Detroit - CAS Theme 2021-2022

In this stunning debut novel, Pushcart-nominated author Ibi Zoboi draws on her own experience as a young Haitian immigrant, infusing this lyrical exploration of America with magical realism and vodou culture. On the corner of American Street and Joy Road, Fabiola Toussaint thought she would finally find une belle vie--a good life. But after they leave Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Fabiola's mother is detained by U.S. immigration, leaving Fabiola to navigate her loud American cousins, Chantal, Donna, and Princess; the grittiness of Detroit's west side; a new school; and a surprising romance, all on her own. Just as she finds her footing in this strange new world, a dangerous proposition presents itself, and Fabiola soon realizes that freedom comes at a cost.

Loren D. Estleman's most popular characters, PI Amos Walker and hit man Peter Macklin, are together in one story for the first time inBlack and White Ball! Detroit hit man Peter Macklin forces private eye Amos Walker to furnish protection for Laurie, Macklin's estranged wife, while Macklin tracks down the party who has threatened to kill her. The man Walker's client suspects cannot be ignored; as his own grown son, Roger Macklin has inherited all the instincts, and acquired all the training, necessary to carry out his threat. Told partly by Walker in first-person and partly by Macklin in third,Black and White Ball places the detective squarely between two remorseless killers, with death waiting whether he succeeds or fails.

A unique perspective of the Motor City, this anthology combines stories told by both longtime residents and newcomers from activists to teachers to artists to students. While Detroit has always been rich in stories, too often those stories are told back to the city by outsiders looking in, believing they can explain Detroit back to itself.

The place: Detroit. The time: World War II. While most of the police department is fighting overseas, the four men of the Racket Squad struggle to keep a lid on a powderkeg stuffed with draft-dodging troublemakers, Black Market gangsters, enemy saboteurs, and a mixed bag of racial and ethnic groups working uneasily side by side in defense plants run by the automobile industry. With blackjacks, brass knuckles, tommy guns, and their bare fists, Lieutenant Max Zagreb, Sergeant Starvo Canal, and detectives McReary and Burke--known collectively as the "Four Horsemen"--battle their way through ten gritty stories in the hardest-boiled town during the twentieth century's hardest-boiled decade.

From crime stories in the classic hard-boiled style to the vividly experimental, from the determination of those risking everything to the desperation of those with nothing left to lose,Detroit Noir delivers unforgettable tales that capture the city's dark vitality. Includes stories by: Joyce Carol Oates, Loren D. Estleman, Craig Holden, P.J. Parrish, Desiree Cooper, Nisi Shawl, M.L. Liebler, Craig Bernier, Joe Boland, Megan Abbott, Dorene O'Brien, Lolita Hernandez, Peter Markus, Roger K. Johnson, Michael Zadoorian, and E.J. Olsen.

Set in 1954, this compelling historical novel tells the story of a young girl's struggles and triumphs in the aftermath of World War II. The war is over, but the threat of communism and the Cold War loom over the United States. In Detroit, Michigan, twelve-year-old Marjorie Campbell struggles with the ups and downs of family life, dealing with her veteran father's unpredictable outbursts, keeping her mother's stash of banned library books a secret, and getting along with her new older "brother," the teenager her family took in after his veteran father's death.

Detriot was a tough town in a tough time. Southern whites and blacks working side by side, rationing, the black-market, the Mafia, a new kind of jazz for seething summer nights; it was a powder keg. Through this troubled world cuts a killer, savaging ordinary people, the elderly and the defenseless. Lieutenant Zagreb's job is to keep the city from exploding, then to catch a mad killer. And finally, he must save his own soul. He cannot succeed at all three.

A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides - the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl. In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real.

A novel about second chances from a writer of "stirring, poignant, and profound" work (Wally Lamb). Twenty-five years after his high school graduation, David Halpert returns to a place that most people flee. But David is making his own escape--from his divorce and the death of his son. In Detroit, David learns about the double shooting of his high school girlfriend Natalie and her black half-brother, Dirk. As David becomes involved with Natalie's sister, he will discover that both he and his hometown have reasons to hope. As compelling an urban portrait as The Wire and a touching love story, Say Nice Things About Detroit takes place in a racially polarized, economically collapsing city that doesn't seem like a place for rebirth. But as David tries to make sense of the mystery behind Natalie's death and puts back the pieces of his own life, he is forced to answer a simple question: if you want to go home again, what do you do if home is Detroit?

Esperanza Cintrón's Shades: Detroit Love Stories is a short story collection that is distinctly Detroit. By touching on a number of romantic and sexual encounters that span the historical and temporal spaces of the city, each of these interconnected stories examines the obstacles an individual faces and the choices he or she makes in order to cope and, hopefully, survive in the changing urban landscape.

Thunder Citypresents Detroit in the process of becoming the Motor City. Harlan Crownover, scion of a great family of carriage makers, battles with his father to invest in a company run by Henry Ford, who has failed twice before in the automobile business. Desperate for funds, Harlan turns to Big . Jim Dolan, the Midwest's most powerful political boss, and Sal Borneo, a visionary mafioso struggling to bring the commerce of vice into the new century. Allies at first, they soon will be mortal enemies. At the crisis, only Edith Hampton Crownover, Harlan's troubled, aristocratic mother, will be in a position to shift the balance of power.

In 1963, the African American poet Dudley Randall (1914-2000) wrote "The Ballad of Birmingham" in response to the bombing of a church in Alabama that killed four young black girls, and "Dressed All in Pink," about the assassination of President Kennedy. When both were set to music by folk singer Jerry Moore in 1965, Randall published them as broadsides. Thus was born the Broadside Press, whose popular chapbooks opened the canon of American literature to the works of African American writers. Dudley Randall, one of the great success stories of American small-press history, was also poet laureate of Detroit, a civil-rights activist, and a force in the Black Arts Movement.

A frighteningly prescient novel of today's America--one man's story of a racially charged real estate experiment in Detroit, Michigan. Greg Marnier, Marny to his friends, leaves a job he doesn't much like and moves to Detroit, Michigan in 2009, where an old friend has a big idea about real estate and the revitalization of a once great American city. Once there, he gets involved in a fist-fight between two of his friends, a racially charged trial, an act of vigilante justice, a love affair with a local high school teacher, and a game of three-on-three basketball with the President--not to mention the money-soaked real estate project itself, cut out of 600 acres of emaciated Detroit. Marny's billionaire buddy from Yale, Robert James, calls his project "the Groupon model for gentrification," others call it "New Jamestown," and Marny calls it home-- until Robert James asks him to leave. This is the story of what went wrong.