi, Constantinos Hadzinikolaou, Κaterina Iliopoulou, Panayotis Ioannidis, D.I. (Dimitra Ioannou), Adrianne Kalfopoulou, Patricia Kolaiti, Dimitra Kotoula, Alexios Mainas, Christodoulos Makris, Sophie Mayer, Stergios Mitas, Eftychia Panayiotou, Konstantinos Papacharalampos, Iordanis Papadopoulos, Stephanos Papadopoulos, Eleni Philippou, Stamatis Polenakis, Nick Potamitis, George Prevedourakis, Theodoros Rakopoulos, Kiriakos Sifiltzoglou, Eleni Sikélianòs, A. E. Stallings, Yiannis Stiggas, Barnaby Tideman, Maria Topali, Tryfon Tolides, Thanasis Triaridis, Thomas Tsalapatis, George Ttoouli, Universal Jenny, Steve Willey.
“Excellent … launches a counter-offensive against the inhuman and mystifying terminologies of high finance … [Chiotis’s] translations have such vitality that they mesh seamlessly with the English language poems.”–Times Literary Supplement
Vicky Delany launches her new series – a Sherlock themed cozy titled Elementary, She Read.
Literati is pleased to welcome Jung Yun in celebration of the paperback release of her debut novel, Shelter, a staff favorite and a semifinalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
Kyung Cho is a young father burdened by a house he can’t afford. For years, he and his wife, Gillian, have lived beyond their means. Now their debts and bad decisions are catching up with them, and Kyung is anxious for his family’s future. A few miles away, his parents, Jin and Mae, live in the town’s most exclusive neighborhood, surrounded by the material comforts that Kyung desires for his wife and son. Growing up, they gave him every possible advantage—private tutors, expensive hobbies—but they never showed him kindness. Kyung can hardly bear to see them now, much less ask for their help. Yet when an act of violence leaves Jin and Mae unable to live on their own, the dynamic suddenly changes, and he’s compelled to take them in. For the first time in years, the Chos find themselves living under the same roof. Tensions quickly mount as Kyung’s proximity to his parents forces old feelings of guilt and anger to the surface, along with a terrible and persistent question: how can he ever be a good husband, father, and son when he never knew affection as a child?
As Shelter veers swiftly toward its startling conclusion, Jung Yun leads us through dark and violent territory, where, unexpectedly, the Chos discover hope. Shelter is a masterfully crafted debut novel that asks what it means to provide for one’s family and, in answer, delivers a story as riveting as it is profound.
“Shelter is domestic drama at its best, a gripping narrative of secrets and revelations that seized me from beginning to end.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of The Sympathizer
Jung Yun was born in South Korea, grew up in North Dakota, and educated at Vassar College, the University of Pennsylvania, and University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her work has appeared in Tin House (the “Emerging Voices” issue); The Best of Tin House: Stories, edited by Dorothy Allison; and The Massachusetts Review; and she is the recipient of two Artist Fellowships in fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize. Currently, she lives in Baltimore with her husband and serves as an Assistant Professor of English at the George Washington University.
Literati is thrilled to be the partner-bookseller for the Zell Visiting Writers Series, presented by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, which brings world-renowned poets and fiction writers to Helmut Stern Auditorium in the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Marie Howe has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and NYU. Her most recent book, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W. W. Norton, 2009) was a finalist for the IBook Prize. Her other collections of poetry include What the Living Do (1998) and The Good Thief (Persea, 1988), which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1987 National Poetry Series. She coedited (with Michael Klein) the essay anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She was the Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012 to 2014. She lives in New York City.
Literati is delighted to welcome Dan Chaon in support of his latest novel, the staff-favorite Ill Will. Dan will be joined for a post-reading conversation by UM MFA first year in fiction Sam Krowchenko.
Two sensational unsolved crimes—one in the past, another in the present—are linked by one man’s memory and self-deception in this chilling novel of literary suspense from National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon. “We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves.” This is one of the little mantras Dustin Tillman likes to share with his patients, and it’s meant to be reassuring. But what if that story is a lie? A psychologist in suburban Cleveland, Dustin is drifting through his forties when he hears the news: His adopted brother, Rusty, is being released from prison. Thirty years ago, Rusty received a life sentence for the massacre of Dustin’s parents, aunt, and uncle. The trial came to epitomize the 1980s hysteria over Satanic cults; despite the lack of physical evidence, the jury believed the outlandish accusations Dustin and his cousin made against Rusty. Now, after DNA analysis has overturned the conviction, Dustin braces for a reckoning.
