Powell’s is excited to resume in-person author events at our City of Books and Cedar Hills Crossing locations.
We’re continuing to offer virtual events featuring authors from around the world. Please read our lineup of upcoming events carefully, to see whether the event you’d like to attend will be online or at one of our store locations.
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Friday, May 20 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
After moving from a small country town to Seattle, Heather Baxter marries Tom, a widowed doctor with a young son and teenage daughter. A working vacation overseas seems like the perfect way to bring the new family together, but once they’re deep in the Australian outback, the jet-lagged and exhausted kids are so over their new mom. When they discover remote Dutch Island, off-limits to outside visitors, the family talks their way onto the ferry, taking a chance on an adventure far from the reach of iPhones and Instagram. But as soon as they set foot on the island, which is run by a tightly knit clan of locals, everything feels wrong. Then a shocking accident propels the Baxters from an unsettling situation into an absolute nightmare. When Heather and the kids are separated from Tom, they are forced to escape alone, seconds ahead of their pursuers. Now it’s up to Heather to save herself and the kids, even though they don’t trust her, the harsh bushland is filled with danger, and the locals want her dead. Heather has been underestimated her entire life, but she knows that only she can bring her family home again and become the mother the children desperately need, even if it means doing the unthinkable to keep them all alive. The Island (Little, Brown) is the “brilliant and relentless” (Don Winslow) new thriller from Adrian McKinty, author of The Chain.
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Monday, May 23 @ 5pm (PT)
Lynne Cox, internationally famous for swimming the world’s most difficult waterways without a wet suit, and able to endure water temperatures so cold that they would kill anyone else, recognizes and celebrates all forms of athleticism in others, human or otherwise. And when she saw a video of a Newfoundland dog leaping from an airborne helicopter into Italian waters to save someone from drowning, Cox was transfixed by the rescue, and captivated by the magnificence, physicality, and daring of the dog. Tales of Al (Knopf) is the moving, inspiring story of Cox’s adventures on Italy’s picturesque Lake Idroscalo, as witness to the rigorous training of one of these spectacular dogs at SICS, the famed school that has taught hundreds of dog owners how to train their dogs — Newfoundlands, German shepherds, and golden retrievers — for this rescue operation. Cox, author of Swimming to Antarctica and Grayson, writes about coming to know the dog at the book’s center, Al herself, from puppyhood, an adorable but untrainable chocolate Newfoundland — about the dreams, expectations, disappointments, and vision of her trainer and about realizing the dog’s full potential; striving with all of her canine might to become an expertly trained, highly specialized water rescue dog. Cox will be joined in conversation by Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files.
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Monday, May 23 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
Anti-fatness is everywhere. In What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat (Beacon Press), Aubrey Gordon — the creator of Your Fat Friend and co-host of the Maintenance Phase podcast — unearths the cultural attitudes and social systems that have led to people being denied basic needs because they are fat and calls for social justice movements to be inclusive of plus-sized people’s experiences. Unlike the recent wave of memoirs and quasi self-help books that encourage readers to love and accept themselves, Gordon pushes the discussion further towards authentic fat activism, which includes ending legal weight discrimination, giving equal access to health care for large people, increased access to public spaces, and ending anti-fat violence. As she argues, “I did not come to body positivity for self-esteem. I came to it for social justice.” By sharing her experiences as well as those of others — from smaller fat to very fat people — she concludes that to be fat in our society is to be seen as an undeniable failure, unlovable, unforgivable, and morally condemnable. Fatness is an open invitation for others to express disgust, fear, and insidious concern. To be fat is to be denied humanity and empathy. Advancing fat justice and changing prejudicial structures and attitudes will require work from all people. What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat is a crucial tool to create a tectonic shift in the way we see, talk about, and treat our bodies, fat and thin alike. Gordon will be joined in conversation by Dan Casey, a facilitator of deep personal care work in service of collective liberation.
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Tuesday, May 24 @ 5pm (PT)
When a once-promising young writer agrees to ghostwrite a famous physicist’s memoir, his livelihood is already in jeopardy: Plagued by debt, he’s grown distant from his wife — a successful AI designer — and is haunted by an overwhelming sense of dread he describes as “The Mist.” Then, things get worse: The physicist vanishes, leaving everything in limbo, including our narrator’s sanity. Desperate for relief, he undergoes an experimental, psychedelic treatment and finds his world completely transformed: Joy suffuses every moment. For the first time, he understands himself in a larger, universal context, and feels his life shift, refract, and crack open to reveal his past and future alike. Moving swiftly from a chemical spill in West Virginia to Silicon Valley, from a Brooklyn art studio to a high-speed train racing across the Italian countryside, William Brewer’s The Red Arrow (Knopf) wades into the shadowy depths of the human psyche only to emerge, as if speeding through a mile-long tunnel, into a world that is so bright and wondrous, it almost feels completely new. The Red Arrow is a singular, cosmically charged journey through art, memory, and the ways our lives intertwine and align within the riddles of space and time. Brewer will be joined in conversation by Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light.
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Tuesday, May 24 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
A powerful movement is happening in farming today — farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that's meant learning her tribe's history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it's meant preserving forest purchased by her great-great-uncle, among the first wave of African Americans to buy land. Others are rejecting monoculture to grow corn, beans, and squash the way farmers in Mexico have done for centuries. Still others are rotating crops for the native cuisines of those who fled the "American wars" in Southeast Asia. In Healing Grounds (Island Press), Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors' methods of growing food — techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle. This, Carlisle shows, is the true regenerative agriculture — not merely a set of technical tricks for storing CO2 in the ground, but a holistic approach that values diversity in both plants and people. Cultivating this kind of regenerative farming will require reckoning with our nation's agricultural history — a history marked by discrimination and displacement. And it will ultimately require dismantling power structures that have blocked many farmers of color from owning land or building wealth. The task is great, but so is its promise. By coming together to restore these farmlands, we can not only heal our planet, we can heal our communities and ourselves. Carlisle will be joined in conversation by Latrice Tatsey (In-niisk-ka-mah-kii), ecologist and advocate for tribally-directed bison restoration.
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Wednesday, May 25 @ 5pm (PT)
When two unexpected visitors arrive in an insular coastal village, they threaten the equilibrium of a community already confronting climate instability, political violence, and domestic upheavals — a cast of unforgettable characters from the rich imagination of the National Book Award–winning author of Three Junes. A decade from now, in the historic town of Vigil Harbor, there is a rash of divorces among the yacht-club set, a marine biologist despairs at the state of the world, a spurned wife is bent on revenge, and the renowned architect Austin Kepner pursues a passion for building homes designed to withstand the escalating fury of relentless storms. Austin’s stepson, Brecht, has dropped out of college in New York and returned home after narrowly escaping one of the terrorist acts that, like hurricanes, have become increasingly common. Then two strangers arrive: a stranded traveler with subversive charms and a widow seeking clues about a past lover with ties to Austin — a woman who may have been more than merely human. These strangers and their hidden motives come together unexpectedly in an incident that endangers lives — including Brecht’s — with dramatic repercussions for the entire town. Vigil Harbor (Pantheon) reveals Julia Glass in all her virtuosity, braiding multiple voices and dazzling strands of plot into a story where mortal longings and fears intersect with immortal mysteries of the deep as well as of the heart. Glass will be joined in conversation by Daniel Mason, author of The Piano Tuner and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth.
