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.
Readings by featured poets, preceded by a poetry open mike.
Reading by U-M Bear River Review editor Monica Rico, author of the 2001 chapbook Esperanza.
7-9 p.m. (sign-up begins at 6:30 p.m.), Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry.
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.
Keith is a consumer protection attorney for the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. Before graduating from the University of Michigan Law School, he toured with a professional comedy troupe, writing and performing sketch comedy at colleges in the Mid-Atlantic States. His Pushcart-nominated short story was recently published in The Stonecoast Review.
According to an old prophecy, after Kasper’s Greek ancestor stole the wishing hat from Hermes, Fate cursed his progeny to sell hats, on pain of mayhem or death. Kasper, however, doesn’t mind making hats, and he loves Berlin’s cabaret scene even more. But his carefree life of jazz and booze comes to a screeching halt when he must use the wishing hat to rescue his flapper girlfriend Isana from the shadowy Klaus, a veil-wearing Nazi who brainwashes his victims until they can’t see their own faces.
Isana and Kasper’s happiness proves fleeting. Years after her mysterious death, Kasper struggles as a lonely, single father of two until he meets Rosamund Lux, recently released from a political prison where Klaus took her face. Kasper soon suspects that Rosamund is no ordinary woman. According to the prophecy, certain Lux women descend from the water nymph Daphne, who, during Olympian times, transformed into a laurel tree to avoid Apollo’s sexual advances; they, too, suffer from an intergenerational curse connected to Hermes’ stolen hat. As Kasper falls deeper in love, Rosamund’s mental health deteriorates. She has nightmares and delusions about Klaus, and warns that he will launch a night of terror once he’s collected enough faces.
Kasper dismisses the growing Nazi threat until the government reclassifies him as a Jew in 1938. His plan to emigrate unravels when anti-Jewish riots erupt and the Nazis start loading Jews on boxcars to Dachau. Then Rosamund goes missing, and Klaus steals the wishing hat, the family’s only means of escape.
Kasper, however, will face his most difficult battle in America. He must convince his wayward son and indifferent grandson to break the curse that has trapped the family in the hat business for sixteen centuries. Their lives will depend on it.
Book One of the Life Indigo series, Kasper MUtzenmacher’s Cursed Hat is a fantastical family saga about tradition, faith, and identity, set during the Jazz Age, Nazi Germany, and the Detroit race riots of 1943.
Traverse City writer Robert Downes, an entertaining veteran speaker who has written 3 adventure-travel books, presents a video-illustrated talk on the historical research behind his new novel Windigo Moon: A Novel of Native America. Signing.
7-8:30 p.m., AADL Westgate Branch West Side Room, Westgate shopping center, 2503 Jackson. Free. 327-8301.
Culinary historian Adrian Miller, a former special assistant to President Clinton, discusses his new book about White House kitchen staff who served first families from the Washingtons to the Obamas. Followed by a book sale, signing, and reception.
7 p.m., Ford Library, 1000 Beal. Free. 205-0555
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.
Barbara has a new Amanda Doucette novel, The Trickster’s Lullaby, and Vicki has the second in her Sherlock Holmes series, Body on Baker Street.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Sam Walker who will be sharing his new book The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World’s Greatest Teams
About The Captain Class
Walker starts with one of the most hotly debated questions in sports: What are the greatest teams ever—particularly those that sustained success over a long period of time. He devised a formula to compare the achievements of teams from leagues all over the world, and after painstakingly profiling thousands of them, produced a comprehensive, unbiased list of the 16 best. Period. At that point, Walker became obsessed with another, more complicated question: What did these teams have in common? A genius coach? A transcendent superstar? A groundbreaking system? Or was it all a matter of chemistry? A surprising pattern emerged: There was a very specific kind of leader at the center of these teams, a force that drove them to greatness, and they all shared eight specific characteristics. Who they are, who they are not, and the traits they shared will fascinate anyone who follows sports or is interested in building a team—and winning. Told through riveting stories of some of the most compelling and pressure-soaked moments in sports history, Walker not only brings these uncommon leaders to life, he presents a counterintuitive view of leadership—one that can apply to a wide spectrum of competitive disciplines, particularly business.
“Sam Walker has unlocked one of sports’ greatest mysteries: the secret to the success of 16 team dynasties. On nearly every page, you’ll be shaking your head at another revelation about how a team’s dominance is hard-wired to the team captain’s leadership. The Captain Class is one of the most surprising, best-written—and fun—sports books published in recent years.”—Don Van Natta Jr., Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author of First Off the Tee
“Well-researched, wildly entertaining, and thought-provoking. In The Captain Class, Sam Walker presents compelling narratives about the secret ingredient to the greatest teams of all time—and quickly makes you reexamine long-held beliefs about leadership and the glue that binds winning teams together.”—Theo Epstein, President of Baseball Operations for the Chicago Cubs
Sam Walker is The Wall Street Journal’s page one editor overseeing its sports coverage across all print editions and digital platforms. A former reporter and columnist, Walker founded the Journal’s prizewinning daily sports pages in 2009. He is the author of Fantasyland, a bestselling account of his attempt to win Tout Wars, America’s top fantasy-baseball expert competition (of which he is a two-time champion). He lives in New York with his wife, Christy Fletcher, and their two children.
