Kazuo Ishiguro’s visit to the Hopwood room last spring was the literary equivalent of Manchester United playing against Real Madrid in The Big House last summer. And although he wouldn’t have filled the 115,000 seats, the English writer did draw a crowd big enough to call for a live video stream to accommodate the individuals in the overflow room who couldn’t squeeze into the seminar where he was speaking. Peter Ho Davies, British-American novelist and former director of the U-M MFA program, introduced the man of the hour and started off the event talking about Britishness, Japaneseness, and Internationalness. And how Ishiguro saw his work in these contexts.

I caught up with Stein for a chat between tour stops, and we got into some interesting comparative territory. He likens writing A Sudden Light, his fourth novel, to Haruki Murakami’s marathon training routine. He relates the creative process to playing tennis, and, well, not playing tennis. He offers an anecdote about how his former karate Shihan influenced his daily writing habits.

Last week David Mitchell was in town as the University of Michigan Zell distinguished writer in residence. As the writer in residence, Mitchell sat in for a roundtable discussion in the Hopwood room, a room he described endearingly as a Harry Potterish, cult leader’s den. For an hour, he fielded questions from writers, teachers, and academics, and one kid interested in infanticide in literature. Mitchell, all charm and savoir faire, handled the tot-offing inquiry by addressing how to write about evil, finishing with a humble, “If you’ll let me get away with that as an answer.” He used that line more than once; and when he did, the questioners always smiled and nodded and said yes, likely thinking to themselves, “That answers my question and all the questions I wish I’d asked.”

Inside the Hopwood Room, friends and colleagues caught up over coffee and cookies, discussing avalanche survival tactics and personal rules about never living in alligator-populated states, awaiting the main event: an in-the-flesh Genius.

Once upon a time in Seattle I lived with a lawyer, a librarian, an engineer, and a retailer. We threw dance-y parties and hosted champagne and apricot scone brunches. We read by the fireplace and played after dinner games of Settlers of Catan. And although we did not know one another prior to moving in together—we met the old-fashion way, on craigslist—we became close.

Last week, novelist, critic, and children’s book writer Dale Peck came to town. Though he may be most famous for his literary criticism—his willingness to “write about sacred cows and say bad things,” his words—his fiction is terrific. Every seat was taken at the enormous roundtable in the center of the room, its wooden top a mosaic of current literary journals from around the globe, and latecomers sat in stray chairs hugging the periphery. As Peck received praise and inquiry from attendees, his warm nature put the room at ease. But like a retired assassin touring a museum of weapons, Peck’s hawkish reputation circled below the surface, only occasionally coming up to say hello. We won’t talk about Tao Lin … but we did talk about something of great interest to us here at Fiction Writer’s Review: book reviews.

In 2009, Narrative Magazine published Anthony Marra’s short story “Chechnya.” He was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop then and “Chechnya” was his first published story. It won a Pushcart Prize before Marra expanded it into his first published novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, released this week by Hogarth. Lauded by Ann Patchett for being the most “ambitious and fully realized” first novel since Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena connects the lives of six characters surviving the dense hellscape of war-torn Chechnya, 1994-2004.

Despite the ongoing chill of this Midwestern winter, Kathryn Davis filled the Hopwood room with writers eager to ask her questions. Davis told us that she loves answering reader questions. “You never know what somebody’s going to ask you.” It seems simple now to write this out, but I suppose you never know what you really think about a given matter unless someone—and as a writer, as Davis knows, that someone is often you—asks.

For Kevin Smokler, author of Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven’t Touched Since High School, which has just been released by Prometheus Books, Calvino’s dictum rings true. As a “righter-than-thou” highschooler, Smokler says he got off on the wrong foot with The Classics—“Those grown-up books you were forced to read as a teenager whether you wanted to or not.” But last year, at thirty-nine, Smokler set out to set the record straight. He revisited coming-of-age classics like Huck Finn and labored over coming-to-work classics like “Bartleby the Scrivener.” He riffed on coming-to-theory classics like Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, while digging through modern coming-to-meta-narration classics like Tim O’Brian’s The Things They Carried. In a recent interview with NPR, Smokler said he considered a wide range of books before finally whittling his list down to fifty. With so much important literature, old and new, that didn’t make the cut—Calvino, Baldwin, Díaz—Smokler is definitely thinking about Practical Classics 2.0.

Writer of fiction, non-fiction, essays, tweets, book reviews, movie reviews, music reviews, grocery lists, to-do lists, laundry lists, and probably more, Colson Whitehead traveled to Michigan recently from his native New York City to give Ann Arborites a Q & A. Whitehead arrived just after the hour, looking and playing the part of The Successful Contemporary American Novelist—svelte and sartorial and on the go—despite the fact that he’d just wrapped up a similar  discussion with an undergraduate writing class, to which he’d headed straight from the airport. The man hadn’t even checked into his hotel. Whitehead, a guy who jokes about a life of “writing and watching TV,” is one busy dude. Yet he generously made time for the crowd, and mixed thoughtful reflection with self-deprecating humor as he answered questions.

Hands behind his head, Bosnia and Herzegovina-American writer Aleksandar Hemon leaned back on the hind legs of his chair at the Hopwood Room roundtable recently and welcomed questions from the usual suspects of writers and readers, teachers and academics. “What is your name?” he asked each questioner. After a time people knew to introduce themselves before speaking. Hemon’s temperament is casual and direct in equal measure, which makes him as inviting as he is intimidating. “We can start talking about whatever you want, anytime you want. Or we can also sit in silence. I’m comfortable.”

Ann Arbor is a Lit town. I knew this in 2012 when I found myself at a farm on the outskirts of town listening Tracy K. Smith read from her Pulitzer Prize winning poetry collection Life On Mars. I knew this when, a month later, I found myself playing soccer with British novelist David Mitchell, whose Cloud Atlas was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004. I will know this once again when I sit in Literati’s tiny upstairs reading room, listening to Stuart Dybek read from his short story collections and talk about writing in the Midwest. 

John Irving’s 13th novel, In One Person, which came out last week, gives us yet another classic Irving outsider—a fatherless boy prone to sexual mishaps—and a timely discussion of intolerance. Here are four things you should know before the author reads from his latest book at Town Hall on Thursday