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Wednesday, May 25 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
At age 11, Helen disappeared in the wilderness of Mount Rainier National Park while camping with her father, Benjamin. She was gone for almost a week before being discovered and returned to her family. It is now 25 years later, and after more than two decades of estrangement, Helen and Benjamin reconnect at his home in Portland, Oregon, to try to understand what happened during the days she was gone. Meanwhile, Benjamin meets an odd pair, a woman and boy who seem driven to help him learn more about Helen's disappearance and send him on a journey that will lead to a murder house, uncanny possession, and a bone-filled body of water known as Sad Clown Lake, a lake "that could only be found by getting lost, that was never in the same place twice." Passersthrough (Soho) is a haunted, starkly lyrical exploration of family, memory, and the border between life and death from Peter Rock, author of My Abandonment.
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Wednesday, May 25 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
A group of teens are trapped in an old motel with a murderer in Two Truths and a Lie (Christy Ottaviano Books/Hachette), the chilling new YA mystery from April Henry. Nell has always wanted to be an actor, but doubts her ability. As a member of her school’s theater program, she prefers working backstage. On the way to a contest, an unexpected blizzard strands her acting troupe in a creepy motel. Soon they meet a group of strangers from another high school — including the mysterious and handsome Knox, who insists they play the game Two Truths and a Lie. When it’s Nell’s turn, she draws a slip of paper inked in unfamiliar handwriting: I like to watch people die. I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve killed. Suddenly a night of harmless fun turns into a matter of life and death. As guests go missing, it becomes clear that a murderer is hiding in their midst ready to strike again. In a room full of liars and performers, the truth is never quite what it seems. Nell is going to have to act like her life depends on it — because it does.
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Thursday, May 26 @ 5pm (PT)
When Phil Klay, author of Redeployment and Missionaries, left the Marines a decade ago after serving as an officer in Iraq, he found himself a part of the community of veterans who have no choice but to grapple with the meaning of their wartime experiences — for themselves and for the country. American identity has always been bound up in war — from the Revolutionary War of our founding, to the Civil War that ended slavery, to the two world wars that launched America as a superpower. What did the current wars say about who we are as a country, and how should we respond as citizens? Unlike in previous eras of war, relatively few Americans have had to do any real grappling with the endless, invisible conflicts of the post-9/11 world; in fact, increasingly few people are even aware they are still going on. It is as if these wars are a dark star with a strong gravitational force that draws a relatively small number of soldiers and their families into its orbit while remaining inconspicuous to most other Americans. In the meantime, the consequences of American military action abroad may be out of sight and out of mind, but they are very real indeed. This chasm between the military and the civilian in American life, and the moral blind spot it has created, is one of the great themes of Uncertain Ground (Penguin Press), Klay’s powerful series of reckonings with some of our country’s thorniest concerns, written in essay form over the past ten years. In the name of what do we ask young Americans to kill, and to die? In the name of what does this country hang together? As we see at every turn in these pages, those two questions have a great deal to do with each another, and how we answer them will go a long way toward deciding where our troubled country goes from here. Klay will be joined in conversation by Thomas E. Ricks, adviser on national security at the New America think tank and author of Fiasco.
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Friday, May 27 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
In The Night Always Comes (Harper Perennial), Willy Vlautin explores the impact of trickle-down greed and opportunism of gentrification on ordinary lives in a scorching novel that captures the plight of a young woman pushed to the edge as she fights to secure a stable future for herself and her family. Saddled with bad credit and juggling multiple jobs, some illegally, Lynette diligently works to buy the house she lives in with her mother and developmentally disabled brother, Kenny. Portland’s housing prices have nearly quadrupled in 15 years, and the owner is giving them a good deal. Lynette knows it’s their last best chance to own a home — and obtain the security they’ve never had. While she has enough for the down payment, she needs her mother to cover the rest of the asking price. But a week before they’re set to sign the loan papers, her mother reneges on her promise, pushing Lynette to her limits to find the money they need. Set over two days and two nights, Vlautin’s The Night Always Comes follows Lynette’s frantic search — an odyssey of hope and anguish that will bring her face-to-face with greedy rich men and ambitious hustlers, those benefiting and those left behind by a city in the throes of a transformative boom. As her desperation builds and her pleas for help go unanswered, Lynette makes a dangerous choice that sets her on a precarious, frenzied spiral. In trying to save her family’s future, she is plunged into the darkness of her past and forced to confront the reality of her life.
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Tuesday, May 31 @ 5pm (PT)
From Ann Leary, author of The Good House, comes the story of two friends, raised in the same orphanage, whose loyalty is put to the ultimate test when they meet years later at a controversial institution — one as an employee; the other, an inmate. It’s 1927 and 18-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. She’s immediately in awe of her employer — brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel. Dr. Vogel had been the only woman in her class in medical school. As a young psychiatrist, she was an outspoken crusader for women’s suffrage. Now, at age 40, Dr. Vogel runs one of the largest and most self-sufficient public asylums for women in the country. Mary deeply admires how dedicated the doctor is to the poor and vulnerable women under her care. Soon after she’s hired, Mary learns that a girl from her childhood orphanage is one of the inmates. Mary remembers Lillian as a beautiful free spirit with a sometimes-tempestuous side. Could she be mentally disabled? When Lillian begs Mary to help her escape, alleging the asylum is not what it seems, Mary is faced with a terrible choice. Should she trust her troubled friend with whom she shares a dark childhood secret? Mary’s decision triggers a hair-raising sequence of events with life-altering consequences for all. Inspired by a true story about the author’s grandmother, The Foundling (Scribner/Marysue Rucci Books) offers a rare look at a shocking chapter of American history. Leary will be joined in conversation by Lee Woodruff, author of In an Instant.
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Wednesday, June 1 @ 5pm (PT)
In Lydia Conklin’s exuberant, prize-winning story collection, Rainbow Rainbow (Catapult), queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming characters seek love and connection in hilarious and heartrending stories that reflect the complexity of our current moment. A nonbinary writer on the eve of top surgery enters into a risky affair during the height of COVID. A lesbian couple enlists a close friend as a sperm donor, plying him with a potent rainbow-colored cocktail. A lonely office worker struggling with their gender identity chaperones their nephew to a trans YouTube convention. And in the depths of a Midwestern winter, a sex-addicted librarian relies on her pet ferrets to help resist a relapse at a wild college fair. A fearless collection of stories that celebrate the humor, darkness, and depth of emotion of the queer and trans experience that's not typically represented: liminal or uncertain identities, queer conception, and queer joy — Rainbow Rainbow captures both the dark and lovable sides of the human experience and establishes Conklin as a fearless new voice for their generation. Conklin will be joined in conversation by Leigh Newman, author of Nobody Gets Out Alive.
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Wednesday, June 1 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
In a career in public office spanning five decades, Mark Odom Hatfield (1922–2011) never lost an election. First elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1950, he retired from political office in 1997 after serving as Oregon state senator, secretary of state, governor, and as United States senator for five terms. He was arguably the state’s most important politician, but his brand of liberal-to-moderate Republicanism has long since vanished from the political stage. Historian Richard W. Etulain’s Mark O. Hatfield: Oregon Statesman (University of Oklahoma Press) tells Hatfield’s story — as an Oregonian, a politician, and a man of practical vision, deep convictions, and far-reaching consequence in the civic life of the state and the nation. The private life, the public figure, the man of faith and family, of an older West and the new: Etulain’s biography captures Mark Hatfield in full, as a major western politician of the twentieth century.
