The Henry Ford Centennial Library (16301 Michigan Ave, Dearborn, MI 48126) will host Michigan Notable Books authors Ghassan Zeineddine and Raymond (RS) Deeren for an in-person conversation on Wednesday, May 30 at 6:30 p.m. regarding their books Dearborn and Enough to Lose. Registration is required. Books will be available to purchase courtesy of Book Beat.
Each author’s book presents a vivid portrait of life in Michigan whether it’s in the city of Dearborn or a rural area such as the Upper Peninsula. Both Zeineddine and Deeren will share insights on their writing processes on their acclaimed books.
Michigan Notable Books is an annual program with roots stretching back to 1991. Every year, the Library of Michigan selects up to twenty of the most notable books, either written by a Michigan resident or about Michigan or the Great Lakes. The selected books are honored in the year after their publication or copyright date. Each selected title speaks to our state’s rich cultural, historical, and literary heritage and proves without a doubt that some of the greatest stories are found in the Great Lakes State.
The Michigan Notable Books program is sponsored in part by the Library of Michigan Foundation, Michigan Center for the Book and Michigan Humanities which is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanties.
Ghassan Zeineddine was born in Washington, DC, and raised in the Middle East. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College, author of Dearborn, and co-editor of the creative nonfiction anthology Hadha Baladuna: Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Ohio.
“Both witty and thoughtful, Zeineddine’s tragicomic stories about Arab American characters in Dearborn, Mich., explore themes of immigration, prejudice, sexuality, belonging and more.”—The Washington Post
“Funny and sincere. . . . connected by history, by ambition, by a myth of a nation that never manifests but is reborn again and again in the immigrant gaze.”—New York Times Book Review
RS Deeren is the author of Enough to Lose: Stories. He received his MFA from Columbia College Chicago and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. He was the 2016 Union League Club of Chicago Library’s Writer in Residence and a 2015 Luminarts Cultural Foundation Creative Writing Fellow. The title story to Enough to Lose has been anthologized in Tales of Two Americas edited by John Freeman. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry appears in The Great Lakes Review, Joyland, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. He is from rural Michigan, where he worked as a line cook, a substitute teacher, a landscaper, a banker, and a lumberjack. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee.
“A barn burner of love and longing, Enough to Lose delivers gut-punch stories over and over, each one studded with fierce insights about class and family and rural living and rendered in tender, electric prose.”—Karen Tucker, author of Bewilderness
“Enough to Lose is compulsively readable. Like Denis Johnson, Richard Russo, and Daniel Woodrell, Deeren’s stories reflect the often brutal reality of working-class, rural life, punctuated by moments of beauty and brilliance. Filled with nuance, Enough to Lose prompts readers to think about the humanity of those who might have experiences vastly different than their own.”—Donald Quist, author of For Other Ghosts and To Those Bounded