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Powell's Books Author Events Powell's Books is honored to host author events at our locations in downtown Portland and Beaverton, Oregon.

Check out our virtual events archive on our YouTube channel.


I Will Read to You

Kids’ Storytime

Saturday, September 30 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Join us every Saturday for kids' storytime. Today we're reading I Will Read to You by Gideon Sterer.

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Wildfire

Breena Bard in Conversation With Jonathan Hill

Saturday, September 30 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Julianna loved her life in rural Oregon. She loved taking care of her farm animals and being part of her local 4H club. But then the unthinkable happened… a wildfire destroyed her family’s home. In the aftermath, her family relocated to Portland, Oregon, where Julianna hopes to put everything behind her. Believing the fire to be the result of kids playing with fireworks, she certainly isn’t interested when her parents and younger sister start getting involved in the growing climate change protests. All she wants to do is move on, but that becomes near impossible when Carson, an old friend from her hometown who may have had a hand in starting the wildfire, is suddenly back in her life. Julianna can’t seem to catch a break, but when two new friends invite her to join their school’s conservation club, she learns that maybe she can turn her anger into something powerful. Emotional and inspiring, Breena Bard’s new graphic novel, Wildfire (Little, Brown Ink), shows readers that healing from tragedy can take many forms and demonstrates what it means to take action in the face of climate change — and how that action can be different for each of us. Bard will be joined in conversation by Jonathan Hill, award-winning cartoonist and author of Tales of a Seventh-Grade Lizard Boy.

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And Now, Nowhere But Here

Andrea Hollander & John Brehm

Sunday, October 1 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Each of the 52 poems in Andrea Hollander’s And Now, Nowhere But Here (Terrapin Books), her sixth full-length collection, focuses on “an appreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible,” to quote Joseph Conrad from Heart of Darkness. But these autobiographical poems are not dark. Instead, they explore threshold moments from Hollander’s New Jersey childhood after her family’s departure from the military; her young adult years and accompanying struggles to understand how to engage with men; her long marriage spent in the Arkansas Ozark woods and its unexpected end; and her subsequent love affair with Portland, Oregon, where she settled after her divorce in 2011 and where she continues to thrive.

In Dharma Talk (Wisdom Publications), award-winning poet John Brehm, author of The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, explores the perennial themes of aging, compassion, emptiness, nonseparation, and more. At once poignant and humorous, Brehm’s gentle, wry poems remind us that the personal and the universal are not different — and point us to the Dharma of everyday life.

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Deliver Me

Elle Nash in Conversation With Kevin Maloney

Sunday, October 1 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

At a meatpacking facility in the Missouri Ozarks, Dee-Dee and her co-workers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift. The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee’s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term. Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges Dee-Dee to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend, Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish. With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother’s and boyfriend’s newfound parturient attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete. When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane’s own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby’s arrival. Deliver Me (Unnamed Press) is the new novel from Elle Nash, author of Animals Eat Each Other. Nash will be joined in conversation by Kevin Maloney, author of The Red-Headed Pilgrim.

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Jewish Space Lasers

Mike Rothschild in Conversation With Shane Burley

Monday, October 2 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In 2018, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene took to social media to share her suspicions that the California wildfires were started by 'space solar generators' which were funded by powerful, mysterious backers. Instantly, thousands of people rallied around her, blaming the fires on "Jewish space lasers" and, ultimately, the Rothschild family. For more than 200 years, the name "Rothschild" has been synonymous with two things: great wealth, and conspiracy theories about what they're "really doing" with it. Almost from the moment Mayer Amschel Rothschild and his sons emerged from the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt to revolutionize the banking world, the Rothschild family has been the target of myths, hoaxes, bizarre accusations, and constant, virulent antisemitism. Over the years, they have been blamed for everything from the sinking of the Titanic, to causing the Great Depression, and even creating the COVID-19 pandemic. Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories (Melville House) is a deeply researched dive into the history of the conspiracy industry around the Rothschild family — from the "pamphlet wars" of Paris in the 1840s to the dankest pits of the internet today. Journalist and conspiracy theory expert Mike Rothschild, who isn't related to the family, sorts out myth from reality to find the truth about these conspiracy theories and their spreaders. Who were the Rothschilds? Who are they today? Do they really own $500 trillion and every central bank, in addition to "controlling the British money supply"? Is any of this actually true? And why, even as their wealth and influence have waned, do they continue to drive conspiracies and hoaxes? Rothschild will be joined in conversation by Shane Burley, author of ¡No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis.

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Bride of the Tornado

James Kennedy in Conversation With Laini Taylor

Monday, October 2 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Stephen King’s The Mist meets David Lynch’s Twin Peaks in this surreal, mind-bending horror-thriller. In a small town tucked away in the midwestern corn fields, the adults whisper about Tornado Day. Our narrator, a high school sophomore, has never heard this phrase but she soon discovers its terrible meaning: a plague of sentient tornadoes is coming to destroy them. The only thing that stands between the town and total annihilation is a teen boy known as the tornado killer. Drawn to this enigmatic boy, our narrator senses an unnatural connection between them. But the adults are hiding a secret about the origins of the tornadoes and the true nature of the tornado killer — and our narrator must escape before the primeval power that binds them all comes to claim her. Audaciously conceived and steeped in existential dread, James Kennedy’s Bride of the Tornado (Quirk Books) is a genre-defying fever dream of a novel that reveals the mythbound madness at the heart of American life. Kennedy will be joined in conversation by Laini Taylor, author of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy.

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The Cost of Free Land

Rebecca Clarren in Conversation With Trevino L. Brings Plenty

Tuesday, October 3 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Growing up, Rebecca Clarren only knew the major plot points of her tenacious immigrant family’s origins. Her great-great-grandparents, the Sinykins, and their six children fled antisemitism in Russia and arrived in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, ultimately settling on a 160-acre homestead in South Dakota. Over the next few decades, despite tough years on a merciless prairie and multiple setbacks, the Sinykins became an American immigrant success story. What none of Clarren’s ancestors ever mentioned was that their land, the foundation for much of their wealth, had been cruelly taken from the Lakota by the United States government. By the time the Sinykins moved to South Dakota, America had broken hundreds of treaties with hundreds of Indigenous nations across the continent, and the land that had once been reserved for the seven bands of the Lakota had been diminished, splintered, and handed for free, or practically free, to white settlers. In The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance (Viking), Clarren melds investigative reporting with personal family history to reveal the intertwined stories of her family and the Lakota, and the devastating cycle of loss of Indigenous land, culture, and resources that continues today. With deep empathy and clarity of purpose, Clarren grapples with the personal and national consequences of this legacy of violence and dispossession. What does it mean to survive oppression only to perpetuate and benefit from the oppression of others? By shining a light on the people and families tangled up in this country’s difficult history, The Cost of Free Land invites readers to consider their own culpability and what, now, can be done. Clarren will be joined in conversation by filmmaker, musician, and poet Trevino L. Brings Plenty, author of Wakpa´ Wana´gi Ghost River and Real Indian Junk Jewelry.

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Prince of Thorns & Nightmares

Linsey Miller in Conversation With Rosiee Thor

Tuesday, October 3 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Prince Phillip's known from a young age that his destiny has already been decided for him by his father, King Hubert. His job is to smile and wave for the crowd and ride off into the sunset with his predetermined fiancée, Princess Aurora, after her curse is lifted on her sixteenth birthday. But just days before Aurora's birthday party, Phillip experiences a strange burst of magic, and three fairies tell him that he is part of a prophecy set to defeat Maleficent, the Mistress of All Evil. Suddenly Phillip feels as if he has a choice — maybe magic can be the freedom he has been looking for. Although, having magic and working with fairies to retrieve powerful ancient artifacts would be much more enjoyable if he didn't have to deal with her every night, a girl named Briar Rose who appears in his dreams on the other side of a mystical thorn maze. Phillip doesn't know how he can be so annoyed by a person he can't even see but having to hear the mysterious maiden's laughs and jabs at him every time he goes to sleep is worse than any nightmare. But Phillip is starting to realize that Briar Rose isn't so different from himself, and maybe they can change both of their fates one dream at a time. In Linsey Miller’s Prince of Thorns & Nightmares (Disney Press), Prince Phillip tells his side of Disney's Sleeping Beauty, where once upon a dream was just the beginning. Miller will be joined in conversation by Rosiee Thor, author of Tarnished Are the Stars.

