Stories in author and University of Michigan professor Greg Schutz’s new short story collection, Joyriders, demonstrate “how fragile things are.” The characters “share the terror and joy of having learned a life was a thing that could change.”

The short stories in Joyriders track characters who are coping with the course that their lives have taken. The stories take place in both the Midwest, including Wisconsin and Michigan, and rural Appalachia, including North Carolina. They also reveal how the natural world may be its own character in this collection.

For the characters, life sometimes moves very quickly. The story, “To Wound, to Tear, to Pull to Pieces,” brings a young woman who hears about her high school acquaintance’s affair from the distance of an observer. However, she has had her own liaison with an older man, and subsequent heartbreak. She reflects:

In truth, though, it’s not the initial meeting I typically find myself trying to remember as much as the moments that soon followed—sweeping apperceptions of opportunity and risk, and then choices made so suddenly and completely they seemed like they could never be unchosen.

Clarity on what happened requires retrospectively parsing out the events of one’s life.

Fagin the Thief comes with content warnings for all sorts of sinister actions: abuse, death, swearing, and crime, including property theft. Yet readers may find themselves on the side of Jacob Fagin, the thief and Jew at the center of the crime ring, in this take on Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.  

Author and U-M alum Allison Epstein, who lives in Chicago, will debut her third historical fiction novel at Literati Bookstore on Monday, March 3, at 6:30 pm. She returns to Literati after sharing her previous book, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, there as well.

The main character, Jacob Fagin, who prefers to go by his last name, takes to a life of crime like a fish to water and quickly learns the ropes. When he begins stealing, he is enamored with the opportunities that it provides:

Michigan has its unique qualities, and author John Counts infuses them into his short stories in Bear County, Michigan.

Counts takes a page from William Faulkner’s writing by centering each story within a fictional county. Set in northern Michigan, the characters hunt, work blue-collar jobs, get hooked on drugs, coexist with the wildlife, spend time on the water, and go to a nudist resort on the lake.

Counts, who is based in Whitmore Lake and a journalist and editor for MLive, will read from his new collection at Literati Bookstore on Friday, February 28, at 6:30 pm.

The short stories in Bear County, Michigan study how life deals the characters tough hands and how they react. In the story “The Hermit,” Karl loses the love of his life:

To whom or what do we owe ethical consideration? What circumstances call for morality?

University of Michigan professor Webb Keane argues that the answer to these questions is inextricably linked to our personal context in his new book, Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination.

People don’t live moral life in the abstract, they live it within specific circumstances and social relations, with certain capacities, constraints and long-term consequences. Put another way, you simply cannot live out the values of a Carmelite nun without a monastic system, or a Mongolian warrior without a calvary, and the respective social, economic and cultural systems that sustain them and acknowledge their worth.

We are who we are—and we make decisions—based on the situations in which we find ourselves, according to Keane.

Animals, Robots, Gods contains five chapters along with an introduction and coda. In the introduction, Keane starts by sharing that one of the premises of the book is the question, “What is a human being anyway?” and says that, “we will explore the range of ethical possibilities and challenges that take place at the edge of the human.” As he shows, the delineation is not always so clear.

At the end of Pinion, the poet confesses, “Last night, I let in all the birds.” Ann Arbor writer Monica Rico does just that in her new poetry collection, Pinion.

Poems in Pinion contemplate birds. Moreover, the people—a father, mother, grandmother, grandfather, uncle, sister, and husband—take on the qualities of the birds: owls, a cardinal, a robin, ravens, and more species. The poem “Five Things Borrowed” shares a memory that merges with geese and an owl:

Who killed Michael Porter in the pantry with a candlestick during the preview party for the annual house and garden tour?

This question sets the scene for the cozy mystery novel Murder at Twin Beeches by Ann Arbor author Maria Leonhauser. The book is the start of a series, and the intrigue builds, detail by meticulous detail, in short chapters with a brisk pace.

Twin Beeches is a family estate that briefly changed hands but went back to the same longstanding family when the short-term owner, who was known to throw parties, disappeared. Louise Jenkins, the current heir after five generations of men named Samuel, appreciates the history and setting:

Saba Keramati writes about the hopes, dreams, characteristics, and experiences that form the self but that also stir up more mysteries in her new poetry collection, Self-Mythology. 

Keramati, born in America, writes from the perspective of being an only child of political refugees, her Chinese mother and Iranian father. Her poems probe how holding many identities results in feeling not fully one of them. The first poem, “THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO SAY THIS,” conveys the pang of these distinctions: “I have to write this poem in English / I do not speak my mother’s language / I do not speak my father’s language / I am not grateful for this country.” These circumstances and the desire to claim an identity, while at the same time chafing against the divisions of self, set the foundation for the collection that asks, “Who am I being today? / … / You’ll always be wrong, and I’ll always be / here, chameleoning myself / with every shift of the light.” 

