Powell’s is excited to offer virtual event programming featuring authors from around the world. We’re using Zoom Webinar as our virtual event platform (as it comes with enhanced security features). Missed an event? Watch past virtual events on our YouTube channel.
Questions about how to attend our virtual events? Click here for our FAQ.
Tuesday, April 20 @ 5pm (PT)
From Paula McLain, the bestselling author of The Paris Wife, comes an atmospheric novel of intertwined destinies and heart-wrenching suspense: A detective hiding away from the world. A series of disappearances that reach into her past. Can solving them help her heal? Anna Hart is a seasoned missing persons detective in San Francisco with far too much knowledge of the darkest side of human nature. When tragedy strikes her personal life, Anna, desperate and numb, flees to the Northern California village of Mendocino to grieve. She lived there as a child with her beloved foster parents, and now she believes it might be the only place left for her. Yet the day she arrives, she learns a local teenage girl has gone missing. The crime feels frighteningly reminiscent of the most crucial time in Anna’s childhood, when the unsolved murder of a young girl touched Mendocino and changed the community forever. As past and present collide, Anna realizes that she has been led to this moment. Weaving together actual cases of missing persons, trauma theory, and a hint of the metaphysical, McLain’s propulsive and deeply affecting new novel, When the Stars Go Dark (Ballantine), tells a story of fate, necessary redemption, and what it takes, when the worst happens, to reclaim our lives — and our faith in one another. McLain will be joined in conversation by Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees, The Invention of Wings, and The Book of Longings. Signed editions of When the Stars Go Dark are available while supplies last.
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Thursday, April 22 @ 5pm (PT)
Empire of Pain (Doubleday) is a grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin — written by Patrick Radden Keefe, the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions — Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. In his new book, Keefe chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability. The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama — baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling. It is a portrait of the excesses of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed and indifference to human suffering that built one of the world’s great fortunes. Keefe will be joined in conversation by Lydia Polgreen, journalist and head of content for Gimlet Media.
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Tuesday, April 27 @ 5pm (PT)
Jonny Sun is back with a collection of essays and other writings in his unique, funny, and heartfelt style. The wonderfully original author of Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too gives us Goodbye, Again (Harper Perennial), a collection of touching and hilarious personal essays, stories, poems — accompanied by his trademark illustrations — covering topics such as mental health, happiness, and what it means to belong. The pieces range from long meditations on topics like loneliness and being an outsider, to short humor pieces, conversations, and memorable one-liners. Jonny's honest writings about his struggles with feeling productive, as well as his difficulties with anxiety and depression, will connect deeply with his fans, as well as anyone attempting to create in our chaotic world. It also features a recipe for scrambled eggs that might make you cry. Sun will be joined in conversation by Samantha Irby, author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life and Wow, No Thank You. Signed editions of Goodbye, Again are available while supplies last.
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Wednesday, April 28 @ 5pm (PT)
In his first basketball novel, New York Times bestselling author John Grisham takes you to a different kind of court. Samuel “Sooley” Sooleymon is a raw, young talent with big hoop dreams… and even bigger challenges off the court. In the summer of his 17th year, Samuel Sooleymon gets the chance of a lifetime: a trip to the United States with his South Sudanese teammates to play in a showcase basketball tournament. During the tournament, Samuel receives devastating news from home: A civil war is raging across South Sudan, and rebel troops have ransacked his village. His father is dead, his sister is missing, and his mother and two younger brothers are in a refugee camp. Partly out of sympathy, the coach of North Carolina Central offers him a scholarship. Samuel moves to Durham, enrolls in classes, joins the team, and prepares to sit out his freshman season. But Samuel has something no other player has: a fierce determination to succeed so he can bring his family to America. With the Central team losing and suffering injury after injury, Sooley is called off the bench. And the legend begins. But how far can Sooley take his team? And will success allow him to save his family? Gripping and moving, Sooley (Doubleday) showcases John Grisham’s unparalleled storytelling powers in a whole new light. This is Grisham at the top of his game. Grisham will be joined in conversation by thriller writer J. T. Ellison, author of Her Dark Lies and Emmy Award-winning cohost of the literary show, A Word on Words.
Please note: This is a ticketed event. Purchasing a preorder copy of Sooley ($28.95) entitles you to attend our virtual event with Grisham and Ellison on Wednesday, April 28, at 5pm (PT). After you’ve purchased the book, we will automatically register you for the Zoom event – and will send you a confirmation email two days prior to the event containing a Zoom link to the event and instructions on how to access it. A limited number of signed editions of Sooley are available, and will be shipped to ticket buyers while supplies last.
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Thursday, April 29 @ 8pm (PT)
From Michelle Zauner — the indie rock star of Japanese Breakfast fame and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book — comes an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In Crying in H Mart (Knopf), Zauner’s exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, she proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band — and meeting the man who would become her husband — her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was 25, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Zauner will be joined in conversation by Ben Gibbard, lead vocalist and guitarist of Death Cab for Cutie.
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Monday, May 3 @ 4pm (PT)
Our earliest experiences shape our lives far down the road, and What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing (Flatiron) provides powerful scientific and emotional insights into the behavioral patterns so many of us struggle to understand. “Through this lens we can build a renewed sense of personal self-worth and ultimately recalibrate our responses to circumstances, situations, and relationships. It is, in other words, the key to reshaping our very lives" (Oprah Winfrey). This book is going to change the way you see your life. Have you ever wondered, "Why did I do that?" or "Why can't I just control my behavior?" Others may judge our reactions and think, "What's wrong with that person?" When questioning our emotions, it's easy to place the blame on ourselves, holding ourselves and those around us to an impossible standard. It's time we started asking a different question. Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce D. Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” Here, Winfrey shares stories from her own past, understanding through experience the vulnerability that comes from facing trauma and adversity at a young age. In conversation throughout the book, she and Dr. Perry focus on understanding people, behavior, and ourselves. It’s a subtle but profound shift in our approach to trauma, and it’s one that allows us to understand our pasts in order to clear a path to our future ? opening the door to resilience and healing in a proven, powerful way. Winfrey and Dr. Perry will be joined in conversation by Arianna Davis, Oprah Daily Senior Director.
Please note: This is a ticketed event. Purchasing a preorder copy of What Happened to You? ($28.99) entitles you to attend the virtual event with Winfrey, Dr. Perry, and Davis on Monday, May 3, at 4pm (PT). After you’ve purchased the book, the publisher will automatically register you for the Zoom event – and will send you a confirmation email containing a Zoom link to the event and instructions on how to access it.
This event is presented in partnership with Flatiron Books and Blue Willow Bookshop.
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Tuesday, May 4 @ 5pm (PT)
A sequel to the critically acclaimed Rat Girl, Kristin Hersh’s beautifully written new memoir takes readers on an emotional journey through the author's life as she reflects on 30 years of music and motherhood. Doony, Ryder, Wyatt, Bodhi. The names of Hersh’s sons are the only ones included in her new book, Seeing Sideways: A Memoir of Music and Motherhood (University of Texas Press). As it unfolds and her sons’ voices rise from its pages, it becomes clear why: these names tell the story of her life. This story begins in 1990, when Hersh is the leader of the indie rock group Throwing Muses, touring steadily, and the mother of a young son, Doony. The chapters that follow reveal a woman and mother whose life and career grow and change with each of her sons: the story of a custody battle for Doony is told alongside that of Hersh’s struggles with her record company and the resulting PTSD; the tale of breaking free from her record label stands in counterpoint to her recounting of her pregnancy with Ryder; a period of writer’s block coincides with the development of Wyatt as an artist and the family’s loss of their home; and finally, soon after Bodhi’s arrival, Hersh and her boys face crises from which only strange angels can save them. Punctuated with her own song lyrics, Seeing Sideways is a memoir about a life strange enough to be fiction, but so raw and moving that it can only be real. Hersh will be joined in conversation by John Doe, founding member of punk band X and author of Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk.
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Wednesday, May 5 @ 5pm (PT)
Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she’s been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide. Now, in her first book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Knopf), the world’s leading forest ecologist brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths — that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own. Simard writes — in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways — how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies — and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them. Finding the Mother Tree is a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery. Simard will be joined in conversation by Aaron Scott, host of OPB's Timber Wars podcast and a producer/reporter for Oregon Field Guide. This event is cosponsored by Oregon Public Broadcasting.
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Thursday, May 6 @ 5pm (PT)
Like a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham’s debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go. Pop Song (Catapult) is a book about love and about falling in love — with a place, or a painting, or a person — and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss — from Agnes Martin’s abstract paintings to James Turrell’s transcendent light works, and Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean’s Blonde — Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself. Pop Song is also a book about distances, near and far. As she travels from Taos, New Mexico, to Shanghai, China, and beyond, Pham meditates on the miles we are willing to cover to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed. Pop Song is a book about all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home. There is heartache in these pages, but Pham’s electric ways of seeing create a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy that is triumphant in both its vulnerability and restlessness. Pham will be joined in conversation by Mary H.K. Choi, author of Emergency Contact, Permanent Record, and Yolk.
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Tuesday, May 11 @ 5pm (PT)
When award-winning, trendsetting chef Gregory Gourdet got sober, he took stock of his life and his pantry, concentrating his energy on getting himself healthy by cooking food that was both full of nutrients and full of flavor. Now, the beloved Top Chef star shares these extraordinary dishes with everyone. Gourdet’s Everyone’s Table (Harper Wave) features 200 mouthwatering, decadently flavorful recipes carefully designed to focus on superfoods — ingredients with the highest nutrient density, the best fats, and the most minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants — that will delight home cooks. Gourdet’s dishes are inspired by his deep affection for global ingredients and techniques — from his Haitian upbringing to his French culinary education, from the cuisines of Asia as well as those of North and West Africa. His unique culinary odyssey informs this one-of-a-kind cookbook, which features dynamic vegetable-forward dishes and savory meaty stews, umami-packed sauces and easy ferments, and endless clever ways to make both year-round and seasonal ingredients shine. Everyone’s Table will change forever the way we think about, approach, and enjoy healthy eating. Gourdet will be joined in conversation, Michelle Tam, food blogger and author of Nom Nom Paleo.
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Thursday, May 13 @ 5pm (PT)
The First Ten Years: Two Sides of the Same Love Story (Harper Perennial) is the sometimes hilarious, occasionally heartbreaking, and always entertaining joint memoir by Joseph Fink, cocreator of Welcome to Night Vale, and his wife, writer and performer Meg Bashwiner, chronicling the first 10 years of their relationship from both sides. In 2009, 22-year-old Joseph, newly arrived to New York City from the West Coast, was juggling odd jobs to pay the rent and volunteering with a theater company in the East Village so he could snag free tickets to their shows. Meg, a 22-year-old aspiring performer and playwright, was living with her parents in New Jersey, working a desk job and commuting to her internship with that same East Village theater company. Joseph's and Meg's stories meet when they both find themselves selling tickets in a cramped box office. They quickly became friends. Within a year, they were a couple. Within five years they were touring the world, performing on some of the world's greatest and not-so-great stages. In their candid, soul-baring memoir, Joseph and Meg recount their first 10 years together, each telling their story as they remember it, without having consulted the other. We hear both sides of their first kiss, first breakup, first getting back together, the death of a father, marriage, international fame, world tours, mental illness, and discussions about having children. Sometimes, they recall things differently — neither agrees on who paid for the morning-after pill on their first date. Sometimes they remember the exact same details in the same way — but still have their own narrative on just what those details mean. Bashwiner and Fink will be joined in conversation by Symphony Sanders, actor, voice of Welcome to Night Vale's Tamika Flynn, and co-host of the Good Morning Night Vale podcast.
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Tuesday, May 18 @ 5pm (PT)
From Suyi Davies Okungbowa, one of the most exciting new storytellers in epic fantasy, comes Son of the Storm (Orbit), a sweeping tale of violent conquest and forgotten magic set in a world inspired by the precolonial empires of West Africa. In the ancient city of Bassa, Danso is a clever scholar on the cusp of achieving greatness — only he doesn’t want it. Instead, he prefers to chase forbidden stories about what lies outside the city walls. The Bassai elite claim there is nothing of interest. The city’s immigrants are sworn to secrecy. But when Danso stumbles across a warrior wielding magic that shouldn’t exist, he’s put on a collision course with Bassa’s darkest secrets. Drawn into the city’s hidden history, he sets out on a journey beyond its borders. And the chaos left in the wake of his discovery threatens to destroy the empire. Okungbowa will be joined in conversation by S. A. Chakraborty, author of The Daevabad Trilogy.
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Wednesday, May 19 @ 5pm (PT)
At 51 years old, twins Jeanie and Julius still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation in the English countryside. The cottage they have shared their entire lives is their only protection against the modernizing world around them. Inside its walls, they make music, and in its garden, they grow everything they need to survive. To an outsider, it looks like poverty; to them, it is home. But when Dot dies unexpectedly, the world they’ve so carefully created begins to fall apart. The cottage they love, and the security it offered, is taken back by their landlord, exposing the twins to harsh truths and even harsher realities. Seeing a new future, Julius becomes torn between the loyalty he feels towards his sister and his desire for independence, while Jeanie struggles to find work and a home for them both. And just when it seems there might be a way forward, a series of startling secrets from their mother’s past come to the surface, forcing the twins to question who they are, and everything they know of their family’s history. In her stunning novel, Unsettled Ground (Tin House), Claire Fuller — the award-winning author of Our Endless Numbered Days, Swimming Lessons, and Bitter Orange — masterfully builds a tale of sacrifice and hope, of homelessness and hardship, of love and survival, in which two marginalized and remarkable people uncover long-held family secrets and, in their own way, repair, recover, and begin again. Fuller will be joined in conversation by Ron Rash, author of Serena and Above the Waterfall.
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Tuesday, May 25 @ 5pm (PT)
Jonathan Taplin’s extraordinary journey has put him at the crest of every major cultural wave in the past half century: he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band in the ’60s, producer of major films in the ’70s, an executive at Merrill Lynch in the ’80s, creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service in the ’90s, and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium. His is a lifetime marked not only by good timing but by impeccable instincts — from the folk scene to Woodstock, Hollywood’s rebellious film movement, and beyond. Taplin is not just a witness but a lifelong producer, the right-hand man to some of the greatest talents of both pop culture and the underground. With cameos by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Martin Scorsese, and countless other icons, The Magic Years (Heyday) is both a rock memoir and a work of cultural criticism from a key player who watched a nation turn from idealism to nihilism. Taplin offers a clear-eyed roadmap of how we got here and makes a convincing case for art’s power to deliver us from “passionless detachment” and rekindle our humanism. Taplin will be joined in conversation by Robbie Robertson, guitarist and principal songwriter in The Band.
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Tuesday, June 3 @ 5pm (PT)
It began with a comet… At first, people gazed in wonder at the radiant tear in the sky. A year later, the celestial marvel became a planetary crisis when Earth spun through the comet's debris field and the sky rained fire. The town of Northfall, Minnesota, will never be the same. Meteors cratered hardwood forests and annihilated homes, and among the wreckage a new metal was discovered. This "omnimetal" has properties that make it world-changing as an energy source… and a weapon. John Frontier — the troubled scion of an iron-ore dynasty in Northfall — returns for his sister's wedding to find his family embroiled in a cutthroat war to control mineral rights and mining operations. His father rightly suspects foreign leaders and competing corporations of sabotage, but the greatest threat to his legacy might be the U.S. government. Physicist Victoria Lennon was recruited by the Department of Defense to research omnimetal, but she finds herself trapped in a laboratory of nightmares. And across town, a rookie cop is investigating a murder that puts her own life in the crosshairs. She will have to compromise her moral code to bring justice to this now lawless community. In his gut-punch of a novel, The Ninth Metal (Houghton Mifflin), the first in his Comet Cycle, Benjamin Percy (author of Red Moon and The Wilding) lays bare how a modern-day gold rush has turned the middle of nowhere into the center of everything, and how one family — the Frontiers — hopes to control it all. Percy will be joined in conversation by Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling and The Ballad of Black Tom.
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Tuesday, June 8 @ 5pm (PT)
When Trystan Reese was just a year into his relationship with Biff (now his husband), the couple learned that Biff’s niece and nephew were about to be removed from their home by Child Protective Services. Immediately, Trystan and Biff took in one-year-old Hailey and three-year-old Lucas, becoming caregivers overnight to two tiny survivors of abuse and neglect. From this surprising start, Trystan and Biff built a loving marriage and happy home — learning to parent on the job. They adopted Hailey and Lucas, and soon decided to grow their family biologically with a child that Trystan, who is transgender, would carry. Trystan’s groundbreaking pregnancy attracted media fanfare, and the family welcomed baby Leo in 2017. In How We Do Family: From Adoption to Trans Pregnancy, What We Learned About Love and LGBTQ Parenthood (The Experiment), Trystan shares their unique story and what he’s learned about being the best parent, partner, and person you can be. Through crisis, adoption, pregnancy — and all the usual challenges of parenting — Trystan shows that more important than getting things right is doing them with love. Reese will be joined in conversation by Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon and Far from the Tree.
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Tuesday, June 15 @ 5pm (PT)
Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases, and even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of a rare illness called Chagas. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas — or the kissing bug disease — is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus. Today, more than 300,000 Americans have Chagas. Why do some infectious diseases make headlines and others fall by the wayside? After her aunt’s death, Hernández begins searching for answers about who our nation chooses to take care of and who we ignore. Crisscrossing the country, she interviews patients, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. Hernández’s The Kissing Bug (Tin House) tells the story of how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden — and how the disease intersects with Hernández’s own identity as a niece, sister, and daughter; a queer woman; a writer and researcher; and a citizen of a country that is only beginning to address the harms caused by Chagas, and the dangers it poses. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, The Kissing Bug reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all. Hernández will be joined in conversation by Amy Stewart, author of the Kopp Sisters series and The Drunken Botanist.
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