Meanwhile, one of Dustin’s patients has been plying him with stories of the drowning deaths of a string of drunk college boys. At first Dustin dismisses his patient’s suggestions that a serial killer is at work as paranoid thinking, but as the two embark on an amateur investigation, Dustin starts to believe that there’s more to the deaths than coincidence. Soon he becomes obsessed, crossing all professional boundaries—and putting his own family in harm’s way. From one of today’s most renowned practitioners of literary suspense, Ill Will is an intimate thriller about the failures of memory and the perils of self-deception. In Dan Chaon’s nimble, chilling prose, the past looms over the present, turning each into a haunted place.
“Dan Chaon’s new novel is subtly, steadily unnerving—like a scalpel slipping under your skin and prying it, ever so slowly, from the muscle beneath. Ill Will is a dark Möbius strip of a thriller that will leave you questioning what’s perceived and what’s imagined, and whether the reverberations of tragedy ever truly come to an end.”—Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You
Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.
Readings by U-M creative writing grad students, including fiction writer Kristen Roupenian and poet Robert Heald.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 615-3710.
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.
Literati is delighted to welcome Deepak Unnikrishnan in support of his debut novel, Temporary People, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.
In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. Brought in to construct the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labor force works without the rights of citizenship, endures miserable living conditions, and is ultimately forced to leave the country. Until now, the humanitarian crisis of the so-called “guest workers” of the Gulf has barely been addressed in fiction. With his stunning, mind-altering debut novel Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan delves into their histories, myths, struggles, and triumphs.
Combining the irrepressible linguistic invention of Salman Rushdie and the satirical vision of George Saunders, Unnikrishnan presents twenty-eight linked stories that careen from construction workers who shapeshift into luggage and escape a labor camp, to a woman who stitches back together the bodies of those who’ve fallen from buildings in progress, to a man who grows ideal workers designed to live twelve years and then perish—until they don’t, and found a rebel community in the desert. With this polyphony, Unnikrishnan brilliantly maps a new, unruly global English. Giving substance and identity to the anonymous workers of the Gulf, he highlights the disturbing ways in which “progress” on a global scale is bound up with dehumanization.
Deepak Unnikrishnan is a writer from Abu Dhabi, and an editor at The State. His fiction and essays have appeared in Guernica, Drunken Boat, Himal Southasian, Bound Off, The State Vol IV: Dubai and in the anthology The Apex Book of World SF 4, among others.
Literati is pleased to partner with the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing and WCBN Radio for the latest installment of Word^2: Writer to Writer, a series which puts a UM professor and member of the Sweetland faculty in conversation about writing.
This month, Writer to Writer welcomes Clare Croft, a historian, theorist, and dramaturg working at the intersection of dance studies and performance studies. She specializes in 20th and 21st century American dance, cultural policy, feminist and queer theory, and critical race theory. In all of these areas, Croft considers how dance is a way of thinking and a mode for asking questions. What does it mean to acknowledge that people have bodies and that they use their bodies to make meaning, create community, and critique social structures?
Croft’s current book project, Funding Footprints: Dance and American Diplomacy (Oxford University Press), examines the history of U.S. State Department funding of international dance tours. Croft’s writing about dance has appeared in Dance Research Journal, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Topics, and is forthcoming in Dance Chronicle. From 2002-2005, Croft was a regular contributor to The Washington Post, and from 2005-2010, she covered dance, as well as theatre and musical theatre, for the Austin American-Statesman.
In 2010, Croft’s article, “Ballet Nations: The New York City Ballet’s 1962 U.S. State Department-Sponsored Tour of the Soviet Union,” received the American Society of Theatre Research’s Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize, which recognizes the publication that best explores the intersections of theatre and dance/movement. Croft was also the 2007 recipient of the Society of Dance History Scholar’s Selma Jeanne Cohen Award. At the University of Michigan, Croft teaches courses in the BFA and MFA dance programs, as well as in the BFA interarts program.
Mar. 22: Readings by Jennifer Clark, a Kalamazoo poet who has a forthcoming 2nd collection Johnny Appleseed: The Slice and Times of John Chapman, and InsideOut Literary Arts Project (Detroit) interim director and Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Detroit project coordinator Alise Alousi, whose work is featured in Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry. Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
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7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
These 2 mystery writers discuss their latest thrillers. Canadian writer Chevy Stevens’ Never Let You Go is about a woman who had escaped with her daughter from an abusive marriage who feels she is now being tracked by her ex-husband, and Stephen Mack Jones’s August Snow is the first in his series about a street-smart Detroit private eye who gets caught up on rat’s nest of Detroit’s most dangerous criminals, from corporate embezzlers to tattooed mercenaries in the course of investigating the murder of a powerful banker. Signings.
