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.
Join us for this multi-media presentation about theater of the absurd including a theatrical performance by the actors performing “The Lesson” at the Yellow Barn. (Tickets for that performance available at the link below.)
Nicola’s Books will have copies of the play and also books about theater of the absurd on hand for purchase.
Theatre of the Absurd
Eugene Ionesco was born in Romania in 1912, but spent much of his life in France. “La Lecon” (“The Lesson”,) his second play, was written in 1950. Other playwrights whose plays are also considered to belong to the Theatre of the Absurd include Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, and Harold Pinter. There have been many different interpretations of “Absurdist” theatre. One thought is that these playwrights wished to rebel against traditional theatre, and to comment on certain aspects of society and the human condition by writing these “anti-plays.” “The Lesson” has been interpreted to demonstrate “the impossibility of communication” between the professor and his pupil, and the use of language as an instrument of power. Other explanations are that the professor represents dominance and even political dictatorship, and the maid represents a mother figure, or perhaps the professor’s subconscious mind.
The Play is the longest continuously running performance in the world. It has been performed seven days a week at Paris’s’Theatre de la Huchette’ for sixty years, always to a full house of theatre goers.
Tickets for the Yellow Barn performance available at https://www.artful.ly/store/events/12966
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
Open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each night 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. The 3 judges are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Space limited, so it’s smart to arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6:30 p.m.), Greyline (except as noted), 100 N. Ashley. $10. 764-5118.
Sweetwaters and Toastmaster community members are creating a new Toastmasters Club at Sweetwaters! We will have 1 or 2 prepared speeches, showcase some of our (kind, encouraging and gentle) evaluations of the speeches, and some opportunities for people to have impromptu speaking fun. There will also be a chance for Q & A during the meeting too.
Come a little early and pick-up a beverage or snack from the cafe and have fun making new friendships with encouraging and supportive people!
Sweetwaters Washington St., 123 W. Washington St. Ann Arbor, MI 48104. Free.joshs@sweetwaterscafe.com https://www.facebook.com/events/1053675414768433/
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.