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Our Fragile Moment

Michael Mann in Conversation With Monica Samayoa

Wednesday, October 4 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

For the vast majority of its 4.54 billion years, Earth has proven it can manage just fine without human beings. Then came the first proto-humans, who emerged just a little more than 2 million years ago — a fleeting moment in geological time. What is it that made this benevolent moment of ours possible? Ironically, it’s the very same thing that now threatens us — climate change. The drying of the tropics during the Pleistocene period created a niche for early hominids, who could hunt prey as forests gave way to savannahs in the African tropics. The sudden cooling episode known as the “Younger Dryas” 13,000 years ago, which occurred just as Earth was thawing out of the last Ice Age, spurred the development of agriculture in the fertile crescent. The “Little Ice Age” cooling of the 16th–19th centuries led to famines and pestilence for much of Europe, yet it was a boon for the Dutch, who were able to take advantage of stronger winds to shorten their ocean voyages. The conditions that allowed humans to live on this earth are fragile, incredibly so. Climate variability has at times created new niches that humans or their ancestors could potentially exploit, and challenges that at times have spurred innovation. But there’s a relatively narrow envelope of climate variability within which human civilization remains viable. And our survival depends on conditions remaining within that range. In his book, Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis (PublicAffairs), renowned climate scientist Michael Mann, author of The New Climate War, will arm readers with the knowledge necessary to appreciate the gravity of the unfolding climate crisis, while emboldening them — and others — to act before it truly does become too late. Mann will be joined in conversation by Monica Samayoa, award-winning climate and environmental journalist.

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Rough Around the Hedges

Lish McBride in Conversation With Shéa MacLeod & Linda Mercury

Thursday, October 5 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Will Murphy spends his down time doing subversive cross-stitch, crafting saucy baked goods for the romance book club he attends with his Nana, and desperately trying to hide the fact that he’s been in love with Vanessa Woodbridge for, well, ever. For years, he’s been content to wear the best friend label. But suddenly it’s starting to chafe, right when Vanessa needs a trusted friend more than ever. Vanessa Woodbridge wants to be a hedge witch more than anything, but her chances of becoming one are laughable. Her father’s pride stands between her and her dream of leaving her barista job behind in favor of crafting helpful potions and magical edibles at Wicked Brews. The Woodbridge patriarch has forbidden her from a career path that is, in his opinion, beneath their magical family legacy. She might not care about his feelings, but without his signature, Vanessa can’t sign up for the classes she desperately needs to learn essential hedge witchery. She’s ready to give up, but with Will at her back, she finds the courage to fight for what she wants. She’s never been able to count on her dad, but she can count on her best friend. Will’s her rock. He would never crumble. Only Will feels like he’s doing exactly that. He’s falling apart inside and he’s not sure how long he can keep up the façade of the calm, platonic, best friend. But for Vanessa? He’d do anything to help her get her dream… Even if it costs him the one thing he cherishes most. Her. Rough Around the Hedges (Devo-Lish) is the new uncanny romance novel from Lish McBride. McBride will be joined in conversation by Shéa MacLeod, author of the Lady Rample Mysteries cozy series, and Linda Mercury, author of Start Your Life Now.

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Menewood

Nicola Griffith in Conversation With Michelle Kicherer

Friday, October 6 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In the much-anticipated sequel to Hild, Nicola Griffith’s Menewood (MCD) transports readers to seventh-century Britain, a land full of rival kings and rival religions, poised for revolutions like the world has never seen. Hild — now eighteen and married to her forbidden childhood love, battle-scarred and triumphant — is no longer a bright child who charms and dazzles the court with seemingly supernatural insight. But she remains one of the king’s most trusted advisers, both seer and warrior, which makes her formidable in a volatile court, and also subject to His Majesty’s most dangerous whims. She has never been stronger or more vulnerable. And war is brewing: old alliances are fraying, the priests are impatient to displace the old religions, vengeful rivals are antsy, the king is greedy and dangerously confident. Change is in the air, even if Hild is the only one who can clearly sense it. She wants to protect her own — her family, her friends, her land — but is that enough? For them? For her? As she fights to survive the turbulent times, her life will be rocked by unimaginable loss and grief, and a new strength will be forged, as her vision for a new kind of future emerges and Menewood takes root. In the last decade, Hild has become a beloved classic of epic storytelling. Menewood picks up where that heroine’s journey left off, and exceeds it in every way. Griffith will be joined in conversation by arts journalist and writing coach Michelle Kicherer.

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The Forest Demands Its Due

Kosoko Jackson in Conversation With Aiden Thomas

Friday, October 6 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

A Lesson in Vengeance meets The Taking of Jake Livingston in The Forest Demands Its Due (Quill Tree), Kosoko Jackson’s thrilling, page-turning YA horror/fantasy set in dark academia — about a queer Black teen who discovers the sinister, deadly history of his boarding school and the corrupt powers behind it all. Regent Academy has a long and storied history in Winslow, Vermont, as does the forest that surrounds it. The school is known for molding teens into leaders, but its history is far more nefarious than any outsider could begin to suspect. Seventeen-year-old Douglas Jones wants nothing to do with Regent's king-making; he’s just trying to survive. But then a student is murdered and, for some reason, by the next day no one remembers him having ever existed, except for Douglas and the groundskeeper's son, Everett Everley. In his determination to uncover the truth, Douglas awakens a horror hidden within the forest, unearthing secrets that have been buried for centuries. A vengeful creature wants blood as payment for a debt more than 300 years in the making — or it will swallow all of Winslow in darkness. And for the first time in his life, Douglas might have a chance to grasp the one thing he’s always felt was missing: power. But if he’s not careful, he will find out that power has a tendency to corrupt absolutely everything. Jackson will be joined in conversation by Aiden Thomas, author of The Sunbearer Trials.

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A Stone Is a Story

Kids' Storytime With Leslie Barnard Booth

Saturday, October 7 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

"Where do rocks come from?" The answer may be more incredible than you think! After all, a stone is not just a stone: a stone is a story. Embark on a journey across time to see how one stone can change and transform, from magma under Earth's crust to the sand swept up by a rushing river to the very heart of the tallest mountain. Watch what happens when rain, ice, and wind mold this rock into something new, something you might even hold in your hand — something full of endless possibility. Complete with additional information about geology and the rock cycle, Leslie Barnard Booth’s A Stone Is a Story (Margaret K. McElderry Books) is a lyrical and captivating story that invites readers to experience the wonder of the natural world around us, and to see — in every cliff, pebble, and stone — a window into Earth's deep past.

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Shitty Craft Club

Sam Reece

Saturday, October 7 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Welcome to the Shitty Craft Club! Based on the TikTok sensation by comedian Sam Reece, Shitty Craft Club (Chronicle Books) is an empowering guide to creativity, embracing chaos, and finding inner calm. Did you know that you are a glorious and incredible artist? Wait, really? Well, you are. Shitty Craft Club gives you permission to have fun and be as weird, wild, and wonderful as you want to be. It’s about trying for your best, not perfection. With step-by-step instructions and funny, deeply relatable tales from her life, Reece hilariously guides you through dozens of projects. Melding the nihilistic spirit of millennial/Gen Z humor with Amy Sedaris's gonzo crafting style and a healthy dose of Lisa Frank vibes, Reece proves there’s no limit to what a craft can be. Making a bunch of pom-poms so you can be your own cheerleader? That’s a craft. Sculpting a rhinestone shrimp out of aluminum foil and a glue gun? A craft. Having literally one sip of water (congrats, by the way)? Yup, you bet — a craft. Because life is hard. So why not spend a bit of time gluing some trash to more trash if it makes you happy?

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Disease of Kings

Anders Carlson-Wee & Edgar Kunz

Sunday, October 8 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In poems bursting with narrative power, Disease of Kings (W. W. Norton) explores the tender yet volatile friendship between two young scammers living off the fat of society. Here are stories of an odd couple who scrounge, con, hustle, and steal, alternately proud of their ability to fabricate a life at the margins and ashamed of their own laziness and greed. Rich with a specificity of voices, these poems locate themselves in a midwestern city at once gritty with reality and achingly anonymous. Here, the central speaker and his best — only — friend, North, come together and apart, nursing a sense of freedom that is fraught with codependence and isolation. With plainspoken language and tremendous tonal range, Anders Carlson-Wee leads us into the heart of one friendship's uneasy domesticity — a purgatory where, in this poet's vision, it is possible for loss to give way to hope, lack to fulfillment, shame to gratitude. 

From the author of the award-winning Tap Out — "a gritty, insightful debut" (Washington Post) — Edgar Kunz's second poetry collection, Fixer (Ecco), propels the reader across the shifting terrain of late-capitalist America. Temp jobs, conspiracy theories, squatters, talk therapy, urban gardening, the robot revolution: this collection fixes its eye on the strangeness of labor, through poems that are searching, keen, and wry. The virtuosic central sequence explores the untimely death of the poet's estranged father, a handyman and addict, and the brothers left to sort through the detritus of a life long lost to them. Through lyrical, darkly humorous vignettes, Kunz asks what it costs to build a home and a love that not only lasts but sustains.

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Preorder a Signed Edition (Kunz)

The Book of (More) Delights

Ross Gay

Sunday, October 8 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Ross Gay’s essays have been called “exquisite” (Tracy K. Smith), “imperative” (New York Times Book Review), and “brilliant” (Ada Limón). Now in his new collection of genre-defying pieces, The Book of (More) Delights (Algonquin) — again written over the course of a year — one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “ubiquitous, nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world — sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree — and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. For his many fans eagerly awaiting this new volume and for readers who have enjoyed the works of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Zadie Smith, and Rebecca Solnit, Gay once again offers us “literature that feels as fluent and familiar as a chat with a close friend” (New York Review of Books). The Book of (More) Delights is a collection to savor and share.

