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.

Writers know that sometimes, no matter what your intentions are when you sit down to work, the process may lead you in another direction completely.

Breeda Kelly Miller, who will appear at Ann Arbor’s Schuler Books on January 30, had planned to tell her Irish immigrant mother’s story, Mrs. Kelly’s Journey Home, in book form first, then perhaps adapt it into a play.

“I started writing, and the play just started taking over,” Miller said. “I thought, ‘What? Fine. I’ll just write the play first. There are no rules. I’ll just break this rule that doesn’t exist.’”

The result was a one-woman play starring Miller that premiered in Ann Arbor in October 2021 and has since played on stages around Michigan, as well as locales nationwide and in Ireland.

The play aired on Detroit PBS this past December, significantly expanding Miller’s audience, but also pressing her to strike while the iron was hot and get the book done.

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:

If you're an Ann Arbor District Library cardholder, you receive a weekly email newsletter listing news, upcoming events, and a slew of recommendations from the catalog. Those recs are also available at aadl.org/reviews, and we're always happy to make suggestions for books, audiobooks, streamable content in the catalog, DVDs, board games, tools, etc. if you visit us at the branches.

But our 2024 Staff Picks allow the AADL crew to go beyond the library catalog—and the calendar year.

We don't limit our year in review to things that came out in 2024 or that can be checked out from AADL; the staff comments on whatever favorite media and events they experienced this year, no matter when or where they originated. Maybe a favorite album of 2024 came out in 1973, or the best book someone read this year is so old that it's out of copyright. It's all good, and it all counts.

Here are the categories of AADL's 2024 Staff Picks:

➥ AADL 2024 Staff Picks: Homepage
➥ AADL 2024 Staff Picks: Screens
➥ AADL 2024 Staff Picks: Audio
➥ AADL 2024 Staff Picks: Pulp Life
 

AADL 2024 STAFF PICKS: WORDS
Books, audiobooks, graphic novels, comics, websites, and more:

Chien-an Yuan is an evangelist.

Not the type who's selling you hope in exchange for a monthly tithe but the kind who just wants you to believe—in art and its healing powers; in music and its succor; in poetry and life-giving energy.

The Ann Arbor musician-photographer-curator works not just in words but in deeds—and sometimes, the deeds are words, carefully arranged and expertly recited as is the case with The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry.

The project is a collaboration between Yuan's 1473 record label, Michigan poets, and Fifth Avenue Studios, the recordings division of the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL). 

Named after two high school teachers who inspired Yuan, The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry is a collection of recited poems, documented at Fifth Avenue Studios, with covers created by local artists for each chapter in the series. (Shannon Rae Daniels' watercolors will adorn the first 10 sessions.) All the recordings can be listened to and downloaded free of charge whether or not you have a library card.

The anthology's construction is ongoing—you can listen to Ann Arbor poets Kyunghee Kim and Zilka Joseph so far—but there's an official launch for the project on Monday, December 9, at 6 pm at AADL's Downtown location. Kim will be joined by upcoming Coolidge-Wagner writers Sherina Rodriguez Sharpe, Chace Morris, and Emily Nick Howard, along with Yuan introducing the poets and talking about the project. (Joseph will be at a future Coolidge-Wagner event.)

I sent Yuan some queries about The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry, and his answers were so passionate, revealing, and thorough that they stand alone without my framing questions.

Below is Yuan's testament to the power of art and a brief history of The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry: