Maya Barzilai (modern Herbrew and Jewish culture) and Kathryn Babayan (Iranian history and culture) discuss Barzilai’s new book Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters, a monster tour of the Golem narrative across various cultural and historical landscapes.
About the book:
“In the 1910s and 1920s, a “golem cult” swept across Europe and the U.S., later surfacing in Israel. Why did this story of a powerful clay monster molded and animated by a rabbi to protect his community become so popular and pervasive? The golem has appeared in a remarkable range of popular media: from the Yiddish theater to American comic books, from German silent film to Quentin Tarantino movies. This book showcases how the golem was remolded, throughout the war-torn twentieth century, as a muscular protector, injured combatant, and even murderous avenger. This evolution of the golem narrative is made comprehensible by, and also helps us to better understand, one of the defining aspects of the last one hundred years: mass warfare and its ancillary technologies.
Literati is honored to welcome back poet Tarfia Faizullah who will be sharing her latest collection Registers of Illuminated Villages. She will joined by poet Keith Taylor for a post-reading conversation.
About Registers of Illuminated Villages:
Registers of Illuminated Villages is Tarfia Faizullah’s highly anticipated second collection, following her award-winning debut, Seam. Faizullah’s new work extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voices–elegies, outcries, self-portraits, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, family, and memory. One poem steps down the page like a Slinky; another poem responds to makeup homework completed in the summer of a childhood accident; other poems punctuate the collection with dark meditations on dissociation, discipline, defiance, and destiny; and the near-title poem, “Register of Eliminated Villages,” suggests illuminated texts, one a Qur’an in which the speaker’s name might be found, and the other a register of 397 villages destroyed in northern Iraq. Faizullah is an essential new poet whose work only grows more urgent, beautiful, and–even in its unsparing brutality–full of love.
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam, winner of a VIDA Award and a Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. She teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Detroit.
Join us for a special event as we celebrate the release of Notes from a Public Typewriter!
About Notes from a Public Typewriter:
When Michael Gustafson and his wife Hilary opened Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they put out a typewriter for anyone to use. They had no idea what to expect. Would people ask metaphysical questions? Write mean things? Pour their souls onto the page? Yes, no, and did they ever.
Every day, people of all ages sit down at the public typewriter. Children perch atop grandparents’ knees, both sets of hands hovering above the metal keys: I LOVE YOU. Others walk in alone on Friday nights and confess their hopes: I will find someone someday. And some leave funny asides for the next person who sits down: I dislike people, misanthropes, irony, and ellipses … and lists too.
In Notes from a Public Typewrite Michael and designer Oliver Uberti have combined their favorite notes with essays and photos to create an ode to community and the written word that will surprise, delight, and inspire.
Michael Gustafson is the co-owner of Literati Bookstore, an independent bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and Literati Bookstore co-owner, Hilary.
Oliver Uberti is an award-winning graphic designer and was Senior Design Editor at National Geographic before turning to books. He is the co-author and designer of two books published by Penguin in the UK, London: The Information Capital (2014) and Where the Animals Go (2016). He lives in Los Angeles.
This year’s Story Slam is quickly approaching! Using this year’s theme, “In search of a home: Home and belonging,” we are now accepting written submissions of prose, poetry, narratives, personal essays and more (900 words or less) for our Story Slam to be held March 30 at 7 p.m. in the newsroom at 420 Maynard.
A panel of judges will select a winner to receive a prize!
Guests and participants can enjoy food during the event, and all are welcome to attend!
Submit online to tinyurl.com/TMDstoryslam. You will be notified if your piece is selected to present! There may also be time for an open mic portion of the evening.
Neutral Zone literary arts director and award-winning local slam poet Molly Raynor discusses writing poetry from initial idea through final revisions. For adult and teen (grade 6 & up) fiction and nonfiction writers. Also, local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal host an open house for writers to connect with one another and/or work on their projects at 7 p.m. on Apr 16.
7-8:45 p.m., AADL Westgate. Free. 327-8301.
Literati is pleased to welcome author Leah Stewart who will be sharing her latest novel What You Don’t Know About Charlie Outlaw. Leah will be joined by fellow author Eileen Pollack for a discussion after the reading.