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Wednesday, June 1 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
What does a great artist who is also a mother look like? What does it mean to create, not in “a room of one’s own,” but in a domestic space? Must maternal selfhood and artistic greatness be in conflict, or is there a space where they converge? In The Baby on the Fire Escape (W. W. Norton), Julie Phillips explores the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Audre Lorde, and Alice Neel. Lorde’s queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms. Lessing had to choose between her motherhood and herself. Neel, when she wanted to finish a painting, was said to have left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment. Le Guin found productive stability in family life and wrote brilliantly on writing, mothering, and reproductive choice. In her presentation based on The Baby on the Fire Escape, Phillips will talk about Le Guin’s approach to the mind-baby problem, drawing on her interviews with Le Guin and the author’s own writing on motherhood.
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Thursday, June 2 @ 5pm (PT)
From Nell Zink, one of America’s most original voices, comes Avalon (Knopf), a profound and singular story about a young woman searching for her place in the world. Bran’s Southern California upbringing is anything but traditional. After her mother joins a Buddhist colony, Bran is raised by her “common-law stepfather” on Bourdon Farms — a plant nursery that doubles as a cover for a biker gang. She spends her days tending plants, slogging through high school, and imagining what life could be if she had been born to a different family. And then she meets Peter, a beautiful, troubled, and charming train wreck of a college student from the East Coast, who launches his teaching career by initiating her into the world of literature and aesthetics. As the two begin a volatile and ostensibly doomed long-distance relationship, Bran searches for meaning in her own surroundings — attending disastrous dance recitals, house-sitting for strangers, and writing scripts for student films. She knows how to survive, but her happiness depends on learning to call the shots. Exceedingly rich, ecstatically dark, and delivered with masterful humor, Avalon is the irresistible story of one teenager’s reckoning with society at large and her search for a personal utopia. Zink will be joined in conversation by Justin Taylor, author of Riding with the Ghost.
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Thursday, June 2 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Crossing Paths: A Pacific Crest Trailside Reader (Mountaineers Books) offers triumphs, terrors, and tales stretching 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada. What’s it like to be a trail angel and can romance truly blossom from first meeting to marriage on the Pacific Crest Trail? How do trail names get bestowed and what does it mean when you find yourself roaring back at a mountain lion? How have climate change, technology, and the sheer number of hikers affected life on the PCT? Find the answers to all these questions, and so many more, in the diverse writings gathered in Crossing Paths, an anthology of stories and poems written by PCT hikers. Reflecting the contributors’ rich and varied individual experiences, this collection includes both ordinary and extraordinary experiences, from dodging lightning strikes on an exposed ridge south of Sonora Pass or surviving early fall snowstorms in the Cascades, to deeply personal walks-as-therapy following military service or cancer treatment. The selection represents geographic, gender, ethnic, and age diversity, and strives to reflect the totality and depth of life on the trail. Editors Rees Hughes and Howard Shapiro will be joined in conversation by Crystal Gail Welcome, experiential educator and founder of the non-profit youth organization, Only Footprints; Dorothy Brown-Kwaiser, interpretive park ranger; and Russ Mease, PCT and CDT thru-hiker.
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Saturday, June 4 @ 2pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask — or not — was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As Happy-Go-Lucky (Little, Brown) opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes. But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he’s stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine. As the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a stranger’s teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone’s son. And back on the road, he discovers a battle-scarred America: people weary, storefronts empty or festooned with Help Wanted signs, walls painted with graffiti reflecting the contradictory messages of our time: Eat the Rich. Trump 2024. Black Lives Matter. In Happy-Go-Lucky, Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris. Sedaris will be joined by opening act Cindy House, author of Mother Noise.
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Monday, June 6 @ 5pm (PT)
Metropolis (Algonquin) — the masterful new novel of psychological suspense from B. A. Shapiro, author of The Art Forger — follows a cast of unforgettable characters whose lives intersect when a harrowing accident occurs at the Metropolis Storage Warehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But was it really an accident? Was it suicide? A murder? Six mysterious characters, who rent units in, or are connected to, the self-storage facility, must now reevaluate their lives. These characters have a variety of backgrounds: they are different races; they practice different religions; they're young and they're not so young; they are rich, poor, and somewhere in the middle. As they dip in and out of one another's lives, fight circumstances that are within and also beyond their control, and try to discover the details of the accident, Shapiro both dismantles the myth of the American dream and builds tension to an exciting climax. For readers of Janelle Brown, Lucy Foley, Megan Abbott, and Laura Lippman, Metropolis is an original, spellbinding, and moving story of what we hang on to, what we might need to let go, and how unexpected events can lead us to discover our truest selves. Shapiro will be joined in conversation by Tim Johnston, author of Descent and The Current.
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Tuesday, June 7 @ 5pm (PT)
The once idyllic coastal plain of North Carolina is home to a close-knit, rural community that for more than a generation has battled the polluting practices of large-scale farming taking place in its own backyard. After years of frustration and futility, an impassioned cadre of local residents, led by a team of intrepid and dedicated lawyers, filed a lawsuit against one of the world’s most powerful companies — and, miraculously, they won. As vivid and fast-paced as a thriller, Corban Addison’s Wastelands (Knopf) takes us into the heart of a legal battle over the future of America’s farmland and into the lives of the people who found the courage to fight. With journalistic rigor and a novelist’s instinct for story, Wastelands captures the inspiring struggle to bring a modern-day monopoly to its knees, to force a once-invincible corporation to change, and to preserve the rights — and restore the heritage — of a long-suffering community. Addison will be joined in conversation by John Grisham, author of 47 consecutive #1 bestsellers.
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Tuesday, June 7 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Saul doesn't get why he's misunderstood. At his high-tech day job, he hides in the bathroom writing a novel about his dead grandfather and wonders why his boss wants to fire him. He tells his almost ex-wife about a blind date and wonders why she slams the door in his face. He aches with worry for his seven-year-old son, who seems happier living with his mom and her new man. When the blind date becomes a complicated relationship, and Saul’s blunders at work threaten the survival of the company, Saul has to wake up and confront his fears. Yuvi Zalkow’s I Only Cry with Emoticons (Red Hen) is a quirky comedy that reveals the cost of being disconnected — even when we're using a dozen apps on our devices to communicate — and an awkward man's search for real connections, on and offline. Zalkow will be joined in conversation by Joanna Rose, author of A Small Crowd of Strangers.
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Tuesday, June 7 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
Disgraced Navy SEAL Finn is on the run. A wanted man since he jumped ship from the USS Abraham Lincoln, he’s sought for questioning in connection to war crimes committed in Yemen by a rogue element in his SEAL team. But his memory of that night — as well as the true fate of his mentor and only friend, Lieutenant Kennedy — is a gaping hole. Finn learns that three members of his team have been quietly redeployed to Iceland, which is a puzzle in itself; the tiny island nation is famous for being one of the most peaceful, crime-free places on the planet. His mission is simple: track down the three corrupt SEALs and find out what really happened that night in Yemen. But two problems stand in his way. On his first night in town a young woman mysteriously drowns — and a local detective suspects his involvement. What’s worse, a SEAL-turned-contract-killer with skills equal to his own has been hired to make sure he never gets the answers he’s looking for. And he’s followed Finn all the way to the icy north. Cold Fear (Bantam) is the riveting follow-up to Steel Fear from combat-decorated Navy SEAL Brandon Webb (co-written with John David Mann).