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This is Death Valley

Melissa Broder in Conversation With Katherine D. Morgan CANCELLED  

Monday, October 9 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

We are sorry to report that this event has been cancelled.
 
The most profound book yet from the visionary author of Milk Fed and The Pisces, a darkly funny novel about grief that becomes a desert survival story. In Melissa Broder’s astounding new novel, a woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow — for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path, thanks to a receptionist who recommends a nearby hike. Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant. This is Melissa Broder at her most imaginative, most universal, and finest. This is Death Valley (Scribner). Broder will be joined in conversation by Katherine D. Morgan, author of the debut chapbook, No Self-Respecting Woman.

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But First, Coffee

Jordan Michelman & Zachary Carlsen

Monday, October 9 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

But First, Coffee (Union Square) is the entertaining and informative new coffee book from Jordan Michelman and Zachary Carlsen, the cofounders of Sprudge — the world’s most popular coffee website. But First, Coffee shows readers the many ways they can enjoy coffee at home, from detailed instructions on countertop brewing methods like Chemex, AeroPress, and French press to recipes that use coffee as an ingredient in cocktails, milkshakes, floats, and even a spice rub. Whether you use an automatic coffee maker or a fancy La Marzocco espresso machine, this book will build your coffee-crafting knowledge, with recipes such as Caffe con Panna (a shot of espresso topped with whipped cream), Affogato (espresso poured over ice cream), a coffee-chocolate syrup, and the classic Espresso Martini. The book also includes tips and guidance on the gear you need to create the home coffee experience that’s right for you; expert instructions for more than two-dozen brewing methods for coffee and espresso; and sections on how to build a mug collection and how to find the best coffee beans on the market. Part barista recipe book, part mixology book, But First, Coffee has all the coffee recipes you need to keep the java flowing from morning to night.

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Collision of Power

Martin Baron in Conversation With Len Reed

Tuesday, October 10 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Marty Baron took charge of The Washington Post newsroom in 2013, after nearly a dozen years leading The Boston Globe. Just seven months into his new job, Baron received explosive news: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, would buy the Post, marking a sudden end to control by the venerated family that had presided over the paper for eighty years. Just over two years later, Donald Trump won the presidency. Now, the capital’s newspaper, owned by one of the world’s richest men, was tasked with reporting on a president who had campaigned against the press as the “lowest form of humanity.” Pressures on Baron and his colleagues were immense and unrelenting, having to meet the demands of their new owner while contending with a president who waged a war of unprecedented vitriol and vengeance against the media. In the face of Trump’s unceasing attacks, Baron steadfastly managed the Post’s newsroom. Their groundbreaking and award-winning coverage included stories about Trump’s purported charitable giving, misconduct by the Secret Service, and Roy Moore’s troubling sexual history. At the same time, Baron managed a restive staff during a period of rapidly changing societal dynamics around gender and race. In Collision of Power (Flatiron), Baron recounts this with the tenacity of a reporter and the sure hand of an experienced editor. The result is elegant and revelatory — an urgent exploration of the nature of power in the 21st century. Baron will be joined in conversation by former Oregonian editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning editorialist Len Reed.

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The Hank Show

McKenzie Funk in Conversation With Peter Frick-Wright

Tuesday, October 10 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

The world we live in today, where everything is tracked by corporations and governments, originates with one manic, elusive, utterly unique man — as prone to bullying as he was to fits of surpassing generosity and surprising genius. His name was Hank Asher, and his life was a strange and spectacular show that changed the course of the future. In The Hank Show: How a House-Painting, Drug-Running DEA Informant Built the Machine That Rules Our Lives (St. Martin’s), critically acclaimed author and journalist McKenzie Funk relates Asher's stranger-than-fiction story — he careened from drug-running pilot to alleged CIA asset, only to be reborn as the pioneering computer programmer known as the father of data fusion. He was the billionaire whose creations now power a new reality where your every move is tracked by police departments, intelligence agencies, political parties, and financial firms alike. But his success was not without setbacks. He truly lived nine lives — on top of the world one minute, only to be forced out of the companies he founded and blamed for data breaches resulting in major lawsuits and market chaos. In the vein of the blockbuster movie Catch Me if You Can, this spellbinding work of narrative nonfiction propels you forward on a forty-year journey of intrigue and innovation, from Colombia to the White House and from Silicon Valley to the 2016 Trump campaign, focusing a lens on the dark side of American business and its impact on the everyday fabric of our modern lives. Funk will be joined in conversation by audio producer and writer Peter Frick-Wright.

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In the Form of a Question

Amy Schneider

Wednesday, October 11 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In eighth grade, Amy Schneider was voted “Most likely to appear on Jeopardy!” by her classmates. Decades later, this trailblazer finally got her chance. Not only did she walk away with $1.3 million while captivating the world with her impressive 40-game winning streak, but she made history and won an even greater prize — the joy of being herself on national television and blazing a trail for openly queer and transgender people around the world. Now, she shares her singular journey that led to becoming an unlikely icon and hero to millions. Her super power: boundless curiosity and fearless questioning. In the Form of a Question (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster) explores some of the innumerable topics that have fascinated Amy throughout her life — books and music, Tarot and astrology, popular culture and computers, sex and relationships — but they all share the same purpose: to illustrate, and celebrate, the results of a lifetime spent asking, why?

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A Fine Line: Searching for Balance Among Mountains

Graham Zimmerman in Conversation With Greg Scott

Thursday, October 12 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

How do we reconcile our love of outdoor adventure with the inevitability of loss in high-risk sports? Still in his thirties, Graham Zimmerman has made first ascents from Alaska to Pakistan, and in 2020 he received the Piolet d’Or for his climb on Pakistan’s Link Sar with Steve Swenson. A sponsored athlete who is sought out as a climbing partner, Zimmerman knows that he must find a balance between his ambitions as an alpinist and his social responsibilities — as a husband, climate advocate, and community leader. His generation has faced devastating grief in the mountains, including the deaths of Kyle Dempster, Hayden Kennedy, and Inge Perkins, and his cohort has witnessed firsthand the effects of climate change in the form of disappearing glaciers and increasingly erratic weather. Zimmerman writes of the exhilaration he feels while climbing but also the painful realization that summiting at all costs is an outdated model. As A Fine Line: Searching for Balance Among Mountains (Mountaineers Books) traces Zimmerman’s journey, mountain lovers everywhere will see themselves in this coming-of-age story of adventure and personal reckoning. Zimmerman will be joined in conversation by Greg Scott, board president for the Mazamas.

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Liberation Day

George Saunders in Conversation With Justin Taylor

Thursday, October 12 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

The “best short story writer in English” (Time) is back with Liberation Day (Random House), a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose — wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned — George Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality. “Love Letter” is a tender missive from grandfather to grandson, in the midst of a dystopian political situation in the not-too-distant future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and each other. “Ghoul” is set in a Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park in Colorado, and follows the exploits of a lonely, morally complex character named Brian, who comes to question everything he takes for granted about his “reality.” In “Mother’s Day,” two women who loved the same man come to an existential reckoning in the middle of a hailstorm. And in “Elliott Spencer,” our 89-year-old protagonist finds himself brainwashed — his memory “scraped” — a victim of a scheme in which poor, vulnerable people are reprogrammed and deployed as political protesters. Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention as Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances. Saunders will be joined in conversation by Justin Taylor, author of Riding with the Ghost.

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Canopy of Titans

Paul Koberstein & Jessica Applegate in Conversation With Ian Gill

Friday, October 13 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In Canopy of Titans (OR Books), Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate examine the global importance of the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest that stretches from Northern California to Alaska. Their urgent and authoritative account sets out the threats facing a vital environmental resource, and celebrates the beauty and complexity of one of the world's great forests. Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting, Koberstein and Applegate pull back the curtain on policies of governmental bodies that have seriously diminished the rainforest's capacity to store carbon, and uncover industry practices that have led to the destruction of swaths of a major ecological resource. Additionally, using an environmental justice perspective, Canopy of Titans shines a light on the Indigenous communities that have lived in the rainforest for millennia, and the impact forest policies have had on their lives. Koberstein and Applegate will be joined in conversation by Ian Gill, author, journalist, critic, conservationist, and co-founder of the West Coast bioregional initiative, Salmon Nation.

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Last to Leave the Room

Caitlin Starling & CJ Leede

Friday, October 13 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

The city of San Siroco is sinking. The basement of Dr. Tamsin Rivers, the arrogant, selfish head of the research team assigned to find the source of the subsidence, is sinking faster. As Tamsin grows obsessed with the distorting dimensions of the room at the bottom of the stairs, she finds a door that didn’t exist before — and one night, it opens to reveal an exact physical copy of her. This doppelgänger is sweet and biddable where Tamsin is calculating and cruel. It appears fully, terribly human, passing every test Tamsin can devise. But the longer the double exists, the more Tamsin begins to forget pieces of her life, to lose track of time, to grow terrified of the outside world. As her employer grows increasingly suspicious, Tamsin must try to hold herself together long enough to figure out what her double wants from her, and just where the mysterious door leads. Last to Leave the Room (St. Martin’s) is a new novel of genre-busting speculative horror from Caitlin Starling, author of The Death of Jane Lawrence.

A provocative and unforgettable debut that is both a blood-soaked love letter to Los Angeles and a gleeful send-up to iconic horror villains, CJ Leede’s Maeve Fly (Tor Nightfire) will thrill fans of My Heart is a Chainsaw and Caroline Kepnes’s You series. By day, Maeve Fly works at the happiest place in the world as every child’s favorite ice princess. By the neon night glow of the Sunset Strip, Maeve haunts the dive bars with a drink in one hand and a book in the other, imitating her misanthropic literary heroes. But when Gideon Green — her best friend’s brother — moves to town, he awakens something dangerous within her, and the world she knows suddenly shifts beneath her feet. Untethered, Maeve ditches her discontented act and tries on a new persona. A bolder, bloodier one, inspired by the pages of American Psycho. Step aside Patrick Bateman, it’s Maeve’s turn with the knife.

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Bruce and the Legend of Soggy Hollow

Kids' Storytime With Ryan T. Higgins

Saturday, October 14 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Celebrate all things scary with Ryan T. Higgins's new Mother Bruce picture book, Bruce and the Legend of Soggy Hollow (Disney-Hyperion). Bruce is a bear who does not like holidays, and he really doesn't like Halloween. His family of mice and geese decides the only way to get Bruce excited about Halloween is to tell a scary story. But their campfire tale takes a turn when a ghostly visitor appears. Will Bruce get in the Halloween spirit? Or will the Halloween spirit get Bruce?

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Rintaro

Sylvan Mishima Brackett in Conversation With Nori De Vega

Saturday, October 14 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Nestled behind a leafy courtyard in San Francisco's Mission District, with the warm glow of lanterns illuminating well-worn wood counters, Rintaro is a beautiful escape: familiar and unexpected, bold and restrained. And its food is straightforwardly delicious: dashimaki tamago, juicy and piping hot; pork gyoza, each dumpling held together by a web of crispy batter; udon with hand-rolled noodles and a hot-spring egg; and a towering melon parfait with bright melon jellies that all but burst in your mouth. This is food that tastes both like Japan and California — not fusion food — but the food that you'd expect if the Bay Area were a region of Japan. Rintaro (Hardie Grant), the debut cookbook from this groundbreaking restaurant, translates the experience of a Tokyo izakaya to the home kitchen. Beautiful and idiosyncratic, Rintaro is both a master class in making homemade udon noodles, and plumbs the depths of true comfort in food, with recipes like its curry rice. With over 70 recipes showcasing inspiration and detailed instruction in equal measure, chef/owner Sylvan Mishima Brackett’s Rintaro is a book for anyone who loves Japanese food, from the curious novice to expats craving the tastes of home. It is a book that blends careful mastery with the pure delight of making the tastiest food; it encourages you to find the beauty in your own terroir and the heart in your own cooking. Brackett will be joined in conversation by Nori De Vega, founder of Tikim.

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The Refugee Ocean

Pauls Toutonghi in Conversation With Jon Raymond

Sunday, October 15 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Born in Beirut in 1922, Marguerite Toutoungi lives a life of loss and sacrifice. She dreams of traveling to Europe and studying music at the Conservatoire de Paris but her family — and her society — hold her back. When she meets the son of a Cuban tobacco farmer at a formal dance, love transforms her life. Together with him, she flees across the Pacific Ocean. She’s hoping for a new beginning. Instead, she finds revolution and chaos. Over fifty years later, Naïm Rahil is a teenage refugee from Aleppo, Syria. A former piano prodigy who struggles to thrive in America — and who has lost part of his hand in the war — he dreams of a simple, normal life. Moving from Aleppo on the brink of civil war, to Lebanon in the late 1940s, to Havana during the Cuban Revolution, to the suburbs of Washington, DC, Pauls Toutonghi’s The Refugee Ocean (Simon & Schuster) grapples with what it means to be an immigrant, shows how wounds can heal, and highlights the role of music and art in the resilience of the human spirit. Toutonghi will be joined in conversation by Jon Raymond, author of Denial.

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Monica

Daniel Clowes in Conversation With Eric Reynolds

Monday, October 16 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Monica (Fantagraphics), the long-awaited new graphic novel from Daniel Clowes (Ghost World and Patience), is a genre-bending thriller from one of the most assured storytellers of all time. Monica is a series of interconnected narratives that collectively tell the life story — actually, stories — of its title character. Clowes calls upon a lifetime of inspiration to create the most complex and personal graphic novel of his distinguished career. Rich with visual detail, an impeccable ear for language and dialogue, and thrilling twists, Monica is a multilayered masterpiece in comics form that alludes to many of the genres that have defined the medium — war, romance, horror, crime, the supernatural, etc. — but in a mysterious, uncategorizable, and quintessentially Clowesian way that rewards multiple readings. Five years in the making, Monica marks the apex of creativity from one of the defining voices of the graphic novel boom over the past quarter-century. Clowes will be joined in conversation by Eric Reynolds, VP/Associate Publisher of Fantagraphics Books.

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Black River Orchard

Chuck Wendig

Monday, October 16 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something else is changing in the town besides the season. Because in that town there is an orchard, and in that orchard, seven most unusual trees. And from those trees grows a new sort of apple: strange, beautiful, with skin so red it’s nearly black. Take a bite of one of these apples and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger. More vital. More yourself, you will believe. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing — and become darker. This is what happens when the townsfolk discover the secret of the orchard. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples… and what’s the harm, if it is making them all happier, more confident, more powerful? And even if buried in the orchard is something else besides the seeds of this extraordinary tree: a bloody history whose roots reach back to the very origins of the town. But now the leaves are falling. The days grow darker. It’s harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown. Black River Orchard (Del Rey) is the new masterpiece of horror from Chuck Wendig, author of Wanderers and The Book of Accidents.

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Devil Makes Three

Ben Fountain in Conversation With Omar El Akkad

Tuesday, October 17 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

From the award-winning author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk comes a brilliant and propulsive new novel about greed, power, and American complicity set in Haiti, 1991. When a violent coup d’état leads to the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, American expat Matt Amaker is forced to abandon his idyllic, beachfront scuba business. With the rise of a brutal military dictatorship and an international embargo threatening to destroy even the country’s most powerful players, some are looking to gain an advantage in the chaos — and others are just looking to make it through another day. Desperate for money — and survival — Matt teams up with his best friend and business partner, Alix Variel, the adventurous only son of a socially prominent Haitian family. They set their sights on legendary shipwrecks that have been rumored to contain priceless treasures off a remote section of Haiti’s southern coast. Their ambition and exploration of these disastrous wrecks come with a cascade of ill-fated incidents — one that involves Misha, Alix’s erudite sister, who stumbles onto an arms-trafficking ring masquerading as a U.S. government humanitarian aid office, and rookie CIA case officer Audrey O’Donnell, who finds herself doing clandestine work on an assignment that proves to be more difficult and dubious than she could have possibly imagined. Devil Makes Three’s (Flatiron) depiction of blood politics, the machinations of power, and a country in the midst of upheaval is urgently and insistently resonant. This new novel is sure to cement Ben Fountain’s reputation as one of the 21st century’s boldest and most perceptive writers. Fountain will be joined in conversation by Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise.

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Gentle Chaos

Tyler Gaca AKA Ghosthoney

Tuesday, October 17 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

In his raw yet enchanting collection of poems, essays, photographs, and artworks, Tyler Gaca — also known as TikTok's Ghosthoney — dreamily navigates themes of magic and queerness, offering readers an intimate look inside his mind and his worlds, real and imagined. The writings in Gentle Chaos (Running Press) reflect on growing up queer and in love with magic, discovering yourself and your place in the world, and daring to seek out love and hope. The artworks are dedicated to salvaged antique photographs, haircuts, dead moths, the creatures we dream up, and much more. The result is a whimsical, vulnerable, and transporting journey into the gentle chaos within us all.

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Glitter and Concrete

Elyssa Maxx Goodman in Conversation With Nashville Hott

Wednesday, October 18 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

From the lush feather boas that adorned early female impersonators to the sequined lip syncs of barroom queens to the drag kings that have us laughing in stitches, drag has played a vital role in the creative life of New York City. But the evolution of drag in the city — as an art form, a community, and a mode of liberation — has never before been fully chronicled. Now, for the first time, journalist and drag historian Elyssa Maxx Goodman unearths the dramatic, provocative untold story of drag in New York City in all its glistening glory. Goodman ducks beneath the velvet ropes of Harlem Renaissance balls, examines drag’s crucial role in the Stonewall Uprising, traces drag's influence on disco and punk rock as well as its unifying power during the AIDS crisis and 9/11, and culminates in the era of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Informed by meticulous research and archival work, as well as original interviews with high-profile performers, Glitter and Concrete (Hanover Square Press) is a significant contribution to queer history and an essential read for anyone curious about the story that echoes beneath the heels. Goodman will be joined in conversation by local queen Nashville Hott.

