Literati is thrilled to welcome designer Oliver Uberti and his new book Where the Animals Go.
For thousands of years, tracking animals meant following footprints. Now satellites, drones, camera traps, cellphone networks, and accelerometers reveal the natural world as never before. Where the Animals Go is the first book to offer a comprehensive, data-driven portrait of how creatures like ants, otters, owls, turtles, and sharks navigate the world. Based on pioneering research by scientists at the forefront of the animal-tracking revolution, James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti’s stunning, four-color charts and maps tell fascinating stories of animal behavior. These astonishing infographics explain how warblers detect incoming storms using sonic vibrations, how baboons make decisions, and why storks prefer garbage dumps to wild forage; they follow pythons racing through the Everglades, a lovelorn wolf traversing the Alps, and humpback whales visiting undersea mountains. Where the Animals Go is a triumph of technology, data science, and design, bringing broad perspective and intimate detail to our understanding of the animal kingdom
“Where the Animals Go is beautiful and thrilling, a combination of the best in science and exposition, and a joy to study cover to cover.”—Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University
“This book is beautiful as well as informative and inspiring. There is no doubt it will help in our fight to save wildlife and wild habitats.” – Jane Goodall
Oliver Uberti is an award-winning designer and visual journalist and was previously senior design editor at National Geographic. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Tonight Literati is thrilled to host author and translator Clayton Eshleman in conversation with Keith Taylor on the work of Aimé Césaire
The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire gathers all of Cesaire’s celebrated verse into one bilingual edition. The French portion is comprised of newly established first editions of Césaire’s poetic œuvre made available in French in 2014 under the title Poésie, Théâtre, Essais et Discours, edited by A. J. Arnold and an international team of specialists. To prepare the English translations, the translators started afresh from this French edition. Included here are translations of first editions of the poet’s early work, prior to political interventions in the texts after 1955, revealing a new understanding of Cesaire’s aesthetic and political trajectory. A truly comprehensive picture of Cesaire’s poetry and poetics is made possible thanks to a thorough set of notes covering variants, historical and cultural references, and recurring figures and structures, a scholarly introduction and a glossary. This book provides a new cornerstone for readers and scholars in 20th century poetry, African diasporic literature, and postcolonial studies.
Clayton Eshleman is the author of over one hundred books, and the major American translator of Césaire
Keith Taylor teaches at the University of Michigan. He has published many books over the years: collections of poetry, a collection of very short stories, co-edited volumes of essays and fiction, and a volume of poetry translated from Modern Greek.
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.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is excited to welcome John U Bacon in support of the new book about the life of legendary sports broadcaster John Saunders, Playing Hurt: My Journey from Despair to Hope
About Playing Hurt:
During his three decades on ESPN and ABC, John Saunders became one of the nation’s most respected and beloved sportscasters. In this moving, jarring, and ultimately inspiring memoir, Saunders discusses his troubled childhood, the traumatic brain injury he suffered in 2011, and the severe depression that nearly cost him his life. As Saunders writes,
Playing Hurt is not an autobiography of a sports celebrity but a memoir of a man facing his own mental illness, and emerging better off for the effort. I will take you into the heart of my struggle with depression, including insights into some of its causes, its consequences, and its treatments.
I invite you behind the facade of my apparently “perfect” life as a sportscaster, with a wonderful wife and two healthy, happy adult daughters. I have a lot to be thankful for, and I am truly grateful. But none of these things can protect me or anyone else from the disease of depression and its potentially lethal effects.
Mine is a rare story: that of a black man in the sports industry openly grappling with depression. I will share the good, the bad, and the ugly, including the lengths I’ve gone to to conceal my private life from the public.
So why write a book? Because I want to end the pain and heartache that comes from leading a double life. I also want to reach out to the millions of people, especially men, who think they’re alone and can’t ask for help.
John Saunders died suddenly on August 10 ,2016, from an enlarged heart, diabetes, and other complications. This book is his ultimate act of generosity to help those who suffer from mental illness, and those who love them.P.C. Cast is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author whose novels have been awarded the prestigious Oklahoma Book Award, as well as the Prism, Booksellers Best, Holt Medallion, and more. She lives in Oregon with lots of dogs, cats, horses, and a burro.
John U Bacon is the New York Times bestselling author of, among other titles, Three and Out, Fourth and Long, and Endzone.
Storytellers Guild members present a program of old tales and personal stories for grownups.
Free; donations accepted. annarborstorytelling.org, facebook.com/annarborstorytellers. 665-2757.
Storytellers Guild members present a program of old tales and personal stories for grownups.
Free; donations accepted. annarborstorytelling.org, facebook.com/annarborstorytellers. 665-2757.
Literati is thrilled to host novelists Peter Ho Davies and Derek Palacio to celebrate the paperback release of The Fortunes and The Mortifications
About The Fortunes:
Sly, funny, intelligent, and artfully structured, The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience.