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Wednesday, June 8 @ 6pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
David Duchovny’s The Reservoir (Akashic) follows an unexceptional man in an exceptional time. We see our present-day pandemic world and New York City through the eyes of a former Wall Street veteran, Ridley, as he, in his enforced quarantined solitude, looks back upon his life. He examines his wins, his failures, the gnawing questions — his career, his divorce, his estranged daughter — and wonders what it all means and who he really is. Sitting and brooding night after night, gazing out his huge picture window high above the Central Park Reservoir, Ridley spots a flashing light in an apartment across the park as if a lonely quarantined person is signaling him in Morse code. His determination to find out who this mystery woman is, this fellow quarantine damsel in distress trapped in her own Fifth Avenue tower, leads him on an epic quest that will ultimately tempt him with either delusional madness or the fulfillment of his own mythic fate. Is he a dying man going mad or an everyman metamorphosing into a hero? Or both? We accompany Ridley as he leaves the safety of his apartment window to save the Fifth Avenue femme fatale and descends into a dangerous, increasingly surreal world of global conspiracies, madness, and sickness of this viral time; beyond that, into the enduring mysteries of love and fatherhood; and deeper still, into the bedrock mystery of life itself. As Ridley's actions grow more and more uncharacteristic, he realizes the key to all the mysteries of now, and even all of history, seem to lie deep beneath the freezing waters of the reservoir. The Reservoir is a twisted rom-com for our distanced time, when the merest touch could kill and conspiracy theories propagate like viruses — a contemporary union of Death in Venice, Rear Window, and The Plague. Duchovny will be joined in conversation by Kristi Turnquist, TV critic and pop culture reporter for The Oregonian/OregonLive.com.
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Wednesday, June 8 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Dale Scott’s career as a professional baseball umpire spanned nearly 40 years, including 33 in the Major Leagues, from 1985 to 2017. He worked exactly a thousand games behind the plate, calling balls and strikes at the pinnacle of his profession, working in every Major League Baseball stadium, and interacting with dozens of other top-flight umpires, colorful managers, and hundreds of players, from future Hall of Famers to one-game wonders. Scott has enough stories about his career on the field to fill a dozen books, and there are plenty of those stories here. He’s not interested in settling scores, but throughout his book he’s honest about managers and players, some of whom weren’t always perfect gentlemen. But what makes Scott’s The Umpire Is Out (University of Nebraska Press) truly different is his unique perspective as the only umpire in the history of professional baseball to come out as gay during his career. Granted, that was after decades of remaining in the closet, and Scott writes vividly and movingly about having to “play the game”: maintaining a facade of straightness while privately becoming his true self and building a lasting relationship with his future husband. He navigated this obstacle course at a time when his MLB career was just taking off — and when North America was consumed by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Scott’s story isn’t only about his leading a sort of double life, then opening himself up to the world and discovering a new generosity of spirit. It’s also a baseball story, filled with insights and memorable anecdotes that come so naturally from someone who spent decades among the world’s greatest baseball players, managers, and games. Scott’s story is fascinating both for his umpiring career and for his being a pioneer for LGBTQ people within baseball and across sports. Scott will be joined in conversation by The Umpire Is Out’s coauthor, Rob Neyer.
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Thursday, June 9 @ 5pm (PT)
In present-day New York City, five women meet in a basement support group to process their traumas. Bernice grapples with the fallout of dating a psychopathic, blue-bearded billionaire. Ruby, once devoured by a wolf, now wears him as a coat. Gretel questions her memory of being held captive in a house made of candy. Ashlee, the winner of a Bachelor-esque dating show, wonders if she really got her promised fairy tale ending. And Raina's love story will shock them all. Though the women start out wary of one another, judging each other’s stories, gradually they begin to realize that they may have more in common than they supposed… What really brought them here? What secrets will they reveal? And is it too late for them to rescue each other? Dark, edgy, and wickedly funny, Maria Adelmann’s debut, How to Be Eaten (Little, Brown), takes our coziest, most beloved childhood stories, exposes them as anti-feminist nightmares, and transforms them into a new kind of myth for grown-up women. Adelmann will be joined in conversation by Steve Almond, author of All the Secrets of the World. This event is presented in partnership with Rediscovered Books (Boise) and the Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle).
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Friday, June 10 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Explore the artistry of Japanese tea from cultivation to cup in Stories of Japanese Tea (Princeton Architectural Press), a comprehensive illustrated guide to the tea industry from Zach Mangan, founder of Kettl, a New York City- and Fukuoka, Japan-based tea and teaware company. Stories of Japanese Tea includes Japanese growers, their craft of tea-making, and how the tradition of tea has had an influence on cuisine, art, and health. Mangan’s visual exploration of one of the world's most popular beverages tells the stories of tea and tea-making in Japan: how it is grown, harvested, and processed, as well as how it is prepared and enjoyed. Through interviews with tea growers, information on health benefits from Dr. Andrew Weil, and amazing recipes from Japanese chefs and mixologists, including Michelin-starred chef Hayashi Hirohisa and pastry chef Yoshie Shirakawa, you will discover all there is to know about Japanese tea. Mangan will be joined in conversation by Jim Meehan, author of The PDT Cocktail Book and Meehan’s Bartender Manual.
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Friday, June 10 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
A redistricting crisis is now upon us. Nick Seabrook’s surprising, compelling new book, One Person, One Vote (Pantheon) tells the history of how we got to this moment — from the Founding Fathers to today’s high-tech manipulation of election districts — and shows us as well how to protect our most sacred, hard-fought principle of one person, one vote. Here is THE book on gerrymandering for citizens, politicians, journalists, activists, and voters. Seabrook, an authority on constitutional and election law and an expert on gerrymandering, begins before our nation’s founding, with the rigging of American elections for partisan and political gain and the election meddling of George Burrington, the colonial governor of North Carolina, in retaliation against his critics. Seabrook writes of Patrick Henry, who used redistricting to settle an old score with political foe and fellow Founding Father James Madison (almost preventing the Bill of Rights from happening), and of Elbridge Gerry, the Massachusetts governor from whose name “gerrymander” derives. One Person, One Vote explores the rise of the most partisan gerrymanders in American history, put in place by the Republican Party after the 2010 census. We see how the battle has shifted to the states via REDMAP — the GOP’s successful strategy to control state governments and rig the results of state legislative and congressional elections over the past decade. Seabrook makes clear that a vast new redistricting is already here, and that to safeguard our republic, action is needed before it is too late.
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Monday, June 13 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish (Graywolf), the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn’s adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book. Horn swims through a range of subjects, roving across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. From Horn’s upbringing with a mother who used them as a model in photos and art installations — memorably in a photography session in an ice bath with dead squid — to Horn’s travels before they were out as trans, these essays are linked by a desire to interrogate liminal physicalities. Horn reexamines the oft-presumed uniformity of bodily experience, breaking down the implied singularity of “the body” as cultural and scientific object. The essays instead privilege ways of seeing and being that resist binaries, ways that falter, fracture, mutate. A sui generis work of nonfiction, Voice of the Fish blends the aquatic, mystical, and physical to reach a place beyond them all. Horn will be joined in conversation by Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses.
