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.

U-M basketball fans will get to hear perspectives about the team’s past and its present at 6:30 pm Monday at Literati Bookstore, when sports writer Mike Rosenbaum will talk about his book University of Michigan Basketball, 1960-1989: From Cazzie Russell to the NCAA Title alongside past U-M players Tom Staton and Antoine Joubert, and current U-M basketball play-by-play radio personality Brian Boesch.

“I’m leading the event,” said Rosenbaum, who grew up in Oak Park, and graduated from U-M with a communications degree in 1980. “So I’ll probably go over a few stories that [Staton and Joubert] talked about for the book … and then we’ll probably have a discussion about this year’s team. Brian’s close to the team. He’s interviewed all the coaches, and he can give us some insight on what’s going on … and talk about what to expect with the new coach [Dusty May].”

Staton and Joubert are just two of the more than 40 people Rosenbaum interviewed for his book, which has been years in the making.

Whether it’s a picture book, a poetry collection, or a fantasy novel, Fifth Avenue Press is ready to share a compelling array of new releases from local authors.

The Ann Arbor District Library’s imprint is launching nine new publications across several genres during a November 3 book-release reception at the Downtown location.

As part of A2 Community Bookfest, the Fifth Avenue Press reception will include author readings and meet-and-greets along with opportunities to purchase books and get them signed by the authors.

Started in 2017, Fifth Avenue Press assists local authors with creating print-ready books at no cost and ensures they retain all of their rights.

As part of that partnership, the library distributes ebooks of the authors’ works to patrons without paying royalties. The authors also can sell their books in various formats and keep all of the proceeds.

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.”

It's tough being the new kid in school in eighth grade. But in Linus and Etta Could Use a Win, Linus' situation as new kid is made even more fraught thanks to an ill-advised crush, a new friendship that may not be what it seems, and complicated family dynamics in response to his identity as a transgender boy. What to do? Well, Linus dives into his new life in Ohio head first by running for student council.

We spoke with Ypsilanti author and educator Caroline Huntoon about Linus and Etta Could Use a Win, working heavy topics into light reading, and what's coming up next for the prolific writer. 

In U-M alum Perry Janes’ new poetry collection, Find Me When You’re Ready, the poems weigh desire by examining what you can express, what you hold back, and how you tell the story. These poems chase and dodge competing and sinister desires—and see what prevails. 

Janes, originally from Michigan, now lives in California. The poems in Find Me When You’re Ready involve both places, as the book’s description says, “Janes traces a sweeping journey from Detroit to Los Angeles.” 

Janes returns to Ann Arbor for an event at Literati Bookstore where he will be joined in conversation by Peter Ho Davies, with a reading by Tommye Blount, on Friday, October 4, 2024, at 6:30 p.m.

On the topic of relocating from Detroit to the West Coast, Janes writes in the poem, “Ode to Xeriscaping; or, Regarding Austerity, I Find Devotion":

It seems a too-painful irony that U-M art professor Rebekah Modrak while working on the new book Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right’s Assault on Public Education and the Teachers Who Are Fighting Back had to work around censorship laws.

Modrak’s co-editor, Nadine M. Kalin, is on faculty at the University of North Texas, “and in the middle of working on the project, Texas created a new law saying that you can’t essentially do work around diversity,” Modrak explained. “So we, at the University of Michigan, had to create an email address for [Kalin] and sponsor her as an academic so she could use our email address as she worked on the project, to create some distance for herself and some protections. And I thought, wow, maybe this is the future of the country, where we have blue states, where work like this is being done, and we protect academic refugees from red states who are being censored.”

Even with this awkward workaround in place, the pair managed to gather oral histories from 14 public school educators who’d been harassed (or outright dismissed) in recent years because of, among other reasons, their gender presentation, or the topics they taught in class, or the books they offered on their shelves.

“The impetus for the book was that they wanted to be able to tell their own story because their stories were so—the way it was being told by parents or outsiders in the community, or by the administration, was such a distortion from the truth as they understood it,” said Modrak. “So they wanted to be able to tell that. A few of the teachers did go to the media in order to try to get that story out and were punished further for it.”

Ayokunle Falomo’s new poetry collection, Autobiomythography of, examines the concepts of decolonization, identity, and truth while also studying the poet’s relationship to self, family, writing, and growth.

Several poems in Autobiomythography of bear the title “Lugard & I” followed by a parenthetical, such as “Lugard & I (Meditation).” In the notes section, Falomo, a University of Michigan alum, describes that these poems “take/borrow/steal/repurpose words, phrases, sentences, images, ideas, etc. from The Diaries of Lord Lugard, Volume 4 as well as the personal journal I kept in 2018, during my residency at MacDowell.” Falomo, who is Nigerian and American, also notes that Frederick Lugard participated in Britain’s colonization of African countries, including Nigeria. These poems, related by title, “are poems through, by which I mean because of, or more accurately, by way of, Lugard.” The first one in the book, “Lugard & I (Ars Poetica),” offers a series of commands and command-like questions:

Count the cost. Ask questions. Are they loud,
the nouns. Do they speak back.
Consider each word as a rider must his horse.
How fit. How strong. Your adjectives,
how trustworthy are they. How much
does each word weigh. Can you account for every one
of them, for every single thing. Consider scale.

The characters in ’Pemi Aguda’s new collection of short stories, Ghostroots, set out to protect what they have or find what they want—sometimes at a major cost and often via circumstances beyond the ordinary. 

Aguda, who earned her MFA at the University of Michigan and now lives in Philadelphia, will be in conversation about her new book with author and U-M professor Peter Ho Davies on Friday, September 20, at 6:30 pm at Literati Bookstore.

All of the stories in Ghostroots, which is longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction, are set in Lagos, Nigeria. One story, “The Dusk Market,” covers a woman’s interactions with an evening fair, where “When the sun slinks away, when the light of the day things out—oranges replaced by dark grays and purples, the women come out of nowhere.” Yet, “You don’t see the dusk market if you are not invited to the dusk market, but there are slippery moments, slits, frissons.” This unreliability, this capriciousness, catches the attention of this woman, Salewa, whose “eyes are willing to see more than is otherwise available to her.” 

Salewa catches on to the dusk market, but it seems to elude her attempts to go there. The market becomes her main goal because “forget these men, their syrupy tongues, their slimy hands that can break a heart, a body. It is the market that Salewa wants, the soft light, the pleasant hum of commerce, that warmth of camaraderie she had stumbled unto, into, for a short moment or two.” This market becomes a place to feel at home. 

As Salewa searches, she struggles to locate this event and to be recognized as a human. While continuing her quest, Salewa tries to speak to a person whom she recognizes, but the individual responds: