Bookfest | Fifth Avenue Press Book Release Reception

When

Sunday November 9, 2025: 1:00pm to 2:00pm  Add to Calendar /   Add to Google Calendar

Where

Downtown Library: Lower Level Program Room

Description

The Ann Arbor District Library is pleased to announce the release of five new literary works from our Fifth Avenue Press imprint! Our local authors have something to offer for a variety of readers. Listen to a brief reading from each title, meet the authors, buy their books, and get them signed!

These books will be on sale all all day at the Fifth Avenue Press table during A2 Community Bookfest.

Two picture books for children:

RUGGED RAX: The Little Satellite That Could by Suzanne Jacobs Lipshaw 

Imagine you are part of an engineering team tasked with designing and building a mini but mighty satellite—a CubeSat named RAX. Your CubeSat’s mission? Gather space weather data to help scientists prevent massive blackouts caused by solar storms. This team failed during its first attempt; will it succeed this time?RUGGED RAX is the true story of CubeSat RAX and is packed with a payload of space science and engineering for STEM enthusiasts.

The Story of the First Pawpsicle by Ariel Ojibway 

Did you ever wonder who made the first popsicles?

Or if your ancestors made snow cones with maple syrup?

Me too!

I guess we'll never know who made the first frozen treat because the evidence was eaten long ago, but it's always fun to imagine new stories...

Wabooz has a brand new idea for a delicious treat, but will everything turn out as he hoped? Travel with him through the lands where the pawpaws grow in search of the perfect fruit!

Two memoirs for adults:

Running Around Town by Stephen Postema

This collection of essays shares the observations of an energetic boy living in an anything-but-simple time: the mercurial decades of the 1960s and 1970s in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Running Around Town brings funny and quirky insights into gentle focus, with a lens on the small things in life that bring purpose and make us human.

Our perennially curious narrator describes his small but teeming domain extending to the University of Michigan Diag and the people who influenced him: A cashier who sells him a peace sign necklace at Middle Earth. The clerks at Discount Records who provide musical advice. The folk musicians at the Ark. U-M basketball star Cazzie Russell. 

And importantly: a policeman neighbor who bails him out of situational predicaments. And a classmate, a bibliophile, who teaches him to sing in tune and passes him a note in history class at Pioneer High School.

Part coming-of-age impressions, part family and societal portraits in miniature, part love story, Running Around Town is ultimately a tapestry of transformative everyday interactions, woven together with the cultural influences and music of the times.  

Phoenix Girl: How a Fat Asian with Bipolar Found Love by Michelle Yang  

After Michelle emigrates to the U.S. from the tight-knit ethnic Chinese enclave in Incheon, South Korea, she must adapt quickly to survive. With a dominant, impulsive father in charge—who protects the family from everyone but himself—and a mother who never finds her power, Michelle craves safety and security. 

Like tumbleweeds, Michelle and her family bump across the country in a Ford Dixie van before settling in Phoenix, Arizona. Working at their family-owned Chinese takeout restaurant by age 12, Michelle drowns in pressures beyond her age. 

Ultimately, Michelle finds love, not only the romantic kind, but an enduring self-love, which allows her to heal, never give up, and thrive while successfully managing what later becomes a bipolar 1 diagnosis.

One fiction title for adults:

Music For Evenings by Gerald Siclovan

Music for Evenings is a set of three long stories that do not constitute a unified thematic arc or conventional plot line. Extremely minimal links exist between the three stories, which are otherwise independent of one another. Borderline, a three-part narrative with fantastical and heavily satirical elements, begins and ends the book. Charlie, inserted between parts 1 and 2 of Borderline, traces the career of a gifted young sculptor whose professional fortunes flourish even as his personal life deteriorates. Rose and Nicole, which precedes part 3 of Borderline, follows the lives of a two-woman family: Nicole, the mother, is a gifted, semi-professional watercolorist, and her daughter, Rose, a (professional) flute virtuoso.

For all Bookfest events, go to aadl.org/bookfest.