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Tuesday, June 14 @ 5pm (PT)
Sleepwalk (Henry Holt) is a high speed and darkly comic road trip through a near-future America with a big-hearted mercenary, from beloved and acclaimed novelist Dan Chaon. Sleepwalk’s hero, Will Bear, is a man with so many aliases that he simply thinks of himself as the Barely Blur. At 50 years old, he’s been living off the grid for over half his life. He’s never had a real job, never paid taxes, never been in a committed relationship. A good-natured henchman with a complicated and lonely past and a passion for LSD microdosing, he spends his time hopscotching across state lines in his beloved camper van, running sometimes shady often dangerous errands for a powerful and ruthless operation he’s never troubled himself to learn too much about. He has lots of connections, but no true ties. His longest relationships are with an old rescue dog that has post-traumatic stress, and a childhood friend as deeply entrenched in the underworld as he is, who, lately, he’s less and less sure he can trust. Out of the blue, one of Will's many burner phones heralds a call from a 20-year-old woman claiming to be his biological daughter. She says she’s the product of one of his long-ago sperm donations; he’s half certain she’s AI. She needs his help. She’s entrenched in a widespread and nefarious plot involving Will’s employers, and for Will to continue to have any contact with her increasingly fuzzes the line between the people he is working for and the people he’s running from. With his signature blend of haunting emotional realism and fast-paced intrigue, Chaon populates his fractured America with characters who ring all too true. Gazing both back to the past and forward to an inevitable-enough-seeming future, Sleepwalk examines where we’ve been and where we’re going and the connections that bind us, no matter how far we travel to dodge them or how cleverly we hide. Chaon will be joined in conversation by Shawn Vestal, author of Godforsaken Idaho.
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Tuesday, June 14 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
One night in New York City's Chinatown, a woman is at a work reunion dinner with former colleagues when she excuses herself to buy a pack of cigarettes. On her way back, she runs into a former boyfriend. And then another. And… another. Nothing is quite what it seems as the city becomes awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past. What would normally pass for coincidence becomes something far stranger as the recently engaged Lola must contend not only with the viability of her current relationship, but the fact that both her best friend and her former boss, a magazine editor turned mystical guru, might have an unhealthy investment in the outcome. Memories of the past swirl and converge in ways both comic and eerie, as Lola is forced to decide if she will surrender herself to the conspiring of one very contemporary cult. Hilariously insightful and delightfully suspenseful, Cult Classic (MCD) is an original: a masterfully crafted tale of love, memory, morality, and mind control, as well as a fresh foray into the philosophy of romance. Is it possible to have a happy ending in an age when the past is ever at your fingertips and sanity is for sale? With her gimlet eye, Sloane Crosley, author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake, spins a wry literary fantasy that is equal parts page-turner and poignant portrayal of alienation. Crosley will be joined in conversation by Chuck Klosterman, author of The Nineties and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.
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Wednesday, June 15 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Generation X was born between the legions of Baby Boomers and Millennials, and was all but written off as cynical, sarcastic slackers. Yet, Gen X's impact on culture and society is undeniable. In her revealing and provocative essay collection, Kids in America (Santa Fe Writers Project), Liz Prato reveals a generation deeply affected by terrorism, racial inequality, rape culture, and mental illness in an era when none of these issues were openly discussed. Examined through the lens of her high school and family, Prato reveals a small, forgotten cohort shaped as much by Sixteen Candles and Beverly Hills, 90210, as it was by the Rodney King riots and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Prato is unflinching in asking hard questions of her peers about what behavior was then acceptable or overlooked, and how we reconcile those sins today. Kids in America illuminates a generation that is often cited, but rarely examined beyond the gloss of nostalgia. Prato will be joined in conversation by Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Verge and The Book of Joan.
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Thursday, June 16 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Body Grammar (Vintage) is a coming-of-age queer love story set in the glamorous but grueling world of international modeling — and a radiant debut by a talented new writer. By the time Lou turns 18, modeling agents across Portland have scouted her for her striking androgynous look. Lou has no interest in fashion or being in the spotlight. She prefers to take photographs, especially of Ivy, her close friend and secret crush. But when a hike ends in a tragic accident, Lou finds herself lost and ridden with guilt. Determined to find a purpose, Lou moves to New York and steps into the dizzying world of international fashion shows, haute couture, and editorial shoots. It's a whirlwind of learning how to walk and how to command a body she's never felt at ease in. But in the limelight, Lou begins to fear that she's losing her identity — as an individual, as an artist, and as a person still in love with the girl she left behind. A sharply observed and intimate story of grief and healing, doubt and self-acceptance set against the hyper-image-conscious industry of modeling and high fashion, Jules Ohman’s Body Grammar shines with the anxieties of finding your place in the world and the heartbreaking beauty of pursuing love. Ohman will be joined in conversation by Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light.
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Friday, June 17 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Growing up in Australia, Fariha Róisín, a Bangladeshi Muslim, struggled to fit in. In attempts to assimilate, she distanced herself from her South Asian heritage and identity. Years later, living in the United States, she realized that the customs, practices, and even food of her native culture that had once made her different — everything from ashwagandha to prayer — were now being homogenized and marketed for good health, often at a premium by white people to white people. In Who Is Wellness For? (Harper Wave), her thought-provoking new book — part memoir, part journalistic investigation — the acclaimed writer and poet (How to Cure a Ghost) explores the way in which the progressive health industry has appropriated and commodified global healing traditions. She reveals how wellness culture has become a luxury good built on the wisdom of Black, brown, and Indigenous people — while ignoring and excluding them. Deeply intimate and revelatory, Who Is Wellness For? forces us to confront the imbalance in health and healing, carving a path towards self-care that is inclusionary for all.
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Monday, June 20 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
If you've ever expressed even the slightest bit of dissatisfaction with the current state of your life, you've inevitably gotten the response, "Have you tried meditation? Exercise? Joining a cult? Joining an exercise cult?" And a variety of other helpful suggestions. Madeleine Trebenski’s Do I Feel Better Yet?: Questionable Attempts at Self-Care and Existing in General (Chronicle Prism) explores these topics with intellectual essays like "I'm Moving to the Woods to Live in a Nightmare Shack" and instructional guides such as "Are You Hungry or Are You Just Horny?" If you learn anything from Trebenski’s book, it should be that a $72 artisanal hand-blown glass cup isn't going to change your life. Trebenski will be joined in conversation by Matthew Carroll, author of Can I Sit On Your Lap While You’re Pooping?.
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Tuesday, June 21 @ 5pm (PT)
Things are looking up for Mr. and Mrs. Cho. Their dream of franchising their Korean plate lunch restaurants across Hawaiʻi seems within reach after a visit from Guy Fieri boosts the profile of Cho’s Delicatessen. Their daughter, Grace, is busy finishing her senior year of college and working for her parents, while her older brother, Jacob, just moved to Seoul to teach English. But when a viral video shows Jacob trying — and failing — to cross the Korean demilitarized zone, nothing can protect the family from suspicion and the restaurant from waning sales. No one knows that Jacob has been possessed by the ghost of his lost grandfather, who feverishly wishes to cross the divide and find the family he left behind in the north. As Jacob is detained by the South Korean government, Mr. and Mrs. Cho fear their son won’t ever be able to return home, and Grace gets more and more stoned as she negotiates her family’s undoing. Struggling with what they don’t know about themselves and one another, the Chos must confront the separations that have endured in their family for decades. Set in the months leading up to the 2018 false missile alert in Hawaiʻi, Joseph Han’s profoundly funny and strikingly beautiful debut novel, Nuclear Family (Counterpoint), is an offering that aches with histories inherited and reunions missed, asking how we heal in the face of what we forget and who we remember. Han will be joined in conversation by Gene Kwak, author of Go Home, Ricky!.