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Roaming

Jillian Tamaki & Mariko Tamaki in Conversation With Carson Ellis

Thursday, October 19 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Roaming (Drawn & Quarterly) marks a triumphant return to the graphic novel and a deft foray into new adult fiction for Caldecott Medal authors Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki. Over the course of a much-anticipated trip to New York, an unexpected fling blossoms between casual acquaintances and throws a long-term friendship off-balance. Emotional tensions vibrate wildly against the resplendently illustrated backdrop of the city, capturing a spontaneous queer romance in all of its fledgling glory. Slick attention to the details of a bustling, intimidating metropolis are softened with a palette of muted pastels, as though seen through the eyes of first-time travelers. The awe, wonder, and occasional stumble along the way come to life with stunning accuracy. Roaming is the third collaboration from the critically acclaimed team behind Skim and Governor General’s Literary Award–winner This One Summer. Moody, atmospheric, and teeming with life, the magic of this comic's duo leaks through the pages with lush and exquisite pen work. The Tamakis’ singular, elegant vision of an urban paradise slowly revealing its imperfections to the tune of its visitors’ rhythms is a masterpiece — a future classic for generations to come. The Tamakis will be joined in conversation by Carson Ellis, author and illustrator of Home and Du Iz Tak?.

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What We Sow

Jennifer Jewell in Conversation With Loree Bohl

Thursday, October 19 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

In What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (Timber Press), Jennifer Jewell brings readers on an insightful, year-long journey exploring the outsize impact of one of nature's smallest manifestations — the simple seed. She examines our skewed notions where "organic" seeds are grown and sourced, reveals how giant multinational agribusiness has refined and patented the genomes of seeds we rely on for staples like corn and soy, and highlights the efforts of activists working to regain legal access to heirloom seeds that were stolen from Indigenous peoples and people of color. Throughout, readers are invited to share Jewell's personal observations as she marvels at the glory of nature in her Northern California hometown. She admires the wild seeds she encounters on her short daily walks and is amazed at the range of seed forms, from cups and saucers to vases, candelabras, ocean-going vessels, and airliners. What We Sow is a tale of what we choose to see and what we haven't been taught to see, what we choose to seed and what we choose not to seed. It urgently proves that we must work hard to preserve and protect the great natural diversity of seed. Jewell will be joined in conversation by Loree Bohl, author of Fearless Gardening. This event is cosponsored by The Hardy Plant Society of Oregon.

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Soul Jar

Annie Carl in Conversation With Christy George, Ellis Bray, Simon Quinn, Dawn Vogel, Travis Flatt & Mika Grimmer

Friday, October 20 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Too often, science fiction and fantasy stories erase — or cure — characters with disabilities. Soul Jar (Forest Avenue Press), edited by author and bookstore owner Annie Carl, features thirty-one stories by disabled authors, imagining such wonders as a shapeshifter on a first date, skin that sprouts orchid buds, and a cereal-box demon. An insulin pump diverts an undead mob. An autistic teen sets out to discover the local cranberry bog’s sinister secret. A pizza delivery on Mars goes wrong. This thrillingly peculiar collection sparkles with humor, heart, and insight, all within the context of disability representation. Carl will be joined in conversation by Soul Jar contributors Christy George, Ellis Bray, Simon Quinn, Dawn Vogel, Travis Flatt & Mika Grimmer.

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Ways to Build Dreams

Renée Watson

Friday, October 20 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

With Ways to Build Dreams (Bloomsbury UK), Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Award winner Renée Watson continues her bestselling young middle grade series starring Ryan Hart. Middle school is just around the corner for Ryan Hart, which means it’s time to start thinking about the future — and not just how to prank her brother, Ray! Ryan wonders who she wants to be and what kind of person her family hopes she’ll become. Ryan has always been known for her sunny outlook, but can she keep hoping even when things seem hopeless? During Black History Month, Ryan learns more about her ancestors and local Black pioneers and their hopes for the future, for her generation. Drawing on the ambitions of those who came before her, and her own goals, Ryan is determined to turn her dreams into reality. Grow and shine and share with Ryan Hart in this series that brings ever more humor, more love, and more fun.

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Can't Nobody Make a Sweet Potato Pie Like Our Mama!

Kids' Storytime With Rose McGee

Saturday, October 21 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Marie and Landon bicker about many things, but on one topic they agree: their grandmother, "Mama," makes the best sweet potato pies. Those pies are so tasty, and their grandmother is so good at so many things. The twins sometimes wonder: does Mama have superpowers? Marie and Landon love to help Mama bake pies to share. They shop and select, measure and stir. They taste the pie batter and watch Mama put the pies in the oven. They assist with every step. Still, they think there might be some magic involved. Does Mama sprinkle fairy dust into her pies? When the pies are finally ready, neighbors stop by for a slice and some comfort. Some folks look a little sad when they arrive. After they taste Mama's pies, they leave laughing and singing. The twins marvel at the neighbors' transformation. Why do Mama's pies inspire so much joy? Mama's generosity and kindness bring comfort to all she meets. Maybe, the twins realize, the magic isn't in the pies. Maybe it's in their Mama. From the creator of Sweet Potato Comfort Pie, this heartfelt family story shows how a grandmother's particular way of caring wraps her loved ones and her neighborhood in a cinnamon-scented hug. From Rose McGee, the creator of Sweet Potato Comfort Pie, comes Can't Nobody Make a Sweet Potato Pie Like Our Mama! (Minnesota Historical Society Press), a heartfelt family story shows how a grandmother's particular way of caring wraps her loved ones and her neighborhood in a cinnamon-scented hug.

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Eater: 100 Essential Restaurant Recipes From the Authority on Where to Eat and Why It Matters

Hillary Dixler Canavan in Conversation With Brooke Jackson-Glidden, Bonnie Frumkin Morales & Nong Poonsukwattana

Saturday, October 21 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

All the must-eat recipes from the most popular and influential restaurants across the country, brought to you by Hillary Dixler Canavan, the restaurant editor of the food and dining culture brand Eater. Eater’s dedicated team of on-the-ground experts live to drink, dine, and let you know what’s great, and the leading media brand’s debut cookbook includes the dishes that diners can’t stop thinking about, from the chefs and restaurants that have shaped our food culture. Sourced from the best street carts to pillars of fine dining and everywhere in between, this diverse, powerhouse collection features recipes that have been carefully adapted for home cooks. Also packed with expert advice from chefs, bartenders, and sommeliers on easy ways to level up your meals at home — whether it’s building a celebration-worthy seafood tower, using a jar of chili crisp to quickly add depth of flavor to your cooking, sourcing game-changing ingredients and tools, or pairing sake with any kind of food — Eater: 100 Essential Restaurant Recipes From the Authority on Where to Eat and Why It Matters (Abrams) is a must-have for anyone who loves to dine out and wants to bring that magic home. Canavan will be joined in conversation by Eater Portland editor Brooke Jackson-Glidden, Kachka chef and co-owner Bonnie Frumkin Morales, and Nong's Khao Man Gai founder and owner Nong Poonsukwattana.

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Sweet Movie

Alisha Dietzman & Leslie Sainz

Sunday, October 22 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

A National Poetry Series winner selected by Victoria Chang, Alisha Dietzman’s Sweet Movie (Beacon Press) confronts romantic and religious masochism to interrogate spiritual, sexual, and moral agency. Sweet Movie's love poems and ekphrasis echo splintered versions of the same question: how do we navigate a world where the expectations of our performance — our presentation, our means of existence — are dictated by the viewers themselves? Mirroring the uncertain, unstable tenor of Dusan Makavejev's controversial avant-garde film Sweet Movie (1974), the voices in Sweet Movie are equal parts docile, feverish, and violent. This collection reimagines a feminist approach to religious masochism to explore the ways women are denied agency by both their faith communities and by outsiders. Dietzman's poems move through locations across Central Europe and the American South. Each new landscape informs the next: Memphis appears in Berlin in the form of a dead deer, and Southern syntax haunts an elegy for Gustavs Klucis. The inspired poems from Sweet Movie use film and art to break open seeing. What results are deeply insightful and spacious poems of faith, displacement, and love. Perpetually observant, Sweet Movie guardedly but desperately consumes a world that has become unsettling and uncertain.
 
Taking its title from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Leslie Sainz’s Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House) explores the personal and historical tragedies of the Cuban American experience through a distinctly feminine lens. Formally diverse with echoes of Spanish throughout, this debut collection critiques power and patriarchy as weaponized by the governments of the United States and the Republic of Cuba. In investigating the realities of displacement and inherited exile, Sainz honors her imagined past, present, and future as a result of the “revolution within the revolution” — the emancipation of Cuban women. Through lyric and associative meditations, Sainz anatomizes the unique grief of immigrant daughters, as her speakers discover how family can be a microcosm of the very violence that displaced them. What emerges is a spiritual blueprint for disinheritance, radical self-determination, and the nuanced examinations of myth, ritual, and resistance.

