Press enter after choosing selection

Ages 18+.

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

More Than an Audiobook

by Lucy S

Narrated by George Saunders, Nick Offerman, David Sedaris and various others
7 Hours and 30 Minutes

Lincoln in the Bardo might well be on your hold list already. George Saunders’, first novel has received much publicity and praise, rightly so. But have you considered listening to the audio version? Even if you aren’t normally drawn to books on CD, this one is more theatrical production than novel. Read by a cast of some 166 people, many famous voices among them, George Saunders’ story brings to mind Our Town, A Christmas Carol, and As I Lay Dying. The cast does a stellar job in delivering a beautifully read, moving, intelligent, and highly entertaining performance.

Two main plot lines run through Lincoln in the Bardo. Both are suffused with sadness, though there is much humor in the narrations of certain characters from beyond the grave. Many of the voices in this book are residents of The Oak Hill Cemetery, where President Lincoln has interred his son, Willie. They reside in a kind of limbo, “the bardo,” with unfinished business on earth, unaware that they are dead. The chapters alternate between the “action” in the bardo, and the story of the what is happening on the night of Willie Lincoln’s death, as told by Hans Vollman (Nick Offerman), Roger Bevins III (David Sedaris), and the Reverend Everly Thomas (George Saunders). Interspersed with their escapades are chapters focused on the raw grief of a father and his newly departed son. This most poignant story of a man struggling to say goodbye, and his son’s difficulty in letting go of the earth, is particularly moving. Listeners get an inside point of view from Abraham Lincoln himself, burdened with his country’s present agony as well as his own personal bereavement, as "narrated by hans vollman in the body of a. lincoln...
“He is just one.
And the weight of it is about to kill me.
Have exported this grief. Some three thousand times. So far. To date. A mountain. Of boys. Someone’s boys. Must keep on with it. May not have the heart for it. One thing to pull the lever when blind to the result. But here lies one dear example of what I accomplish by the orders I …
What to do. Call a halt? Toss down the loss-hole those three thousand? Sue for peace? Become great course-reversing fool, king of indecision, laughing-stock for ages, waffling hick, slim Mr. Turnabout?
...What am I doing.
What am I doing here.
Lord, what is this? All of this walking about, trying, smiling, bowing, joking? This sitting-down-at-table, pressing-of-shirts, tying-of-ties, shining-of-shoes, planning-of-trips, singing-of-songs-in-the-bath?
When he is to be left out here?
Is a person to nod, dance, reason, walk, discuss?
As before?...
Was he dear or not?
Then let me be happy no more."

There are stand-out performances by many, most notably, David Sedaris, Nick Offerman, Julianne Moore as Jane Ellis, Kirby Heyborne as Willie Lincoln, Bill Hader as Eddie Baron and Megan Mullally as Betsy Baron
See more at: Penguin Random House Audio.

After two full run throughs, I had to return Lincoln in the Bardo for the next listener’s wonderment, but I miss the voices of Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins III, the Reverend Thomas Everly, and 163 others.

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Anything is Possible

by mansii

Returning to the heartbeat of the small town Midwest after a detour to New York City life, Elizabeth Strout revisits the characters of her successful narrative My Name is Lucy Barton in her emotionally barring new work: Anything is Possible. Through a network of short stories that hold their own yet weave into one another, this work explores how single moments hold lasting sway over our futures. An "invisible" school janitor's faith in a small girl propels her forward as a successful writer--now his good faith in people is being tested. When a child is shocked with the image of her mother's affair, it opens lifelong caverns of insecurity; now she has the opportunity to see past her pain in being a catalyst for good in the life of a new generation. Those who felt a kinship with Lucy Barton will find their understanding of this character enlarged and will feel the significance of each person that passes through the life of another, no matter how brief the stay. What do we run away from, and how do we arrange our escape? How often are we torn apart by the two-edged sword of love and hate, and yet how often do we hold the keys to small miracles in our own two hands? This long established, Pulitzer winning author richly explores what it is to be a soul in a world of souls.

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Dig if you will the picture : funk, sex, God and genius in the music of Prince

by potterbee

Today marks one year since the passing of Prince., a beloved artist for many. Recently released is a biography of his life, work, and the artistry of Prince, entitled, Dig if you will the picture : funk, sex, God and genius in the music of Prince.

Ben Greenman (New York Times bestselling author, contributing writer to the New Yorker) presents a unique and kaleidoscopic look into the life, legacy, and electricity of the pop legend Prince and his wide ranging impact on our culture. Uniting a diverse audience while remaining singularly himself, Prince was a tireless artist, a musical virtuoso and chameleon, and a pop-culture prophet who shattered traditional ideas of race and gender, rewrote the rules of identity, and redefined the role of sex in pop music.

