Powell’s is excited to offer virtual events 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.
Thursday, January 20 @ 5pm (PT)
Akata Woman (Viking Books for Young Readers) is the electrifying third book in the series that started with Akata Witch — named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time” and “100 Best YA Books of All Time” — from award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor. From the moment Sunny Nwazue discovered she had mystical energy flowing in her blood, she sought to understand and control her powers. Throughout her adventures in Akata Witch and Akata Warrior, she had to navigate the balance between nearly everything in her life — America and Nigeria, the “normal” world and the one infused with juju, human and spirit, good daughter and powerful Leopard Person. Now, those hard lessons and abilities are put to the test in a quest so dangerous and fantastical, it would be madness to go… but may destroy the world if she does not. With the help of her friends, Sunny embarks on a mission to find a precious object hidden deep in an otherworldly realm. Defeating the guardians of the prize will take more from Sunny than she has to give, and triumph will mean she will be forever changed. Okorafor will be joined in conversation by filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu, co-founder of AFROBUBBLEGUM.
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Tuesday, January 25 @ 5pm (PT)
The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection, Manywhere (MCD), witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, at whatever cost. As each character traces deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery. A trans woman finds her independence through the purchase of a pregnancy bump. A young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themselves in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A young writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag. And in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father. Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories rebound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Thomas uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, Manywhere introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent. Thomas will be joined in conversation by Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things.
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Friday, January 28 @ 5pm (PT)
When Alex and Elana move from small-town Virginia to El Paso, they are just a young married couple, intent on a new beginning. Mexican by birth but adopted by white American Pentecostal parents, Alex is hungry to learn about the place where he was born. He spends every free moment across the border in Juárez — perfecting his Spanish, hanging with a collective of young activists, and studying lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) for his graduate work in sociology. Meanwhile Elana, busy fighting her own demons, feels disillusioned by academia and has stopped going to class. And though they are best friends, Elana has no idea that Alex has fallen in love with Mateo, a lucha libre fighter. When Alex goes missing and Elana can’t determine whether he left of his own accord or was kidnapped, it’s clear that neither of them has been honest about who they are. Spanning their journey from Virginia to Texas to Mexico, Mesha Maren’s thrilling follow-up to Sugar Run takes us from missionaries to wrestling matches to a luxurious cartel compound, and deep into the psychic choices that shape our identities. A sweeping novel that tells us as much about our perceptions of the United States and Mexico as it does about our own natures and desires, Perpetual West (Algonquin) is a fiercely intelligent and engaging look at the false divide between high and low culture, and a suspenseful story of how harrowing events can bring our true selves to the surface. Maren will be joined in conversation by Gabriel Bump, author of Everywhere You Don't Belong.
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Tuesday, February 1 @ 5pm (PT)
Something strange is happening to the teens in Adena, Ohio. A mysterious force is seeking inroads: vulnerabilities to exploit, friendships to hijack, untapped rage to harness toward its own ends. Who will serve it best? Claire is abrasive and aimless, embarrassed by her privileged upbringing. Weak-willed David is consumed by a recent breakup and harbors fantasies of violent, cultish orgies. Greg silently wages war against the voices in his head, while his sister Beth goes quietly mad, surrounded by lights. And at the center is the empathetic, naïve, sensitive Sarah. The force wants her most of all. The question is whether she will be the key to its success or to its destruction. Eerie, hypnotic, and shot through with dark comedy, Simon Jacobs’s String Follow (MCD x FSG) is a razor-sharp suburban Gothic that cuts deep, exposing the sweating, bleeding truth of how kids become adults in 21st-century America. In spellbinding, incisive prose, Jacobs blends the startlingly original and the uncannily familiar, revealing the dark chaos that lurks under the surface of Midwestern suburbia. Jacobs will be joined in conversation by Mona Awad, author of All’s Well, Bunny, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl.
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Wednesday, February 2 @ 5pm (PT)
For fans of Denis Johnson and Ocean Vuong comes a captivating, searing, and ultimately redemptive debut novel about coming of age on Florida’s drug-riddled Gulf Coast and the enigmatic connection between memory and self. David has a mind that never stops running. He reads Dante and Moby Dick, he sinks into Hemingway and battles with Milton. But on Florida’s Gulf Coast, one can slip into deep water unconsciously; at the age of 14, David runs away from home to pursue a girl and, on his journey, tries crack cocaine for the first time. He’s hooked instantly. Over the course of the next decade, he fights his way out of jail and rehab, trying to make sense of the world around him — a sunken world where faith in anything is a privilege. He makes his way to a tenuous sobriety, but it isn't until he takes a literature class at a community college that something within him ignites. All Day Is a Long Time (Harper) is a spectacular, raw account of growing up and managing, against every expectation, to carve out a place for hope. We see what it means, and what it takes, to come back from a place of little control — to map ourselves on the world around, and beyond, us. David Sanchez’s debut resounds with real force and demonstrates the redemptive power of the written word. Sanchez will be joined in conversation by Karen Russell, author of Orange World and Other Stories and Swamplandia!.