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An Other World

Hanif Fazal in Conversation With Ann Nguyen & Matt LaVine

Sunday, October 22 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Addressing the leaders of today and tomorrow, An Other World (Page Two) alternates between heart-wrenching but hopeful letters to Hanif Fazal’s daughter Amina, reflections on Fazal’s formative life experiences and lessons on identity, Black and Brown relationships, and a unique type of freedom that could be available to all of us. In this moving blend of social commentary and memoir with a call to action, Fazal — co-founder of the Center for Equity and Inclusion — documents his journey towards Black and Brown joy, freedom, and belonging. This timely book traces Fazal’s relationships with Black and Brown family members, professional colleagues, and close friends as they attempt to thrive at home, school, and work in the all-consuming whiteness of Portland, Oregon, and the broader United States landscape. Fazal's youth involved a constant experience as the other in an all-white school system, breakdowns in family, and feeling split between his Mexican and Indian heritages. He went on to create programs that offered healing and belonging to BIPOC youth in schools and to BIPOC adults in the workplace. In An Other World, Fazal pinpoints how educational and professional diversity frameworks often perform surface-level inclusion but refuse to invest fully in the complex realities of their BIPOC learners and employees. He also stares down the myth of “making it” and invites BIPOC communities to reflect and redefine success on their own terms. Fazal will be joined in conversation by Ann Nguyen, educator, consultant, and Senior Facilitator at Center for Equity and Inclusion, and Matt LaVine, Senior Race Equity Consultant and Facilitator at the Center for Equity and Inclusion.

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To the Temple of Tranquility… And Step On It

Ed Begley Jr.

Monday, October 23 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Ed Begley Jr. is truly one of a kind, a performer who is known equally for his prolific film and television career and his environmental activism. From an appearance on My Three Sons to a notable role in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman to starring in St. Elsewhere — as well as films with Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, and mockumentarian Christopher Guest — Begley has worked with just about everyone in Hollywood. His "green" bona fides date back to 1970, and have been the topic of two books, a reality show, countless media appearances, and even repeated spoofs on The Simpsons (in one episode, Begley's solar-powered car stalls out on train tracks, but is saved when the train is revealed to be an "Ed Begley Solar-Powered Train”). In To the Temple of Tranquility… And Step On It! (Hachette), Begley shares a fountain of hilarious and poignant stories throughout his life. The memoir is candid and endearing; in one chapter, he is summoned to Marlon Brando's house to discuss the practical uses of electric eels. In another, he tells the story of taking Annette Bening to the Oscars in “an oddball kit-car that had gull wing doors, and was nearly impossible to get in or out of, unless you were a yoga master, which fortunately she was.” Not to mention insightful and surprising tales about The Beatles, Monty Python, Richard Pryor, Cesar Chavez, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Waits, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carrie Fisher, and so many more luminaries. Begley’s unmistakable voice is honest and revealing in a way that only a comic of his caliber can accomplish. Behind all the stories, Begley has wisdom to impart. This is a book about family, friends, addiction, failure, and redemption.

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Shanghai Immortal

A. Y. Chao in Conversation With Fonda Lee

Monday, October 23 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Half vampire. Half fox-spirit. All trouble. Pawned by her mother to the King of Hell as a child, Lady Jing is half-vampire, half-hulijing fox-spirit and all sasshole. As the King's ward, she has spent the past ninety years running errands, dodging the taunts of the spiteful hulijing courtiers, and trying to control her explosive temper — with varying levels of success. So when Jing overhears the courtiers plotting to steal a priceless dragon pearl from the King, she seizes her chance to expose them, once and for all. With the help of a gentle mortal tasked with setting up the Central Bank of Hell, Jing embarks on a wild chase for intel, first through Hell and then mortal Shanghai. But when her hijinks put the mortal in danger, she must decide which is more important: avenging her loss of face, or letting go of her half-empty approach to life for a chance to experience tenderness — and maybe even love. A. Y. Chao’s Shanghai Immortal (Hodder & Stoughton) is a richly told adult fantasy debut teeming with Chinese deities and demons cavorting in jazz age Shanghai. Chao will be joined in conversation by Fonda Lee, author of Untethered Sky and the Green Bone Saga.

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A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten

Tristan Taormino in Conversation With Epiphora

Tuesday, October 24 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten (Duke University Press), award-winning author, sex educator, filmmaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story, revealing how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship. Raised by a hard-working single mother on Long Island, Tristan got her sex ed from the 1980s TV show Solid Gold and The Joy of Sex. She spent summers at drag shows in Provincetown with her father, Bill, who had come out as gay in the mid-1970s. Her sexual identity bloomed during her college years at Wesleyan University, where she discovered her desire for butches and kinky sex. Taormino’s world began to fall apart when her dad was diagnosed with AIDS. After a series of devastating events, she moved to the messy, glorious world of 1990s New York City. In the midst of grief and depression, she helped change queer sexual subculture with her zine Pucker Up, her infamous The Village Voice column, and her editorship of legendary lesbian porn magazine On Our Backs. After the publication of her first book, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, Tristan followed her own path that marked the beginning of her work as a trailblazing feminist pornographer. After a lifetime of outrageous adventures, Taormino reflects on the bonds, loss, and mental health struggles that shaped her. She weaves together history from her father’s unpublished memoir, exploring the surprising ways their personal patterns converge and diverge. Bracingly emotional and erotically charged, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten reveals the transformative power of queer pleasure and defiance. Taormino will be joined in conversation by veteran sex writer Epiphora.

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Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World

M. R. O'Connor

Tuesday, October 24 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

In a riveting investigation of the science and ecology of wildfires, journalist M.R. O'Connor ventures into some of the oldest, most beautiful, and remote forests in North America to explore the powerful and ancient relationship between trees, fires, and humans. Along the way, she describes revelatory research in the fields of paleobotany and climate science to show how the world's forests have been shaped by fire for hundreds of millions of years. She also reports on the compelling archeological evidence emerging from the field of ethnoecology that proves how, until very recently, humans were instigators of forest fires, actively molding and influencing the ecosystems around them by inserting themselves into the loop of a natural biological process to start “good fires.” As she weaves together first-hand reportage with research and cultural insights, O'Connor also embeds on firelines alongside firefighters and “pyrotechnicians.” These highly trained individuals are resurrecting the practice of prescribed burning in an effort to sustain fire-dependent forest ecologies and prevent the catastrophic wildfires that are increasing in frequency and intensity as a result of global warming. Hailing from diverse backgrounds including state and federal agencies, scientific laboratories, and private lands and tribal nations, these fire starters are undertaking a radical and often controversial effort to promote, protect, and expand the responsible use of fire to restore ecological health to landscapes. At the heart of Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World (Bold Type) is a discussion about risk and how our relationship to it as a society will determine our potential to survive the onslaught of climate change.

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Father and Son

Jonathan Raban Tribute Event with Julia Raban, Jon Raymond, Michael Brophy & Gary Fisketjon

Wednesday, October 25 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

For over two decades Jonathan Raban — perhaps the consummate Englishman — was an adoptive son of the Pacific Northwest, living and then dying in Seattle while in between writing revelatory books about his new home: the novels Waxwings and Surveillance and the immediate classic Passage to Juneau. He also spent twelve years on the memoir being celebrated at this special tribute event, having finished it this past January shortly before his death. A story of mourning and resilience, Father and Son (Knopf) is described eloquently by Ian McEwan: “A world war fought on three fronts by a young artillery officer; a courtship, marriage, and forced separation in a hesitant, old-fashioned English style; a sudden, devastating upheaval in the author's own life — Jonathan Raban deploys the skills of an accomplished novelist to braid these elements into a beautiful, compelling memoir drawn from his parents' wartime love letters. He is a master, as shown in his legendary travel writing, of summoning place and people with vivid economy. Haunting, Father and Son displays an exquisite, sometimes lunatic tension between powerful emotions and carnage on one side, and on the other, the conventional codes of what must remain unsaid. This, Raban's final work, is a gorgeous achievement.” Julia Raban, Jonathan's daughter, will be joined in this evening of grateful remembrance by others touched by her father's work and friendship: writer Jon Raymond, painter Michael Brophy, and editor Gary Fisketjon.

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Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms

Alison Pouliot

Thursday, October 26 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

What can we learn from the lives of fungi? Splitting time between the northern and southern hemispheres, ecologist Alison Pouliot ensures that she experiences two autumns per year in the pursuit of fungi — from Australia’s deserts to Iceland’s glaciers to America’s Cascade Mountains. In Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms (University of Chicago Press), we journey alongside Pouliot, magnifiers in hand, as she travels the world. With Pouliot as our guide, we smell fire-loving truffles that transform their scent after burning to lure mammals who eat them and, ultimately, spread their spores. We spot the eerie glow of the ghost fungus, a deceptive entity that looks like an edible oyster mushroom but will soon heave back out — along with everything else in your stomach — if you take a bite. And we crawl alongside vegetable caterpillars, which are neither vegetable nor caterpillar but a fungus that devours insects from the inside out. Featuring stunning color photographs of these mycological miracles, Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms shows that understanding fungi is fundamental for harmonizing with the natural world.