About What You Don’t Know About Charlie Outlaw:
After a series of missteps in the face of his newfound fame, actor Charlie Outlaw flees to a remote island in search of anonymity and a chance to reevaluate his recent breakup with his girlfriend, actress Josie Lamar. But soon after his arrival on the peaceful island, his solitary hike into the jungle takes him into danger he never anticipated.
As Charlie struggles with gaining fame, Josie struggles with its loss. The star of a cult TV show in her early twenties, Josie has spent the twenty years since searching for a role to equal that one, and feeling less and less like her character, the heroic Bronwyn Kyle. As she gets ready for a reunion of the cast at a huge fan convention, she thinks all she needs to do is find a part and replace Charlie. But she can’t forget him, and to get him back she’ll need to be a hero in real life.
Leah Stewart is the critically acclaimed author of The New Neighbor, The History of Us, Husband and Wife, The Myth of You and Me, and Body of a Girl. She received her BA from Vanderbilt University, and her MFA from the University of Michigan. The recipient of a Sachs Fund prize and an NEA Literature Fellowship, she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati and lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two children.
Eileen Pollack is the award-winning author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction, including Breaking and Entering (Four Way Books 2012) and In The Mouth (Four Way Books 2008). She lives in Manhattan and Ann Arbor and teaches on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program in creative writing at the University of Michigan.
Apr. 3 & 17. Open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. Apr. themes: “Awards” (Apr. 3) & “Mail” (Apr. 17). The 3-person judging teams 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 p.m.), Greyline, 100 N. Ashley. $8. 764-5118.
In celebration of National Poetry Month and student poets at U-M, an informal, open-mic reading featuring U-M undergraduate students reading their original poetry. All undergraduates invited to read their original poetry. Arrive and leave as necessary. Sign up at event or pre-register (encouraged). Details/preregistration: Laura Kasischke, laurakk@umich.edu. All welcome to attend and listen. Refreshments will be served.
National Poetry Month each April is the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K-12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, bloggers, and, of course, poets marking poetry’s important place in our culture and our lives.
Literati is pleased to welcome author Michael Ferro who will be reading and discussing his debut novel, Title 13.
About Title 13:
A timely investigation into the heart of a despotic government, TITLE 13 is a darkly comic cautionary tale of mental illness and unconventional love. The novel deftly blends satirical comedy aimed at the hot-button issues of modern society with the gut-wrenching reality of an intensely personal descent into addiction.
Young Heald Brown might be responsible for the loss of highly classified TITLE 13 government documents–and may have hopelessly lost himself as well. Since leaving his home in Detroit for Chicago during the recession, Heald teeters anxiously between despondency and bombastic sarcasm, striving to understand a country gone mad while clinging to his quixotic roots.
Trying to deny the frightening course of his alcoholism, Heald struggles with his mounting paranoia, and his relationships with concerned family and his dying grandmother while juggling a budding office romance at the US government’s Chicago Regional Census Center.
Michael A. Ferro‘s debut novel, TITLE 13, was published by Harvard Square Editions in February 2018. He has received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train for their New Writers Award, won the Jim Cash Creative Writing Award for Fiction, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Michael’s writing has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Crack the Spine, Entropy, Amsterdam Quarterly, Yale University’s Perch Journal, Duende, The Nottingham Review, Splitsider, Potluck Magazine, and elsewhere. Born and bred in Detroit, Michael has lived, worked, and written throughout the Midwest; he currently resides in rural Ann Arbor, Michigan
Literati is thrilled to partner with the Neutral Zone to celebrate the book release of Ann Arbor Youth Poet Laureate Zaphra Stupple! Zaphra will be reading from their debut collection There Will Still Be The Body.
Zaphra Stupple is a poet and multimedia artist living in Michigan. They are the 2017 Ann Arbor youth poet laureate and the 2017 Ann Arbor poetry slam champion. They were a feature in the Neutral Zone’s annual poetry show, Poetry Night In Ann Arbor, and are one third of the accompanying book, Joy, Despite. Their work has been published in The Offing, HEArt Journal, |tap| magazine, and Vinyl, among others. Find them at toothcage.wordpress.com.