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Thursday, February 3 @ 5pm (PT)
What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language (City Lights) is a work of passionate lyrical analysis, a set of freewheeling liner notes, and a love letter to the most vital American art form of the last half-century. Over a series of short chapters, each centered on a different lyric, Daniel Levin Becker — early contributor to the groundbreaking lyrics site Rap Genius (now known as Genius) and author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature — considers how rap’s use of language operates and evolves at levels ranging from the local (slang, rhyme) to the analytical (quotation, transcription) to the philosophical (morality, criticism, irony), celebrating the pleasures and perils of any attempt to decipher its meaning-making technologies. Ranging from Sugarhill Gang to UGK to Young M.A, Rakim to Rick Ross to Rae Sremmurd, Jay-Z to Drake to Snoop Dogg, What’s Good reads with the momentum of a deftly curated mixtape, drawing you into the conversation and teaching you to read it as it goes. A book for committed hip-hop heads, curious neophytes, armchair linguists, and everyone in between. Levin Becker will be joined in conversation by Casey Jarman, author of Death: An Oral History.
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Monday, February 7 @ 5pm (PT)
When Laura Coates joined the Department of Justice as a prosecutor, she wanted to advocate for the most vulnerable among us. But she quickly realized that even with the best intentions, “the pursuit of justice creates injustice.” Through Coates’s experiences, we see that no matter how fair you try to fight, being Black, a woman, and a mother are identities often at odds in the justice system. She and her colleagues face seemingly impossible situations as they teeter between what is right and what is just. On the front lines of our legal system, Coates saw how Black communities are policed differently; Black cases are prosecuted differently; Black defendants are judged differently. How the court system seems to be the one place where minorities are overrepresented, an unrelenting parade of Black and Brown defendants in numbers that belie their percentage in the population and overfill American prisons. She also witnessed how others in the system either abused power or were abused by it — for example, when an undocumented witness was arrested by ICE, when a white colleague taught Coates how to unfairly interrogate a young Black defendant, or when a judge victim-blamed a young sexual assault survivor based on her courtroom attire. Through the revelatory and captivating courtroom scenes in Just Pursuit (Simon & Schuster), Coates explores the tension between the idealism of the law and the reality of working within the parameters of our flawed legal system, exposing the chasm between what is right and what is lawful. Coates will be joined in conversation by Soledad O'Brien, award-winning documentarian, journalist, speaker, author, and philanthropist.
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Tuesday, February 8 @ 5pm (PT)
The ’90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we’re still groping to understand. Beyond epiphenomena like “Cop Killer” and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the Internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it. In The Nineties (Penguin Press), Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. Klosterman has written a multidimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.
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Tuesday, February 15 @ 5pm (PT)
Hazel Sinnett is a lady who wants to be a surgeon more than she wants to marry. Jack Currer is a resurrection man who’s just trying to survive in a city where it’s too easy to die. When the two of them have a chance encounter outside the Edinburgh Anatomist’s Society, Hazel thinks nothing of it at first. But after she gets kicked out of renowned surgeon Dr. Beecham’s lectures for being the wrong gender, she realizes that her new acquaintance might be more helpful than she first thought. Because Hazel has made a deal with Dr. Beecham: if she can pass the medical examination on her own, Beecham will allow her to continue her medical career. Without official lessons, though, Hazel will need more than just her books — she’ll need corpses to study. Lucky that she’s made the acquaintance of someone who digs them up for a living, then. But Jack has his own problems: strange men have been seen skulking around cemeteries, his friends are disappearing off the streets, and the dreaded Roman Fever, which wiped out thousands a few years ago, is back with a vengeance. Nobody important cares — until Hazel. Dana Schwartz’s Anatomy: A Love Story (Wednesday Books) promises a journey full of gothic romance and mystery as Hazel and Jack work together to uncover the secrets buried not just in unmarked graves, but in the very heart of Edinburgh society. Schwartz will be joined in conversation by Ian Karmel, stand-up comedian, actor, and co-head writer for The Late Late Show With James Cordon.