Self-Mythology is forthright about its focus on the poet, but the poems also look outward. A series of centos, poems with all their lines borrowed from others, are sprinkled throughout the book, and each is called “Cento for Loneliness & Writer’s Block & the Fear of Never Being Enough, Despite Being Surrounded by Asian American Poets.” The third such poem contains lines like “I hold things I cannot say in my mouth—” and “There is mythology planted in my mouth which is like sin. / I cannot help but know the words.” In addition to these recurring centos, poems also reflect on attempts to learn a language, miscarriage, what it is like to be in a relationship, fire season in California, social media, astrology, and 9/11. 

Moments of revelation emerge in Self-Mythology. In “Chimera,” the speaker listens to the radio and hears lyrics conveying a thought that had earlier seemed original to the poet: 

With the release of a new friends-to-lovers romance this month, Catch and Keep, Ann Arbor author Erin Hahn completes her spicy trilogy. The novels in this series are dual point-of-view and feature couples in the same friend group. Prior installments were Built to Last and Friends Don’t Fall in Love.

The main roles in Catch and Keep go to Josiah Cole, also known as Joe, and Maren Laughlin, whom Joe calls “Jig” for her penchant for fishing. Couples Shelby & Cam and Craig (Huck) & Lorelai from the previous books of the trilogy make cameos in this third novel.

Many years after knowing each other while growing up, Maren and Joe immediately take notice when they run into each other again. The location where they reconnect is the same place where they interacted in their youth: Cole’s Landing Resort, a lakeside getaway in Wisconsin. Joe’s parents own the resort, and Joe now works and raises his kids there.

Maren grew up going to the resort and vacationed and developed her excellent fishing skills on the lake. In a flashback to an earlier visit, Maren reflects that there is, “Just … something about this place. It makes me feel right. I’m more myself here than anywhere else in the entire world.” It takes a special place to have that effect. Maren and Joe’s shared appreciation for the location becomes part of their fast-growing spark.

Christopher Cosmos' ambitious second novel, Young Conquerors, is a fictional retelling of Alexander the Great’s life. The book follows the University of Michigan grad's 2020 debut, Once We Were Here. 

Young Conquerors begins with a departure. Hephaestion, the book’s narrator, is leaving his homeland just as he comes of age because his uncle will see him as a threat to the throne. When Hephaestion prepares to leave, he already recognizes, “If I’m going to grow, and if I’m going to find out all that I will know, and all that I can be, and the different type of strength I’ve been given, then I need to leave, and it can’t wait any longer.”

His subsequent journey from Salona in Illyria to Pella in Macedonia sets him on a new, irrevocable course, on which he will train as a soldier and conqueror, learn about politics, geography, and religion, and, perhaps most importantly, meet the love of his life. 

In Pella, Hephaestion describes how he meets Alexandros, son of the current basileus, Philippos. After Hephaestion wins the approval of Philippos, the two begin training together, along with Alexandros’ close companions. All these young men are around the age of 15, so this time together is formative and provides crucial preparation for their later endeavors. 

Alexandros and Hephaestion quickly become especially close, and Hephaestion ponders their future: 

This story originally ran on July 31, 2024.

Keith Taylor is launching two new books this year.

The University of Michigan lecturer emeritus and former bookseller offers 40 years of poetry in All the Time You Want: Selected Poems 1977-2017, which was published in January. Then he studies the natural and human world through his poetry collection What Can the Matter Be?, which debuts in August. 

Taylor will read from What Can the Matter Be? at Schuler Books in Ann Arbor on Saturday, August 10, at 3 pm.

Taylor will discuss What Can the Matter Be? with Monica Rico at Literati Bookstore on Wednesday, October 16, at 6:30 pm.

All the Time You Want begins with dancing and concludes with painting. A note to the reader informs us that the poems appear “in roughly chronological order.” These poems map the formative places in Taylor’s life by traveling through Canada and to Ireland, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Isle Royale, Paris, Big Sur, South Bend, North Fishtail Bay, and other places.

Another throughline of the poems is the birds—the crested shelduck, snowy egret, pigeon, cerulean warbler, great horned owl, and ancient murrelet. Or you can follow the art and see “the gaze out past the painting / to all the other stories / no one else could ever understand.” 

These selected poems encounter the ups and downs of the poet’s life and experiences. One day there is “a momentary sense / of the utter loveliness of things” and another day brings “nothing but the clear, sour odor of skunk.”