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Dracula Daily

Matt Kirkland in Conversation With Andy Baio

Thursday, October 26 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

The wildly popular email newsletter that has been described as an "internet sensation" (The New York Times) and "the coolest book club on the internet" (Fast Company) is breathing new life into Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel. Now, the internet phenomenon can be experienced in Dracula Daily: Reading Bram Stoker's Dracula in Real Time with Commentary by the Internet (Andrews McMeel), a deluxe hardcover book that includes hilarious commentary and artwork from Dracula Daily readers. Thanks to Dracula Daily, the email newsletter that delivers the classic vampire novel in bite-sized chunks, "an old story about the undead is getting a new life" (NPR). Combining Stoker's original text alongside reader-generated content, this version of Dracula is a fun and immersive experience, perfect for vampire scholars, Dracula Daily readers, and newcomers to the story. Inside, you'll find a rich selection of artwork and memes from the newsletter's hundreds of thousands of subscribers. From comics celebrating Dracula's famous wall-climbing ability to armchair analysis of the novel's complicated love triangles, the witty commentary and colorful fan art brings a unique twist to the classic tale. Dracula Daily creator Matt Kirkland will be joined in conversation by writer and technologist Andy Baio.

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Marrying Friends

Mary Rechner in Conversation With Chelsea Bieker

Friday, October 27 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

When her troubled husband dies unexpectedly, mercurial Therese gets tangled in competing desires and demands — her own and those of her friends and family on Long Island. Ambitious in scope yet carefully observed, Mary Rechner’s Marrying Friends (Propeller Books) deftly illuminates multiple characters as grief forces them to reimagine their lives and relationships. A frank and often wry look at the bewildering bonds between women, men, siblings, parents, and children, this novel-in-stories confirms Rechner's talent for capturing how we find meaning not only in our dreams, but also in our desperations. Rechner will be joined in conversation by Chelsea Bieker, author of Heartbroke.

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This Old Madrone Tree

Kids' Storytime With Barbara Herkert

Saturday, October 28 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

If ever a tree deserved a love letter, it is the Pacific madrone. Barbara Herkert’s This Old Madrone Tree (Web of Life Children’s Books) charts the life swirling around this luminous tree, from eagles to elk to hummingbirds to fungi, as it patiently stands sentinel through the seasons of the Pacific Northwest. Marlo Garnsworthy’s gorgeous paintings bring the tree’s scarlet berries, spangles of white flowers, and curls of russet and green bark to life. This story of the madrone and its animal neighbors will both comfort and enchant children as they come to understand the timelessness of nature’s cycles.

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A Modern Guide to Human Design

Rachel Lieberman in Conversation With Vaness Henry

Saturday, October 28 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The world teaches us that the truth comes from outside of us — family, friends, experts, institutions — and that we make our best decisions with logic. Human design proposes a new reality: we each have a built-in navigation system. We are each wired for our own unique purpose! Have you realized that things go smoothly when you trust your gut? You might be a Generator. Do you need to “sleep on it” when making a big decision? You might have Emotional Authority. Has anyone ever told you that you give the best advice? You could be a Projector. Do you bristle when others tell you what to do because you know you’re here to impact the world by doing things your way? You may have a Manifestor aura. Have you always just felt more sensitive and different than everyone around you? You might be part of the 1% as a rare Reflector. The best thing about human design is that it recognizes something we all know but often forget: we are all different. Our human design chart is the tangible blueprint for moving away from living the life that society expects of us and stepping into our special gifts and magic. Wouldn’t it be incredible to have an instruction manual explaining how to have the best relationship with your child, partner, friends, or coworkers? Rachel Lieberman’s A Modern Guide to Human Design (Gibbs Smith) empowers us to allow everyone, including ourselves, to be who they are truly meant to be. Lieberman will be joined in conversation by entrepreneur, producer, and author Vaness Henry.

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Home is Here

Liên Shutt in Conversation With Mark Unno

Sunday, October 29 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Home is Here (North Atlantic Books) builds on foundational Buddhist teachings — the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path — offering an intersectional frame to help you embody antiracist practices and tend to your own healing under racism and oppression. Grounded in practice, memoir, and mindful self-help skill-building, Rev. Liên Shutt’s Engaged Four Noble Truths illuminate a path toward healing and liberation. She shares her own experiences with anti-Asian hate — as a teen riding her bike, meditating in whitewashed monasteries — and asks, what does it mean to attend to our suffering in body, heart, and mind when racism can cause such intense hurt and pain? What does it look like to heal? While written mainly for Asian American Buddhists and other BIPOC practitioners, Home is Here moves us all from knowing and contemplation to a place of action and wholeness. In the doing is the realization, and in practicing antiracism, we build a home for all beings. This is reflected in Rev. Shutt’s choice to frame each step of the Engaged Eightfold Path not as “right” but as “skillful” — to convey both the knowing and the practices essential to healing harm. An engaged reframing of core Buddhist spiritual principles, Home is Here connects foundational practices to urgent causes — and invites readers on a path home to wholeness. Rev. Shutt will be joined in conversation by Mark Unno, Professor of Buddhist Studies and Department Head of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon.

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Looking Up

Stephan Pastis

Sunday, October 29 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

From Stephan Pastis, the creator of Pearls Before Swine and author of the Timmy Failure series, comes Looking Up (Aladdin), a quirky and heartwarming middle grade novel about a girl struggling with loneliness and the curveballs of life. Living alone with her mother in a poorer part of town, Saint — a girl drawn to medieval knights, lost causes, and the protection of birthday piñatas — sees the neighborhood she has always known and loved disappearing around her: old homes being torn down and replaced by fancy condos and coffee shops. But when her favorite creaky old toy store is demolished, she knows she must act. Enlisting the help of Daniel “Chance” McGibbons, a quiet, round-faced boy who lives across the street (and whose house also faces the wrecking ball), Saint hatches a plan to save what is left of her beloved hometown. Copies of Pastis’s new Pearls Before Swine Treasury, Pearls Seeks Enlightenment, will also be available at the event. Please note: A purchase of Looking Up is required to join the signing line.

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Of Time and Turtles

Sy Montgomery & Matt Patterson

Sunday, October 29 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

When acclaimed naturalist and National Book Award finalist Sy Montgomery (author of The Soul of an Octopus) and wildlife artist Matt Patterson arrive at Turtle Rescue League, they are greeted by hundreds of turtles recovering from injury and illness. Endangered by cars and highways, pollution and poachers, these turtles — with wounds so severe that even veterinarians would have dismissed them as fatal — are given a second chance at life. The League’s founders, Natasha and Alexxia, live by one motto: never give up on a turtle. But why turtles? What is it about them that inspires such devotion? Ancient and unhurried, long-lived and majestic, their lineage stretches back to the time of the dinosaurs. Some live to two hundred years, or longer. Others spend months buried under cold winter water. Montgomery turns to these little understood yet endlessly surprising creatures to probe the eternal question: how can we make peace with our time? In pursuit of the answer, Montgomery and Patterson immerse themselves in the delicate work of protecting turtle nests, incubating eggs, rescuing sea turtles, and releasing hatchlings to their homes in the wild. We follow the snapping turtle Fire Chief on his astonishing journey as he battles against injuries incurred by a truck. Hopeful and optimistic, Of Time and Turtles (Mariner) is an antidote to the instability of our frenzied world. Elegantly blending science, memoir, philosophy, and drawing on cultures from across the globe, this compassionate portrait of injured turtles and their determined rescuers invites us all to slow down and slip into turtle time.

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Jewel Box

E. Lily Yu in Conversation With Karen Russell

Monday, October 30 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In the village of Yiwei, a fallen wasp nest unfurls into a beautifully accurate map. In a field in Louisiana, birdwatchers forge an indelible connection over a shared glimpse of a Vermilion Flycatcher, and fall. In Nineveh, a judge who prides himself on impartiality finds himself questioned by a mysterious god. On a nameless shore, a small monster searches for refuge and finds unexpected courage. At turns bittersweet and boundary-breaking, poignant and profound, these twenty-two stories sing, as the oldest fables do, of what it means to be alive in this strange, terrible, beautiful world. For readers who loved the intelligence and compassion in Kim Fu's Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century and the dreamlike prose of Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, Jewel Box (Erewhon) introduces the short fiction of Hugo, World Fantasy, and Nebula Award nominee E. Lily Yu, winner of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and author of On Fragile Waves, praised by the New York Times Book Review as "devastating and perfect." Yu will be joined in conversation by Karen Russell, author of Orange World and Other Stories.