Greenman has been listening to and writing about Prince since the mid-eighties. Here, with the passion of an obsessive fan and the skills of a critic, journalist, and novelist, he mines his encyclopedic knowledge of Prince's music to present a biography and the story of the paradigm-shifting ideas that he communicated to his millions of fans around the world.

Greenman's other published work includes collaborations with George Clinton and Questlove on their celebrated memoirs.

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

New title from author Fredrik Backman

by potterbee

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman has remained a popular title in the Hot Books collection over many months. His newest title, Beartown is due for release in just a few more days!

People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

New thriller from the author of The Girl on the Train: Into the Water

by eapearce

British author Paula Hawkins, who wrote the 2015 mega-bestseller The Girl on the Train, has penned another psychological thriller sure to delight readers. Into the Water will hit the shelves on May 2. In the novel, a single mother is found dead at the bottom of a river that runs through an English town. Earlier in the same summer, the body of a young teenage girl was also found at the bottom of the same river. And these are not the only women who have met their fate in this way. The most recent deaths dredge up secrets long kept underwater.

A young girl, whose mother was found dead in the river, is left alone, friendless and in the care of her mysterious aunt in the wake of the summer tragedy. As she and her aunt navigate their own demons, Hawkins unspools a gripping story of how the past can insert itself into the present, and of how deceptive memories can be. We know from The Girl on the Train that Hawkins is a master of demonstrating how slippery the truth is, and fans will certainly not be disappointed to see her do it again in Into the Water.

Best of all, Paula Hawkins will be visiting Ann Arbor on May 17, courtesy of Nicola’s Books! Attend a book discussion of The Girl on the Train prior to her visit at AADL on May 8.

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Brilliant poetry by a Detroit writer / publisher / rock star

by JonesM

Sunlight Through Bullet Holes: POEMS (that will live) contains seven of Jessica Care Moore’s short collections. She is the youngest living Apollo Legend, first coming to national attention by winning the “It’s Showtime at the Apollo” competition a record-setting five times in a row. She has performed on Broadway, at Carnegie Hall, and at Lincoln Center, and she received the 2013 Alain Locke Award. She is CEO of Moore Black Press and Executive Producer of the outstanding Black WOMEN Rock! festival, and she lives and performs here in southeast Michigan.

Her poetry, much of it, cadences as if it were meant to be spoken aloud. Personal and political history, messages of love for children, self, and friends, tributes to musicians and poets, celebrations of Detroit culture and Blackness, and laments of loss and violence develop through breathtaking metaphors and surreal imagery. This is a beautiful, complex collection that's also enjoyable to read.

“I was born with stardust poems
& magic bones walking
inside stories of the children
of Bahia while drinking tears
I’ve swallowed whole in a torrential
Apartheid rain in the heart of Soweto.

I am fearless in this skin.”

Also by jessica Care moore
God Is Not An American: Poetry, Politics, & Love

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Fabulous Fiction Firsts #634

by muffy

In Marlena * *, Julie Buntin's "(s)ensitive and smart and arrestingly beautiful debut" (Kirkus Reviews), 15 year-old Cathy (now calling herself Cat), arrived at Silver Lake, a small rural community in Northern Michigan with her newly divorced mother and older brother, determined to shed her good-girl image and reinvent herself, and was immediately drawn to the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena, her next door neighbor.

Over the course of the coming weeks, the girls turned the untamed landscape of their desolate small town into a kind of playground - skipping school, running feral as Marlena introduced Cat to a new world of drinking and pills and sex and also friendship, the depth of which neither girl has experienced before. Within the year, Marlena was dead, drowned in six inches of icy water in the woods nearby.

Decades later, Cat is married, and a New York City public librarian. She seemingly had move on, now enjoying a close relationship with her mother, until a ghost from that pivotal year surfaces unexpectedly, forcing Cat to examine her role and "the pain at the utter core of me” in losing Marlena.

"The novel is poignant and unforgettable, a sustained eulogy for Marlena’s “glow... that lives in lost things, that sets apart the gone forever.” (Publishers Weekly)

"In this, Marlena joins a glut of recent novels that pair a retrospective female narrator with an extravagantly charismatic but troubled friend. Emma Cline’s novel The Girls loosely reimagines the Manson family murders from the perspective of a 14-year-old named Evie in 1969, who becomes besotted with an older teenager named Suzanne. Emily Bitto’s The Strays is recounted by Lily, a young Australian girl drawn into the 1930s bohemian family of her classmate, Eva. Like Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, these novels consider the fierce complexity of female friendship, and the particular agony of innocence that yearns to be shed. They examine the allure of danger from a space of safety: It’s inevitable which girl will careen toward catastrophe, and which girl will watch, wistfully, from the sidelines.” Read the full review in The Atlantic.