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Wednesday, February 16 @ 5pm (PT)
Though Owen Tanner has never met anyone else who has a chatty bird in their chest, medical forums would call him a Terror. From the moment Gail emerged between Owen's ribs, his mother knew that she had to hide him away from the world. After a decade spent in hiding, Owen takes a brazen trip outdoors in the middle of a forest fire, and his life is upended forever. Suddenly, Owen is forced to flee the home that had once felt so confining and hide in plain sight with his uncle and cousin in Washington. There, he feels the joy of finding a family among friends; of sharing the bird in his chest and being embraced fully; of falling in love and feeling the devastating heartbreak of rejection before finding a spark of happiness in the most unexpected place; of living his truth regardless of how hard the thieves of joy may try to tear him down. But the threat of the Army of Acronyms is a constant, looming presence, making Owen wonder if he'll ever find a way out of the cycle of fear. A heartbreaking yet hopeful novel about the things that make us unique and lovable, Emme Lund’s The Boy With a Bird in His Chest (Atria) grapples with the fear, depression, and feelings of isolation that come with believing that we will never be loved, let alone accepted, for who we truly are, and learning to live fully and openly regardless. Lund will be joined in conversation by Davey Davis, author of The Earthquake Room and X.
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Thursday, February 24 @ 5pm (PT)
From debut author Kit Mayquist comes a propulsive and atmospheric modern Gothic with all the splendor of The Great Gatsby... and all the secrets, lies, and darkness that opulence can hide. Med school dropout Lena is desperate for a job, any job, to help her parents, who are approaching bankruptcy after her father was injured and laid off nearly simultaneously. So when she is offered a position, against all odds, working for one of Boston's most elite families, the illustrious and secretive Verdeaus, she knows she must accept it — no matter how bizarre the interview or how vague the job description. By day, she is assistant to the family doctor and his charge, Jonathan, the sickly, poetic, drunken heir to the family empire, who is as difficult as his illness is mysterious. By night, Lena discovers the more sinister side of the family, as she works overtime at their lavish parties, helping to hide their self-destructive tendencies... and trying not to fall for Jonathan's alluring sister, Audrey. But when she stumbles upon the knowledge that the Verdeau patriarch is the one responsible for the ruin of her own family, Lena vows to get revenge — a poison-filled quest that leads her further into this hedonistic world than she ever bargained for, forcing her to decide how much — and whom — she's willing to sacrifice for payback. The perfect next read for fans of Mexican Gothic, Mayquist’s Tripping Arcadia (Dutton) is a page-turning and shocking tale with an unforgettable protagonist that explores family legacy and inheritance, the sacrifices we must make to get by in today's world, and the intoxicating, dangerous power of wealth. Mayquist will be joined in conversation by Hannah Whitten, author of For the Wolf.
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Monday, February 28 @ 5pm (PT)
Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems. In The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo (Pantheon), Hongo writes about the sound of surf being his first music as a kid in Hawaiʻi, about doo-wop and soul reaching out to him while growing up among Black and Asian classmates in LA, about Rilke and Joni Mitchell as the twin poets of his adolescence, and about feeling the pulse of John Coltrane’s jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joel’s piano from his car radio while driving the freeways as a young man trying to become a poet. Journeying further, he visits devoted collectors of decades-old audio gear as well as designers of the latest tube equipment, listens to sublime arias performed at La Scala, hears a ghostly lute at the grave of English Romantic poet John Keats in Rome, drinks in wisdom from blues musicians and a diversity of poetic elders while turning his ear toward the memory-rich strains of the music that has shaped him: Hawaiian steel guitar and canefield songs; Bach and the Band; Mingus, Puccini, and Duke Ellington. And in the decades-long process of perfecting his stereo setup, Hongo also discovers his own now-celebrated poetic voice. Hongo will be joined in conversation by Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels and The Hummingbird's Daughter.
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Monday, March 7 @ 7:30pm (PT) / Revolution Hall
Bob Odenkirk’s career is inexplicable. And yet he will try like hell to explicate it for you. Charting a “Homeric” decades-long “odyssey” from his origins in the seedy comedy clubs of Chicago to a dramatic career full of award nominations — with a side-trip into the action-man world that is baffling to all who know him — it’s almost like there are many Bob Odenkirks! But there is just one and one is plenty. In his hilarious, heartfelt new memoir, Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama (Random House), the star of Mr. Show, Breaking Bad, and Better Call Saul opens up about the highs and lows of showbiz, his cult status as a comedy writer, and what it’s like to reinvent himself as an action film ass-kicker at 50. Odenkirk will be joined in conversation by Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of Wild, Tiny Beautiful Things, and Brave Enough.
Tickets for this event, $38, include admission and a copy of Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama and are available at revolutionhall.com. Books will be distributed at the event.
