Books

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli What to Read? Summer’s Best Beach Books
By Elizabeth Buzzelli
Yes, another list of books to read while on vacation, sitting on a
quiet beach, in a summer house, in a garden—any place you dream of
being and don’t often get to.

Books Glen D. Young An Ernest Endeavor: Picturing Young Hemingway in Northern Michigan
Picturing Hemingway’s Michigan
Wayne State University Press
216 pages, 269 illustrations
$39.95
By Glen Young
It would be easy to believe that there’s nothing new to say about
Ernest Hemingway. Writers as well as relatives have detailed the
history of Michigan’s most iconic writer in every manner of
publication.

Books Glen D. Young An Ernest Endeavor: Picturing Young Hemingway in Northern Michigan
Picturing Hemingway’s Michigan
Wayne State University Press
216 pages, 269 illustrations
$39.95
By Glen Young
It would be easy to believe that there’s nothing new to say about
Ernest Hemingway. Writers as well as relatives have detailed the
history of Michigan’s most iconic writer in every manner of
publication.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Soul Searching: Three take top prize in Michigan Writers Chapbook Contest
By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
As all writers eventually discover, writing is a lonely business. Not just the hours spent at a computer, but the aftermath — trying to sell the work that has kept the writer busy for months, or even years. As local writer John Mauk notes: “Authors can’t write and then fall into a hole… Authors have to carry their work into the world — even when it’s heavy.”

Books Erin Crowell Strange Days: A Dead Sleeping Shaman meets her own end of the world
“Dead Sleeping Shaman”
By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
Midnight Ink $14.95
By Erin Crowell
There’s something eerie going on in Northern Michigan, people are coming up dead and they’re doing it in strange places – at least is the case in the Emily Kincaid murder/mystery book series.
In “Dead Sleeping Shaman”—the follow-up to “Dead Dancing Women” and “Dead Floating Lovers”—local author (and Northern Express book reviewer) Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli returns readers to the world of writer Emily Kincaid, who is busy working on a Northern Michigan ghost town story when she happens to stumble across an old woman lying motionless against a tree near a remote walking trail.

Books Erin Crowell The Books for Walls Project
By Erin Crowell
This story is about fathers and daughters, mothers and husbands. It’s about the sharing of ideas – a story about stories, inspired by a poem.
The Books for Walls Project is a virtual dinner table, surrounded by conversation. The topic is primordial, the medium – modern.
Enter www.BooksForWallsProject.org and discuss your favorite book, your newest book and books you have yet to read. Listen. Others are reading too.
Books for Walls was a family project, set in motion by a mother who wanted to share her family’s conversation about books, hoping to inspire others to join in the discussion – an open seat, if you will, around the dinner table.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli A traveler finds meaning in unexpected places: An American Map:
Essays by Anne-Marie Oomen
Wayne State University Press, $18.95
Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
“Why do you think we have so many good writers here in the North?” a doctor recently asked me.
Maybe he didn’t add the ‘good.’ That might be my own addition because that’s how I feel, and that’s what makes me proud of where I live: these good writers who circle us with golden words and take our lives deeper, make them brighter.
“An American Map: Essays by Anne-Marie Oomen,” is a fine book by a northern writer cutting a sometimes microscopic and sometimes a deep and wide swath into our hearts and minds.
Oomen, a writing instructor at Interlochen Arts Academy, uses moments from her life to facet experience, finding small and large truths in unusual places. Moving from Empire, Michigan, across the United States, to Puerto Rico, and back to the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Oomen unrolls a different kind of landscape, a deeper travelogue, pulling unexpected meaning from unexpected places.
“Stone Wounds” honors the sacred. In Mount Cardigan, New Hampshire, Oomen is mountain climbing when she comes to rest against a slab of granite running with veins of quartz. “ …long lines crossing and crisscrossing this rock like a child’s script, teasing some words or a story just to the edge of recognition—a mystery, almost a meaning. I hear in the abrupt wind some question I do not understand. Then I remember,” she writes.

Books Elizabeth Buzzelli Northern Muse ; Petoskey’s literary scene
By Elizabeth Buzzelli
Ernest Hemingway came to Walloon Lake from Chicago and fell under the
spell of the North Country. He married his first wife, Hadley, in a
tiny northern church. His Nick Adams short stories became
classics—explorations of fishing and hunting and discovery in the
Upper Peninsula. Hemingway’s novella, “The Torrents of Spring” began
at the railroad station in Mancelona, his two men dead drunk and not
sure where they were. Except they were in Northern Michigan, which
seemed to be enough.