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Tuesday, June 21 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Inspired by Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven and Jess Walter’s Every Knee Shall Bow, Leah Sottile’s When the Moon Turns to Blood (Twelve) explores modern-day survivalism and end-times extremism through the story of Lori Vallow and her husband, gravedigger turned doomsday novelist, Chad Daybell. When police in Rexburg, Idaho perform a wellness check on seven-year-old J.J. Vallow and his sister, 16-year-old Tylee Ryan, both children are nowhere to be found. Their mother, Lori Vallow, gives a phony explanation, and when officers return the following day with a search warrant, she, too, is gone. As the police begin to close in, a larger web of mystery, murder, fanaticism, and deceit begins to unravel. Vallow’s case is sinuously complex. As investigators prod further, they find the accused Black Widow has an unusual number of bodies piling up around her. When the Moon Turns to Blood tells a gripping story of extreme beliefs, snake oil prophets, and explores the question: if it feels like the world is ending, how are people supposed to act? Sottile will be joined in conversation by Ryan Haas, news editor and podcast producer with Oregon Public Broadcasting.
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Tuesday, June 21 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
Timed to the organization's 150th anniversary, Dan Lambe’s Now Is the Time for Trees (Timber Press), written with Lorene Edwards Forkner, celebrates the Arbor Day Foundation’s important role in conservation and energizes readers to plant trees as a means of individual climate activism. Trees and forests are the number one nature-based solution for reversing the negative effects of a changing climate. If ever there was a time to be planting trees, that time is now. Inspired by a collective sense of urgency, a global movement to plant trees is gaining momentum. To move the needle, we need to act on a massive scale and plant millions of trees today to have a measurable and lasting impact on billions of lives tomorrow. In Now Is the Time for Trees, the experts at the Arbor Day Foundation inspire you to do your part by showing you everything you need to know to plant trees at home or in your community. From advice on choosing the right size and type of tree to tried-and-true tips for planting success, this book will help you plant a tree today and leave your own legacy of hope. Equal parts inspiration and advocacy, Now Is the Time for Trees is a rousing call for environmental action and a must-have book for nature lovers everywhere. This event is cosponsored by the Arbor Day Foundation.
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Wednesday, June 22 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
In Battling the Big Lie (Twelve), Pod Save America cohost Dan Pfeiffer dissects how the right-wing built a massive, billionaire-funded disinformation machine powerful enough to bend reality and nearly steal the 2020 election. From the perspective of someone who has spent decades on the front lines of politics and media, Pfeiffer lays out how the right-wing media apparatus works, where it came from, and what progressives can do to fight back against disinformation. Over a period of decades, the right-wing has built a massive media apparatus that is weaponizing misinformation and spreading conspiracy theories for political purposes. This “MAGA Megaphone” that is personified by Fox News and fueled by Facebook is waging war on the very idea of objective truth — and they are winning. This disinformation campaign is how Donald Trump won in 2016, almost won in 2020, and why the United States is incapable of addressing problems from COVID-19 to climate change. Pfeiffer explains how and why the Republicans have come to depend on culture war grievances, crackpot conspiracies, and truly sinister propaganda as their primary political strategies. A functioning democracy depends on a shared understanding of reality. America is teetering on the edge because one of the two parties in our two-party system views truth, facts, and science as their opponent. Battling the Big Lie is a call to arms for anyone and everyone who cares about truth and democracy.
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Thursday, June 23 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started 40 years earlier. As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s, and her own. The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. Also a Poet (Grove Press) explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents, yet fear what that might cost us; when we seek their approval, yet mistrust it. In reckoning with her unique heritage, as well as providing new insights into the life of one of our most important poets, Calhoun offers a brave and hopeful meditation on parents and children, artistic ambition, and the complexities of what we leave behind.
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Thursday, June 23 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
In Olympus, you either have the power to rule… or you are ruled. Achilles Kallis may have been born with nothing, but as a child he vowed he would claw his way into the poisonous city's inner circle. Now that a coveted role has opened to anyone with the strength to claim it, he and his partner, Patroclus Fotos, plan to compete and double their odds of winning. Neither expect infamous beauty Helen Kasios to be part of the prize… or for the complicated fire that burns the moment she looks their way. Zeus may have decided Helen is his to give away, but she has her own plans. She enters into the competition as a middle finger to the meddling Thirteen rulers, effectively vying for her own hand in marriage. Unfortunately, there are those who would rather see her dead than lead the city. The only people she can trust are the ones she can't keep her hands off — Achilles and Patroclus. But can she really believe they have her best interests at heart when every stolen kiss is a battlefield? Wicked Beauty (Sourcebooks Casablanca) is Katee Robert’s scorchingly hot modern retelling of Helen of Troy, Achilles, and Patroclus that's as sinful as it is sweet.
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Monday, June 27 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Tracy Flick is back and, once again, the iconic protagonist of Tom Perrotta’s Election — and Reese Witherspoon’s character from the classic movie adaptation — is determined to take high school politics by storm. Tracy Flick is a hardworking assistant principal at a public high school in suburban New Jersey. Still ambitious but feeling a little stuck and underappreciated in midlife, Tracy gets a jolt of good news when the longtime principal, Jack Weede, abruptly announces his retirement, creating a rare opportunity for Tracy to ascend to the top job. Energized by the prospect of her long-overdue promotion, Tracy throws herself into her work with renewed zeal, determined to prove her worth to the students, faculty, and school board, while also managing her personal life — a ten-year-old daughter, a needy doctor boyfriend, and a burgeoning meditation practice. But nothing ever comes easily to Tracy Flick, no matter how diligent or qualified she happens to be. As she broods on the past, Tracy becomes aware of storm clouds brewing in the present. Is she really a shoo-in for the principal job? Is the superintendent plotting against her? Why is the school board president’s wife trying so hard to be her friend? And why can’t she ever get what she deserves? In classic Perrotta style, Tracy Flick Can’t Win (Scribner) is a sharp, darkly comic, and pitch-perfect reflection on our current moment. Flick fans and newcomers alike will love this compelling novel chronicling the second act of one of the most memorable characters of our time.
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Monday, June 27 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
In Nebula Award-winning author Sam J. Miller’s devastating debut short-fiction collection, Boys, Beasts & Men (Tachyon), queer infatuation, inevitable heartbreak, and brutal revenge seamlessly intertwine. Whether innocent, guilty, or not even human, the boys, beasts, and men roaming through Miller’s gorgeously crafted worlds can destroy readers, yet leave them wanting more. Despite his ability to control the ambient digital cloud, a foster teen falls for a clever con-man. Luring bullies to a quarry, a boy takes clearly enumerated revenge through unnatural powers of suggestion. In the aftermath of a shapeshifting alien invasion, a survivor fears that he brought something out of the Arctic to infect the rest of the world. A rebellious group of queer artists create a new identity that transcends even the anonymity of death. Miller, author of Blackfish City and The Art of Starving, shows his savage wit, unrelenting candor, and lush imagery in this essential career retrospective collection, taking his place alongside legends of the short-fiction form such as Carmen Maria Machado, Carson McCullers, and Jeff VanderMeer. Miller will be joined in conversation by Fonda Lee, author of the Green Bone Saga.