Please note: Entry to Revolution Hall requires either proof of a full course of COVID vaccination OR proof of a negative PCR or antigen COVID test taken in the 72 hours prior to the event. All ticket sales are final, non-transferable, and non-refundable. For additional details, please review Revolution Hall's interim COVID policy.
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Tuesday, March 22 @ 5PM (PT)
Charm is a witch, and she is alone. The last of a line of conquered necromantic workers, now confined within the yard of regrown bone trees at Orchard House, and the secrets of their marrow. Charm is a prisoner, and a survivor. Charm tends the trees and their clattering fruit for the sake of her children, painstakingly grown and regrown with its fruit: Shame, Justice, Desire, Pride, and Pain. Charm is a whore, and a madam. The wealthy and powerful of Borenguard come to her house to buy time with the girls who aren't real. Except on Tuesdays, which is when the Emperor himself lays claim to his mistress, Charm herself. But now, Charm is also the only person who can keep an empire together, as the Emperor summons her to his deathbed, and charges her with choosing which of his awful, faithless sons will carry on the empire — by discovering which one is responsible for his own murder. If she does this last thing, she will finally have what has been denied her since the fall of Inshil — her freedom. But if she does, she will also be betraying the ghosts past and present that live on within her heart. Charm must choose. Her dead Emperor’s will or the whispers of her own ghosts. Justice for the empire or her own revenge. Sara A. Mueller’s debut novel, The Bone Orchard (Tor), is a fascinating whodunit set in a lush, gothic world of secrets and magic. Mueller will be joined in conversation by Arkady Martine, author of A Memory Called Empire.
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Thursday, March 24 @ 5pm (PT)
In a stunning debut — both a beautiful memoir and a brilliant work of investigative journalism that joins that ranks of works by Mary Karr, Leslie Jamison, and Kay Redfield Jamison – the former editor of The Paris Review explores the ways we pathologize human experiences, and offers a searing critique of the handbook of modern psychiatry. Over the course of 25 years, doctors diagnosed Sarah Fay with six different conditions — anorexia, major depressive disorder (MDD), anxiety disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and bipolar disorder. Pathological (HarperOne) is the gripping story of the factors that led to those diagnoses, and the impact each had on her life. But it is also a rigorously researched investigation into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — psychiatry’s “bible,” the manual from which all mental illness diagnoses come. Yet as Fay found out, this revered standard is fiction. Fay contemplates what it means to live with mental illness and what it has meant for her life, and for many others in similar circumstances. So many people have been misdiagnosed and over-diagnosed with multiple (sometimes competing) conditions, causing massive confusion, immense anguish, and unnecessary suffering. As Fay learned, with knowledge comes the ability to understand what invented terms like “clinical depression” or “anxiety disorder” or “bipolar disorder” or any other DSM diagnosis really means. In telling her story, Fay uses a surprising literary device, a fresh and entertaining survey of the rules and history of punctuation, to illuminate how, like pathology, punctuation orders and categorizes, and tries to make sense of what’s otherwise disordered. Fay will be joined in conversation by Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead and Exit A.
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Tuesday, April 19 @ 5pm (PT)
Do we need bookstores in the 21st century? If so, what makes a good one? In his beautifully written book, In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton), Jeff Deutsch — director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the world — pays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions. He considers how qualities like space, time, abundance, and community find expression in a good bookstore. Along the way, he also predicts — perhaps audaciously — a future in which the bookstore not only endures, but realizes its highest aspirations. In exploring why good bookstores matter, Deutsch draws on his lifelong experience as a bookseller, but also his upbringing as an Orthodox Jew. This spiritual and cultural heritage instilled in him a reverence for reading, not as a means to a living, but as an essential part of a meaningful life. Central among Deutsch's arguments for the necessity of bookstores is the incalculable value of browsing — since, when we are deep in the act of looking at the shelves, we move through space as though we are inside the mind itself, immersed in self-reflection. In the age of one-click shopping, this is no ordinary defense of bookstores, but rather an urgent account of why they are essential places of discovery, refuge, and fulfillment that enrich the communities that are lucky enough to have them. Deutsch will be joined in conversation by Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can’t Sleep and Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give.
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Wednesday, April 27 @ 5pm (PT)
In a genre-defying book hailed as “exquisite” (The New York Times) and “spectacular” (The Times Literary Supplement), bestselling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings (New York Review of Books) weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own — works that pondered the nature of narrative itself: Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler’s Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul; François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus — a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for a hundred years — resulted in his banishment; and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn’s struggle to write two of his own books — a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father — that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life. Mendelsohn will be joined in conversation by Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies.
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