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Bat Festival: Stellaluna author is coming!

by annevm

Mark your calendars for Sept. 27, when the 13th annual Great Lakes Bat Festival will happen 10 am - 5 pm at Washtenaw Community College. This festival is presented by the Organization for Bat Conservation and Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum. Among authors and speakers will be Janell Cannon, who wrote and illustrated the classic picture book Stellaluna. The festival offers families a chance to learn about the fascinating world of bats. Check it out!

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Ypsilanti Heritage Festival: "A solemn stately Camel walked majestically . . . "

by annevm

The Ypsilanti Heritage Festival is coming up Aug. 15-17 in Riverside Park. At AADL we have plenty of resources about this popular festival, including articles from Ypsilanti Gleanings, official publication of the Ypsilanti Historical Society. Here is an excerpt from a Review of the 1985 Heritage Parade: . . . "The parade was again excellent with many magnificent horses. The Franzen Circus brought their Elephant which seemed pleased with the crowd and two very young Elephants didn't seem to care for the human admirers. A solemn stately Camel walked majestically, indifferent to the crowd, followed by a Llama and a long cage of 12 or more Tigers in it. Then was a King of the Beasts, a lion, but we missed him. Many beautiful floats and stirring Marching Bands. We think Lincoln High School has the handsomest uniforms. The rain held over during the hour parade but at high noon it really poured. The noise of the rain in the tent of the Kiwanis Chicken Broil was so great it drowned out the many voices." This year's parade is 10:00 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 16. See you there!

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Blog Post

Literati Reading: Roxane Gay

by annevm

Author Roxane Gay will read from her essay collection Bad Feminist on Aug. 7 at 7 pm at Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor. Amazon named her book a Best Book of the Month, August 2014. From Amazon: "A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation . . ."

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Author Reading: Photographing the Giant Squid

by annevm

At Literati bookstore, 124 E. Washington St. in downtown Ann Arbor, they're preparing to host a reading by author Matthew Gavin Frank on Aug. 4 at 7 pm. Frank will read from his book Preparing the Ghost: An essay concerning the giant squid and its first photographer. The author teaches creative writing and lives in Marquette, Michigan.

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Blog Post

Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good

by annevm

Mark your calendars: Kathleen Flinn, author of Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good: Recipes of love, loss, and adventure from an American Midwest family, is scheduled to visit Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor on Aug. 20 at 7 pm. The book, according to a description in the AADL catalog, "...Presents a recipe-augmented family history that traces the origins of the author's love affair with food to her Midwestern youth and her parents' San Francisco pizza parlor . . ."

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Mystery Author Linwood Barclay Coming to Ann Arbor

by annevm

Popular writer Linwood Barclay, whose latest book at AADL is No Safe House, will appear at Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor on Aug. 4, starting at 7 pm. Here is a description of the book from our AADL catalog: "Seven years ago, Terry Archer and his family experienced a horrific ordeal that nearly cost them their lives. Today, the echoes of that fateful night are still audible. Terry's wife, Cynthia, is living separate from her husband and daughter after her own personal demons threatened to ruin her relationship with them permanently. Their daughter, Grace, is rebelling against her parents' seemingly needless overprotection. Terry is just trying to keep his family together. And the entire town is reeling from the senseless murder of two elderly locals. But when Grace foolishly follows her delinquent boyfriend into a strange house, the Archers must do more than stay together. They must stay alive. Because now they have all been unwillingly drawn into the shadowy depths of their seemingly idyllic hometown. For there, they will be reconnected with the man who saved their lives seven years ago, but who still remains a ruthless, unrepentant criminal. They will encounter killers for hire working all sides. And they will learn that there are some things people value much more than money, and will do anything to get it. Caught in a labyrinth between family loyalty and ultimate betrayal, Terry must find a way to extricate his family from a lethal situation he still doesn't fully comprehend. All he knows is that to live, he may have to do the unthinkable..."

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Ann Arbor Art Fairs: AADL has the Good Stuff

by annevm

As the Ann Arbor Art Fairs open today, you can learn a lot from AADL. Take a look at 50 Years of Originality: A History of the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair, a digital collection which includes over 100 images, plus audio recollections and videos. And if you’re interested in viewing past fair posters from our Art Print Collection, click here.

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Writing & Publishing

Nerd Nite Ann Arbor: August 21, presented by AADL at LIVE 102 S First St.

Thursday August 21, 2014: 7:00pm to 9:30pm
LIVE (102 S 1st Street)
Adults

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Public Event

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Blog Post

Fabulous Fiction Firsts #460

by muffy

Being released the latter part of June is Everything I Never Told You * *, the deeply-affecting debut novel by Celeste Ng, a UM grad (MFA, Helen Zell Writers' Program) and recipient of the Pushcart Prize and Hopwood Award. I expect a fair amount of buzz, not just locally. (Check out Vogue's Summer's Buzziest Beach Reads).

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet." - every parent's worst nightmare. All her family knows is that the 15 year-old is missing from her home. The local police treats it as a runaway while her mother refuses to accept anything other than stranger abduction of her middle and favorite child - a motivated and exceptional student, pretty, popular and well-behaved. The rest of the family is less certain and in turn, as they each reflects on the Lydia that they know and love (including Lydia herself), a fractured image emerges, casting shadows, laying bare secrets each is desperate to keep.

The narrative flashed back to 1957 in Cambridge when a premed Radcliffe freshman Marilyn Walker met James Lee, a first-generation Chinese-American who was her graduate teaching instructor. They married over her mother's objection, trading in her dreams of becoming a doctor for the anonymity of a faculty wife at a small college in nowhere Ohio where James was able to find a teaching position. Their background (his - immigrant laborers and scholarship student), (hers- single mother from the South), aspirations (his - to belong) (hers - to stand-out), and dashed dreams became means by which their children were defined and measured, but never truly understood.

"As the police try to decipher the mystery of Lydia's death, her family realize that they didn't know her at all. Lydia is remarkably imagined, her unhappy teenage life crafted without an ounce of cliché. Ng's prose is precise and sensitive, her characters richly drawn." Highly recommended as a YA crossover and book group choice.

* * = 2 starred reviews

Celeste Ng will be in Ann Arbor, July 18, 2014 @ Literati Bookstore, 124 E. Washington. Don't miss this chance to meet her. I am hoping she might touch on her take on ethnic fiction, and why she does not want to be the next Amy Tan.