Inhabiting four lives—a railroad baron’s valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor; Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star; a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes the Asian American community; and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption—this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive—as much through love as blood.
About The Mortifications:
In 1980, a rural Cuban family is torn apart during the Mariel boatlift. Uxbal Encarnación—father, husband, political insurgent—refuses to leave behind the revolutionary ideals and lush tomato farms of his sun-soaked homeland. His wife, Soledad, takes young Isabel and Ulises hostage and flees with them to America, leaving behind Uxbal for the promise of a better life. But instead of settling with fellow Cuban immigrants in Miami’s familiar heat, Soledad pushes farther north into the stark, wintry landscape of Hartford, Connecticut. There, in the long shadow of their estranged patriarch, now just a distant memory, the Encarnacións begin a process of growth and transformation.
In their own way, each one both struggles and flourishes. Isabel, spiritually hungry and desperate for higher purpose, finds herself connected to the dying in uncanny ways. Ulises is bookish and awkwardly tall, like his father, whose memory haunts and shapes his thoughts. Presiding over them both is Soledad. Once consumed by her love for her husband, she begins a tempestuous new relationship with a Dutch tobacco farmer. But just as the Encarnacións begin to cultivate their strange new ways of life, Cuba calls them back. Uxbal is alive, and waiting.
Peter Ho Davies is on the faculty of the graduate program in creative writing at the University of Michigan. His debut collection, The Ugliest House in the World, won the John Llewellyn Rhys and PEN/Macmillan awards in Britain. His second collection, Equal Love, was hailed by the New York Times Book Review for its “stories as deep and clear as myth.” It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a New York Times Notable Book. In 2003 Davies was named among the “Best of Young British Novelists” by Granta. The Welsh Girl was his first novel and his second, The Fortunes, was published in September 2016. The son of a Welsh father and Chinese mother, Davies was raised in England and spent his summers in Wales.
Derek Palacio received his MFA in creative writing from The Ohio State University. His short story “Sugarcane” appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, and his novella, How to Shake the Other Man, was published by Nouvella Books. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is the codirector, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, and serves as a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program.
Readings by U-M creative writing grad students, including fiction writer Sena Moon and poet Joseph Harms.
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 pleased to welcome N.J. Campbell and Annie Hartnett who will be reading and discussing their new novels Found Audio and Rabbit Cake
About Campbell’s Found Audio:
Amrapali Anna Singh is an historian and analyst capable of discerning the most cryptic and trivial details from audio recordings. One day, a mysterious man appears at her office in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, having traveled a great distance to bring her three Type IV audio cassettes that bear the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires that may or may not exist.
On the cassettes is the deposition of an adventure journalist and his obsessive pursuit of an amorphous, legendary, and puzzling “City of Dreams.” Spanning decades, his quest leads him from a snake-hunter in the Louisiana bayou to the walled city of Kowloon on the eve of its destruction, from the Singing Dunes of Mongolia to a chess tournament in Istanbul. The deposition also begs the question: Who is making the recording, and why?
Despite being explicitly instructed not to, curiosity gets the better of Singh and she mails a transcription of the cassettes with her analysis to an acquaintance before vanishing. The man who bore the cassettes, too, has disappeared. The journalist was unnamed.
Here—for the first time—is the complete archival manuscript of the mysterious recordings accompanied by Singh’s analysis.
K.J. Campbell was born in the Midwest. He has won the Little Tokyo Short Story Contest, received accolades from the California State Legislature, and has been anthologized in the collection American Fiction from New Rivers Press. Found Audio is his first novel.
About Harnett’s Rabbit Cake:
Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent. She knows she should plan to grieve her mother, who has recently drowned while sleepwalking, for exactly eighteen months. But there are things Elvis doesn’t yet know—like how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself while sleep-eating or why her father has started wearing her mother’s silk bathrobe around the house. Elvis investigates the strange circumstances of her mother’s death and finds comfort, if not answers, in the people (and animals) of Freedom, Alabama. As hilarious a storyteller as she is heartbreakingly honest, Elvis is a truly original voice in this exploration of grief, family, and the endurance of humor after loss.
Annie Hartnett was the 2013-2014 winner of the Writer in Residence Fellowship for the Associates of the Boston Public Library and has received awards and honors from the Bread Loaf School of English, McSweeney’s, and Indiana Review. Hartnett received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Alabama, an MA from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, and currently teaches at Grub Street, an independent writing center in Boston. She lives with her husband and their beloved Border Collie in Providence, Rhode Island.
Readings by these 2 poets, both U-M creative writing grads. Dartmouth English professor Francis reads from Forest Primeval, her 2016 collection that won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Eschewing a romantic view of nature, the poems are sensitive to darkness and describe “a landscape formed by the legacy of slavery, oppression, and violence against Black people and, especially, Black women,” says a Connotation Press review. Matthews is a North Carolina poet who also writes memoirs and essays and has been published in several prominent literary magazines.