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Tuesday, June 28 @ 5pm (PT)
Jim Woodring has been chronicling the adventures of his cartoon everyman, Frank, for almost 30 years. These stories are a singular rarity in the comics form — both bone-chillingly physical in their depictions of Frank’s travails and profoundly metaphysical at the same time. Not since George Herriman’s Krazy Kat has the comics language been so exquisitely distilled into pure, revelatory aesthetic expression. One Beautiful Spring Day (Fantagraphics) combines three previously published volumes — Congress of the Animals, where Frank embarked upon a life-changing voyage of discovery; Fran, where he learned, then forgot, that things are not always what they seem; and Poochytown, in which Frank demonstrated his dizzying capacity for both nobility and ignominy — along with 100 dazzling new pages conceived and drawn by Woodring. The result is a seamless graphic narrative that forges a new and even more poignantly realized single story that takes readers deep into the hidden meanings of the previous stories and offers the most full, complete, astonishing exposition of Frank and his supercharged world to date. Frank’s curiosity and risk-taking mixed with a dose of, let’s face it, wanton recklessness, takes him on a series of terrifying peregrinations that often leave his soul and body shattered, and the reader in a state of creative exaltation. Suffice to say that if you are a friend to Frank, you will find One Beautiful Spring Day to be a thousand-course feast of agonizing bliss, soul-stirring mystery, and luminous depth. Woodring will be joined in conversation by Gary Groth, co-founder of The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books.
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Tuesday, June 28 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
In So Help Me Golf (Hachette), beloved author and golf aficionado Rick Reilly channels his insatiable curiosity, trademark sense of humor, and vast knowledge of the game in a treasure trove of original pieces about what the game has meant to him and to others. This is the book Reilly has been writing in the back of his head since he fell in love with the game of golf at eleven years old. He unpacks and explores all of the wonderful, maddening, heart-melting, heart-breaking, cool, and captivating things about golf that make the game so utterly addictive. We meet the PGA Tour player who robbed banks by night to pay his motel bills, the golf club maker who takes weekly psychedelic trips, and the caddy who kept his loop even after an 11-year prison stint. We learn how a man on his third heart nearly won the U.S. Open, how a Vietnam POW saved his life playing 18 holes a day in his tiny cell, and about the course that's absolutely free. Reilly expounds on all the great figures in the game, from Phil Mickelson to Bobby Jones to the simple reason Jack Nicklaus is better than Tiger Woods. He explains why we should stop hating Bryson DeChambeau unless we hate genius, the greatest upset in women’s golf history, and why Ernie Els throws away every ball that makes a birdie. Plus all the Greg Norman stories Reilly has never been able to tell before, and the great fun of being Jim Nantz. Connecting it all will be the story of Reilly’s own personal journey through the game, especially as it connects to his tumultuous relationship with his father, and how the two eventually reconciled through golf. This is Reilly’s valentine to golf, a cornucopia of stories that no golfer will want to be without.
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Wednesday, June 29 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
Inspired by the Greek myth of Iphigenia and the Grimm fairytale "Brother and Sister," Michelle Ruiz Keil's second novel follows two siblings torn apart, struggling to find each other in early '90s Portland. All her life, 17-year-old Iph has protected her sensitive younger brother, Orr. But this summer, with their mother gone at an artist residency, their father decides it’s time for 15-year-old Orr to toughen up at a wilderness boot camp. When their father brings Iph to a work gala in downtown Portland and breaks the news, Orr has already been sent away against his will. Furious at her father’s betrayal, Iph storms off and gets lost in the maze of Old Town. Enter George, a queer Robin Hood who swoops in on a bicycle, bow and arrow at the ready, offering Iph a place to hide out while she tracks down Orr. Orr, in the meantime, has escaped the camp and fallen in with The Furies, an all-girl punk band, and moves into the coat closet of their ramshackle pink house. In their first summer apart, Iph and Orr must learn to navigate their respective new spaces of music, romance, and sex-work activism — and find each other before a fantastical transformation fractures their family forever. Told through a lens of magical realism and steeped in myth, Keil’s Summer in the City of Roses (Soho Teen) is a dazzling tale about the pain and beauty of growing up. Keil will be joined in conversation by Emilly Prado, author of Funeral for Flaca.
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Thursday, June 30 @ 5pm (PT)
Winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award, Melissa Febos’s Girlhood (Bloomsbury) examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them. When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defenses she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs. Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny. Written with Febos’ characteristic precision, lyricism, and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self. Febos will be joined in conversation by Genevieve Hudson, author of Boys of Alabama.
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Wednesday, July 6 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
From the author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions comes a stunning collection about those moments when everything changes — for the better, for the worse, for the outrageous — as a diverse cast of characters bounces from Italy to Idaho, questioning their roles in life and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places. We all live like we’re famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don’t want others to see. In The Angel of Rome: And Other Stories (Harper), the riveting new collection of stories from Jess Walter, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place to care for the old man. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the romantic title story, a shy 21-year-old studying Latin in Rome during “the year of my reinvention” finds himself face-to-face with the Italian actress of his adolescent dreams. Funny, poignant, and redemptive, Walter’s collection of short fiction offers a dazzling range of voices, backdrops, and situations. With his signature wit and bighearted approach to the darkest parts of humanity, Walter tackles the modern condition with a timeless touch, once again “solidifying his place in the contemporary canon as one of our most gifted builders of fictional worlds” (Esquire).
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Thursday, July 7 @ 5pm (PT)
My life goes completely sideways the moment I meet the mysterious Braxton. Sure, he’s ridiculously hot, but he’s also the reason I’ve been kicked out of school and recruited into Gray Wolf Academy — a remote island school completely off the grid. I never should have trusted a face so perfect. But the reality of why Gray Wolf wanted me is what truly blows my mind. It’s a school for time travelers. Tripping, they call it. This place is filled with elaborate costumes and rare artifacts, where every move is strategic and the halls are filled with shadows and secrets. Here, what you see isn’t always what it appears. Including Braxton. Because even though there’s an energy connecting us together, the more secrets he keeps from me, the more it feels like something is pulling us apart. Something that has to do with this place — and its darker purpose. It’s all part of a guarded, elaborate puzzle of history and time… and I might be one of the missing pieces. Now I have all the time in the world. And yet I can’t shake the feeling that time is the one thing I’m about to run out of… fast. Dan Brown meets Leigh Bardugo in Alyson Noël’s Stealing Infinity (Entangled), the clever, fast-paced new series from the author of the Immortals series. Noël will be joined in conversation by Tracy Wolff, author of the Crave series.
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Thursday, July 7 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Victor Li is a man without a past. To his new employer, Mark, he’s just an anonymous hired hand to help with the dirty work. Together, they break into storage units that contain the possessions of the recently deported, pocketing whatever is worth selling. Only Victor and his sister, Jules, know that he’s a wanted man. Amid the backpacks and suitcases, Victor makes the find of a lifetime: a gem rare and valuable enough to change his fortunes in an instant. But selling it on the sly? Nearly impossible. Thankfully, its former owner, a woman named Song Fei, also left a book of cryptic notes — including the name of a gemstone dealer in Mexico City. When Victor and Mark cross the southern border, they quickly realize that this gem is wrapped up in a much larger scheme than they imagined. In Mexico City, shadowy international interests are jockeying for power, and they may need someone with Victor’s talents — the same ones that got him in trouble in the first place. On the heels of his knockout debut Beijing Payback, Daniel Nieh delivers Take No Names (Ecco), a white-knuckled and whip-smart thriller that races to an electrifying finish.