* * = 2 starred reviews

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

War in America

by Lucy S

Imagine that entire portions of this country have disappeared under water and that the use of fossil fuels has been outlawed in many states. And then imagine that these events have sparked a second civil war in the United States and that this war sets off a disastrous plague. This is the scenario created by Omar El Akkad in his debut novel, American War. El Akkad comes to fiction writing after many years as a journalist covering stories on the war in Afghanistan, military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the effects of climate change along the southern coast of the US. His deep understanding of these real world conflicts seems to greatly inform and sustain American War. El Akkad brings us to the 2070s when the United States is embroiled in another civil war, brought about less by political differences or racial divides, than by climate and science, creating a refugee situation and a need to fight over remaining land. Fossil fuels are the biggest divider as the North no longer uses or allows them and the South won’t let them go. El Akkad’s plot seems entirely plausible given our present-day events. So much of what is in American War, biological warfare, drones, suicide bombs, torture, refugee camps, can be found in any source of news today.

While his book makes a strong commentary on current political, ecological, and social situations, at it’s heart the story really belongs to El Akkad’s main character, Sarat. We meet Sarat Chestnut as a 6 year old living in Louisiana and follow her through refugee camps, imprisonment and a life after the war set on revenge. In an interview in Bookpage, El Akkad said, “I never intended to write a book about America or war; I intended to write a book about the universality of revenge. I wanted to explore the idea that when people are broken by war, broken by injustice, broken by mistreatment, they become broken in the same way.”

The tragic events in Sarat's family life and the horrors of war that surround her entire existence leave her so thoroughly broken that she has no choice but to seek revenge. The question this powerful novel then asks is, how much revenge will be enough?

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Dawn Farm's Education Series Continues...

by Beth Manuel

The public is invited to Dawn Farm’s free Educational Series. All programs are presented in the St. Joseph Mercy Hospital Education Center auditorium, at 5305 Elliott Drive in Ypsilanti. You can also contact Dawn Farm at 734-485-8725 or info@dawnfarm.org. All are welcome to attend! Registration is not required.

Grief and Loss in Addiction and Recovery will be presented on Tuesday April 18, 2017, from 7:30 pm to 9:00 pm, by Jerry Fouchey, BS, MA, SpA, CADC; Dawn Farm Outpatient and Personal Medicine therapist; and Barb Smith, author of “Brent’s World.” Unresolved grief and loss frequently accompany people throughout the process of moving from the culture of addiction to the culture of recovery. Families of people with addiction experience grief and loss as well. The epidemic of opioid-related overdose deaths has left bereaved families across our country and our community. This program will explain theories of grief and grief recovery related to losses that people with addiction and their families experience throughout the addiction and recovery processes, and will include a personal story of grief, loss and recovery.

On Friday, April 21st, 2017 from 12:30-2:30 PM pm Dr. Kevin T. McCauley, MD; co-founder of the Institute on Addiction Study; writer of the award-winning DVD Pleasure Unwoven will present a free program on the seeming end of the drug war & rise of recovery.The last twenty years produced an explosion of understanding not only about addiction and brain research, but the most current neuroscientific research about addiction - research that explains how the brain constructs pleasurable experiences, what happens when this process goes wrong, and why this can have a dramatic impact in our ability to make proper choices. There will also be a free reception from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM.

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Celebrate National Poetry Month with Michigan Poets!

by potterbee

April is National Poetry Month! There is a wealth of poetry written by many authors from Michigan offered in AADL's catalog. Some items are available to download from the catalog to be enjoyed instantly! Trumbull Ave. by Michael Lauchlan and Weweni by Margaret Noodin are available to download and also in the traditional paper bound form.

Local book sellers Bookbound and Literati Bookstore have author events still to come this month with poets from Michigan.

On Thursday, April 20 at 7:00 pm award-winning Michigan poets Zilka Joseph and M.L. Liebler will be reading poems at Bookbound.

Ann Arbor author Zilka Joseph has an MFA in Poetry from University of Michigan, and she currently teaches workshops, works as a manuscript coach and editor, and mentors writers in the Ann Arbor community. She has written several books of poetry including her most recent, Sharp Blue Search of Flame

M.L. Liebler is an internationally-known Detroit poet, Wayne State University professor and literary arts activist who founded The National Writer's Voice Project in Detroit and the Springfed Arts: Metro Detroit Writers Literary Arts Organization. He has authored and edited numerous books including I Want to Be Once.

At Literati on April 21st, local poets Keith Taylor, Alison Swan, and Raymond McDaniel will be reading from their various collections, in addition to sharing some of their favorite poems, written by poets of the present and past. If the World Becomes So Bright by Keith Taylor is another instant pdf download available from the AADL catalog.

Search the catalog or the public lists to find more local poetry and enjoy a poem a day all month long!