Books Elizabeth Buzzelli Essayist sets life’s questions to music
By Elizabeth Buzzelli
DRIVING WITH DVORAK:
Essays on Memory and Identity
By Fleda Brown
University of Nebraska Press
$24.94

If the unexamined life, as Socrates said, isn’t worth living, then Fleda Brown’s is truly a valuable life. Her new book: Driving with Dvorak: Essays on Memory and Identity, could have been a memoir, except that it isn’t—exactly.
What it is are snapshots -- or maybe better -- X-rays from an ordinary life: father, mother, two sisters, three husbands, children, a retarded brother who dies young, a decaying summer cottage on Michigan’s Central Lake, other American places: east, west, Midwest. Scenes from a woman’s life, a poet’s life, that dive beneath the surface to return with reasons, discoveries, new understanding, new pain, new acceptance -- all the bits of life that make us human beings.
First there is the father, a prominent person in the book and in Brown’s life. In the title essay, he is old, he is angry, and she goads him as she did as a teen. Her sin? She used too much dish soap while washing dishes. She is 44, a grown woman, and doesn’t think she has to tolerate his fits of anger, his penuriousness, his inability to act in his own best interest, and even his self-loathing. She talks back only to have him yell, “By God, I’ll hit you.” Maybe this is where the book begins, with a need to know this man, this husband, this father. Then maybe to learn something valuable about herself.
What she can share with her father is music. Therefore Dvorak, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky. Not in an intellectual joust but in the silent ways music connects person to person, down in what Brown calls an ‘’inarticulate core.”

Books Anne Stanton An Evening with Mary Karr? Author of The Liar’s Club talks about life,drinking, poetry, recovery and God
By Anne Stanton
I have a ritual when trying to find a book of cracking it open and
reading a random paragraph. If I find the writing amazing in at least
one of my openings, I check it out of the library. If the writing
soars on every random page, I buy it.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Michael Delp Seeks Answers Through Short Stories
By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
As If We Were Prey
By Michael Delp
Wayne State University Press
The magic thing about writers is that we get to watch the way they think. They leave a trail of pebbles behind them, a body of work that, with good writers, expands, then flattens into a wide vista of explored ideas.
Michael Delp, teacher of creative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy and writer of many books of poetry and fiction, including: Over the Graves of Horses, Under the Influence of Water and more, is one of these good writers. With, As if We Were Prey, his new book of Michigan-based short stories from Wayne State University Press, he takes old and new themes and drives them and us to new places.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Getting to Know Da U.P. :Odd facts abound in new Almanac
By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula Almanac
By Ron Jolly and Karl Bohnak
University of Michigan Press.
600 pages - $27.95

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is one of those empty places you go because you want to be alone. Or you want to hunt. Maybe you want to cross-country ski. There are lots of reasons to visit. For me it is waterfalls—making a list then finding every one of them. And it’s small lakes so blue-green and clear you think the lake must be shallow, but it isn’t. And it’s miles of Lake Superior shoreline, driving along and wondering about the gales of November and the men out on the freighters and if they are always watching the sky for storms. So many miles of forest and swamp with tiny villages and small towns, all far apart.

Books Erin Crowell A Mennonite Memoir
By Erin Crowell
On the heels of its first comedy festival, Northern Michigan will get
another dose of humor when the National Writers Series presents “An
Evening with Rhoda Janzen,” on March 5, at the City Opera House, in
downtown Traverse City.

Books Anne Stanton Meet Amy Alkon’s Better Half
By Anne Stanton
Thanks to Gregg Sutter, the Advice Goddess is coming to town on
February 11 to dish out her saucy advice on love at the City Opera
House, and to talk about her new book, I See Rude People.
Sutter is the researcher for Elmore Leonard, the reigning king of
crime writers.

Books Erin Cowell Mind Your Manners
The Advice Goddess rages at the rude
I See Rude People: One woman’s battle to beat some manners into impolite
society
By Amy Alkon
McGraw Hill, $16.95

By Erin Crowell

Amy Alkon, humorist and nationally syndicated columnist of “The Advice
Goddess,” has taken her bold opinions of society and had them print, set
and bound into her newest book, “I See Rude People: One woman’s battle to
beat some manners into impolite society.”