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Monday, July 11 @ 5pm (PT)
Louis Bayard, author of The Pale Blue Eye and The Black Tower, is back with a brilliantly wrought, witty, and sensitive novel about the young Jacqueline Bouvier before she became that Jackie — and about a marriage that almost never happened. In the spring of 1951, debutante Jacqueline Bouvier, working as the Inquiring Photographer for the Washington Times-Herald, meets Jack Kennedy, a charming congressman from a notorious and powerful family, at a party in Washington, DC. Young, rebellious, eager to break free from her mother, Jackie is drawn to the elusive young politician, and soon she and Jack are bantering over secret dinner dates and short work phone calls. Jack, busy with House duties during the week and Senate campaigning on the weekend (as well as his other now-well-known extracurricular activities) convinces his best friend and fixer, Lem Billings, to court Jackie on his behalf. Only gradually does Jackie begin to realize that she is being groomed to be the perfect political wife, whether Jack is interested in settling down or not. Taking place mostly during the spring and summer before Jack and Jackie’s wedding, and narrated by an older Lem as he looks back at his own relationship with the Kennedys and his role in this complicated marriage, Jackie & Me (Algonquin) is a searching story about a young woman of a certain class with narrow options, two people who loved each other, and two people who realized too late that they devoted their lives to Jack at their own expense. Sharply written, steeped in the era and with witty appearances by members of the extended Kennedy clan, this is Jackie as never before seen, in a story about love, sacrifice, friendship, and betrayal. Bayard will be joined in conversation by Julia Claiborne Johnson, author of Be Frank With Me and Better Luck Next Time.
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Tuesday, July 12 @ 5pm (PT)
In May 1962, Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl sent shockwaves through the United States, selling more than two million copies in three weeks. The future Cosmopolitan Editor-in-Chief’s book promoted the message that a woman’s needs, ambition, and success during her single years could actually take precedence over the search for a husband. While much of Brown’s advice is outdated and even offensive by today’s standards, her central message remains relevant. In their exceptional anthology, Sex and the Single Woman (Harper Perennial), editors Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson bring together insights from many of today’s leading feminist thinkers and writers to pay homage to Brown’s original work and reinterpret it for a new generation. These contributors provide a much-needed reckoning while addressing today’s central issues, from contraception and abortion (topics the publisher banned from the original) to queer and trans womanhood, racial double standards, dating with disabilities, sexual consent, singlehood by choice, single parenting, and more. Written for today’s women, this revisionist anthology honors Brown’s irreverent spirit just as it celebrates and validates women’s sexual lives and individual eras of singlehood, encouraging us all to reclaim joy where it’s so often been denied. This event will feature a panel discussion with Sex and the Single Woman contributors Tiana Clark, Vanessa Friedman, and Shayla Lawson, in conversation with Katherine Morgan, author of No Self-Respecting Woman.
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Wednesday, July 13 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Guided by acclaimed poet Matthew Dickman’s signature “clarity and ability to engage” (David Kirby, New York Times), Husbandry (W. W. Norton) is a love song from a father to his children. Written after a separation and during overwhelming single-fatherhood in the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, Husbandry refuses romantic notions of parenting and embraces all its mess, anguish, humor, fear, boredom, and warmth. Dickman composes these poems entirely in vivid couplets that animate the various domestic pairs of broken-up parents, two sons, love and grief. He explores the terrain of his children’s dreams and nightmares, the almost primal fears that spill into his own, and the residual impacts of his parents’ failures. Threading his anxieties with bright moments of beauty and gratitude, the volume delights in seeing the world through the clear eyes of childhood and finds meaning in the domestic work — repetitive, exhausting, and sublime — of sustaining three lives. With tender, aching precision, Husbandry reveals the poet’s hunger to be a husband without ever being one, and his search for a father that ends with becoming one himself. Dickman will be joined in conversation by Chelsea Bieker, author of Heartbroke and Godshot.
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Thursday, July 21 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
In the 1960s, Tillamook County, Oregon was at war with itself. As the regional dairy industry shifted from small local factories to larger consolidated factories, and as profit margins for milk and cheese collapsed, Tillamook farmers found themselves in a financial crisis that fueled multiple disputes. The ensuing Cheese War included lies and secrets, as well as spies, high emotion, a shoving match, and even a death threat. Sisters Marilyn Milne and Linda Kirk, children of the Cheese War, conducted years of research and have integrated it with tales of their experiences as farm kids living through the all-consuming fight. As Americans become ever more interested in food supply chains and ethical consumption, Cheese War (Oregon State) is the story of the very human factors behind one of Oregon’s most iconic brands.
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Tuesday, July 26 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
W. Kamau Bell and Kate Schatz’s Do the Work! (Workman) is a hands-on workbook for anyone overwhelmed by racial injustice, who feels shocked by all the American histories they never learned, and who keeps asking the question “what can I DOOOOOO?!” Packed with humorous, thought-provoking activities — all are rooted in history and contemporary social justice concepts — Bell and Schatz’s new book helps readers move from "What can I do?" to... you know... actually doing the work. Revelatory and thought-provoking, their highly illustrated, highly informative interactive workbook gives readers a unique, hands-on understanding of systemic racism — and how we can dismantle it. Packed with activities, games, illustrations, comics, and eye-opening conversation, Do the Work! challenges readers to think critically and act effectively. Try the “Separate but Not Equal” crossword puzzle. Play “Bootstrapping, the Game” to understand the myth of meritocracy. Test your knowledge of racist laws by playing “Jim Crow or Jim Faux?” Bell and Schatz will be joined in conversation by Megan Rapinoe, Olympic gold medalist, two-time Women’s World Cup champion, and author of One Life.
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Wednesday, July 27 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Denial (Simon & Schuster) is a futuristic thriller about climate change by Jon Raymond, the acclaimed screenwriter of First Cow, Meek’s Cutoff, and HBO’s Mildred Pierce. The year is 2052. Climate change has had a predictably devastating effect: Venice submerged, cyclones in Oklahoma, megafires in South America. Yet it could be much worse. Two decades earlier, the global protest movement known as the Upheavals helped break the planet’s fossil fuel dependency, and the subsequent Nuremberg-like Toronto Trials convicted the most powerful oil executives and lobbyists for crimes against the environment. Not all of them. A few executives escaped arrest and went into hiding, including pipeline mastermind Robert Cave. Now, a Pacific Northwest journalist named Jack Henry who works for a struggling media company has received a tip that Cave is living in Mexico. Hoping the story will save his job, he travels south and, using a fake identity, makes contact with the fugitive. The two men strike up an unexpected friendship, leaving Jack torn about exposing Cave — an uncertainty further compounded by the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and a new romance with an old acquaintance. Who will really benefit from the unmasking? What is the nature of justice and punishment? How does one contend with mortality when the planet itself is dying? Denial is both a page-turning speculative suspense novel and a powerful existential inquisition about the perilous moment in which we currently live. Raymond will be joined in conversation by Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks.
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Wednesday, July 27 @ 7:30pm (PT) / Newmark Theatre
From Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, comes a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants — and the equally powerful taboos. Of all the things humans rely on plants for — sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber — surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a "drug"? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime? In This Is Your Mind on Plants (Penguin Press), Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs — opium, caffeine, and mescaline — and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings? In his unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively — as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Pollan’s groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.
Please note: Tickets for this event are $28 (before service charges) and include admission, as well as one paperback copy of This Is Your Mind on Plants. Books distributed at event.
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Thursday, July 28 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
From the world of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead… Clementine lives! In Tillie Walden’s Clementine Book One (Image), Clementine is back on the road, looking to put her traumatic past behind her and forge a new path all her own. But when she comes across an Amish teenager named Amos with his head in the clouds, the unlikely pair journeys North to an abandoned ski resort in Vermont, where they meet up with a small group of teenagers attempting to build a new, walker-free settlement. As friendship, rivalry, and romance begin to blossom amongst the group, the harsh winter soon reveals that the biggest threat to their survival… might be each other. Walden will be joined in conversation by writer-illustrator Terry Blas, author of Dead Weight and Lifetime Passes.
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