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Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love

David Biespiel

Wednesday, November 1 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Two-time Oregon Book Award winner David Biespiel’s Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love (Stephen F. Austin University Press) takes place during the first year of the Reagan era. Jon “Duke” Wain, a charmed 18-year-old growing up in Meyerland, Houston’s enormous Jewish neighborhood, finds a companion for drinking, drugs, and living wildly in Manolo Salazar, his gay best friend, who has grown up in Hispanic Gulfgate, heir to his own father’s evangelical ministry. On a Saturday night in September in 1981, the night Nolan Ryan pitches his record fifth no-hitter at the Astrodome, the two scions light out for Galveston Island intent on heading down the Texas coastline and not returning home. Binging among dangerous revelers, Duke meets Caroline Cahill, a haunting young woman who turns out to be a runaway from West Texas. Confronted at the threshold of life and fate, Duke wonders if Caroline Cahill’s story is the route to putting his birthright behind him. The answer will change his life. Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love is about the tensions between ambition and faith, duty and desire, art and life — and about those whose lives must live with the consequences of choosing one over the other.

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A Curse for True Love

Stephanie Garber in Conversation With Laini Taylor

Wednesday, November 1 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Two villains, one girl, and a deadly battle for happily ever after. Evangeline Fox ventured to the Magnificent North in search of her happy ending, and it seems as if she has it. She’s married to a handsome prince and lives in a legendary castle. But Evangeline has no idea of the devastating price she’s paid for this fairytale. She doesn’t know what she has lost, and her husband is determined to make sure she never finds out… but first he must kill Jacks, the Prince of Hearts. Blood will be shed, hearts will be stolen, and true love will be put to the test in Stephanie Garber’s A Curse for True Love (Flatiron), the breathlessly anticipated conclusion to the Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy. Garber will be joined in conversation by Laini Taylor, author of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy.

Please note: Garber is only signing copies of her new book, A Curse for True Love. Limited signed copies of Garber's previous books will be available while supplies last (in-store only).

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Dearborn

Ghassan Zeineddine in Conversation With Omar El Akkad

Friday, November 3 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Spanning several decades, Ghassan Zeineddine’s debut collection examines the diverse range and complexities of the Arab American community in Dearborn, Michigan. In ten tragicomic stories, Zeineddine explores themes of identity, generational conflicts, war trauma, migration, sexuality, queerness, home and belonging, and more. In Dearborn (Tin House), a father teaches his son how to cheat the IRS and hide their cash earnings inside of frozen chickens. Tensions heighten within a close-knit group of couples when a mysterious man begins to frequent the local gym pool, dressed in Speedos printed with nostalgic images of Lebanon. And a failed stage actor attempts to drive a young Lebanese man with ambitions of becoming a Hollywood action hero to LA, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have other plans. By turns wildly funny, incisive, and deeply moving, Dearborn introduces readers to an arresting new voice in contemporary fiction and invites us all to consider what it means to be part of a place and community, and how it is that we help one another survive. Zeineddine will be joined in conversation by Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise.

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Mom Rage

Minna Dubin in Conversation With Marissa Korbel

Friday, November 3 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Mothers aren’t supposed to be angry. Still, Minna Dubin was an angry mom: exhausted by the grueling, thankless work of full-time parenting and feeling her career slip away, she would find herself screaming at her child or exploding at her husband. When Dubin pushed past her shame and talked with other mothers about how she was feeling, she realized that she was far from alone. Mom Rage (Seal Press) is Dubin’s groundbreaking work of reportage about an unspoken crisis of anger sweeping the country — and the world. She finds that while a specific instance of rage might be triggered by something as simple as a child who won’t tie her shoes, the roots of the anger go far deeper, from the unequal burden of childcare shouldered by moms to the flattening of women’s identities once they have kids. Drawing on insights from moms across the spectrum of race, sexual orientation, and class, she offers practical tools to help readers disarm their rage in the moment, while never losing sight of the broader social change we need to stop raging for good. Dubin will be joined in conversation by Marissa Korbel, editor at The Rumpus.

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Removal Acts

Erin Marie Lynch in Conversation With Gabrielle Bates

Sunday, November 5 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Drawing its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, Erin Marie Lynch’s remarkable debut collection, Removal Acts (Graywolf), reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence. Through an array of brief lyrics, visual forms, chronologies, and sequences, these virtuosic poems trace a path through the labyrinth of distances and absences haunting the American colonial experiment. Removal Acts takes its speaker’s fraught methods of accessing the past as both subject and material: family photos, the fragile artifacts of primary documents, and the digital abyss of web browsers and word processors. Alongside studies of two of her Dakota ancestors, Lynch has assembled an intimate record of recovery from bulimia, insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide. In these rigorous, scrutinizing examinations of “removal” in its many forms — as physical displacement, archival absence, Whiteness, and vomit — Lynch has crafted a harrowing portrait of the entwined relationship between the personal and historical. The result is a powerful affirmation of resilience and resolute presence in the face of eradication. Lynch will be joined in conversation by Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat.

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The Ghost Forest

Greg King in Conversation With Amy Stewart

Monday, November 6 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Every year millions of tourists from around the world visit California’s famous redwoods. Yet few who strain their necks to glimpse the tops of the world’s tallest trees understand how unlikely it is that these last isolated groves of giant trees still stand at all. In his gripping historical memoir, The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods (PublicAffairs), journalist and famed redwood activist Greg King examines how investors and a growing US economy drove the timber industry to cut down all but 4 percent of the original two-million-acre redwood ecosystem. King first examined redwood logging in the 1980s — as an award-winning reporter. What he found in the woods convinced him to leap the line of neutrality and become an activist dedicated to saving the very last ancient redwood groves remaining in private hands. The land grab began in 1849, when a “green gold rush” of migrants came to exploit the legendary redwoods that grew along the Russian River. Several generations later, in 1987, Greg King discovered and named Headwaters Forest — at 3,000 acres the largest ancient redwood habitat remaining outside of parks — and he led the movement to save this grove. After a decade of one of the longest, most dramatic, and violent environmental campaigns in US history, in 1999 the state and federal governments protected Headwaters Forest. The Ghost Forest explores a central question, an overhanging mystery: what was it like, this botanical Elysium that grew only along the Northern California coast, a forest so spectacular — but also uniquely valuable as a cornerstone of American economic growth — that in the end it would inspire life-and-death struggles? Few but loggers and surveyors ever saw such magnificent trees, ancient sentinels that, like ghosts, have informed King’s understanding of the world. On a lifelong journey, King finds himself through the generations, and through the trees. King will be joined in conversation by Amy Stewart, author of Wicked Plants and The Drunken Botanist.

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The Books of Clash Volume 2

Gene Luen Yang in Conversation With Jonathan Hill

Monday, November 6 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Based on the global hit Clash of Clans and penned by superstar graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang, The Books of Clash Volume 2: Legendary Legends of Legendarious Achievery (First Second) is the second volume of a new action-packed series that brings the characters from everyone's favorite mobile gaming sensation to life! Once upon a time, archers Jane and Angie were best friends who did everything together. That is, until, one day during battle Jane found herself stranded and alone in an otherworldly cave where she stumbled upon a mysterious scroll… with an even more mysterious message. Continuing the epic graphic novel series set in the world of Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, Yang pens an offbeat and action-packed tale that turns the fantasy-adventure genre on its head! Yang will be joined in conversation by Jonathan Hill, award-winning cartoonist and author of Tales of a Seventh-Grade Lizard Boy.

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Altogether Different

Brianna Wheeler in Conversation With Claudia Meza

Wednesday, November 8 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

If you could choose between being Black and being white, what would you do? As a child, Brianna Wheeler, the mixed-race descendent of Dangerfield Newby — the first of John Brown's raiders to die at Harpers Ferry in their bid to end slavery — unconsciously chose whiteness, unaware that she had the choice at all. As an adult, following the deaths of her mother and grandmother, Wheeler struggled with her own identity, convinced that her lasting legacy would be the rejection of her own Blackness. Then, in 2020, a racial reckoning rekindled her connection to both her heritage and her grandmother's lifelong work of preserving the stories of Dangerfield and the rest of her ancestors, leading Wheeler to confront both long-held family dynamics and her own place in history — from a new perspective. A unique blend of memoir, creative nonfiction and illustration, Altogether Different (Korza Books) untangles the complex connections between the stories we tell ourselves and the histories preserved for us. Wheeler will be joined in conversation by Claudia Meza, award-winning journalist and host of the daily news and talk podcast, City Cast Portland.

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Betrayal

Phillip Margolin in Conversation With James Byrne

Wednesday, November 8 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Robin Lockwood is now a prominent defense attorney in Portland, Oregon but a decade ago, she was a ranked and rising MMA fighter. Her career came to a quick end when she was knocked out and concussed in the first round by Mandy Kerrigan, a much more talented fighter. Now the situation couldn't be more different, with Kerrigan on her last legs, her career nearly over, arrested for the quadruple murder of the entire Finch family, and Kerrigan's only possible friend is the attorney she beat so many years ago. For Robin, it's no simple case — Margaret Finch was a lawyer working for vicious Russian mobsters and was in the crosshairs of both the mobsters and the widower of a woman a client killed; her husband Nathan Finch was deeply in debt to a bookie who threatened his life; her son Ryan was the one who sold Kerrigan illegal performance-enhancing drugs and was beaten severely by her when Kerrigan failed her drug test. To complicate matters further, the DA that Robin is facing is the man she's just started dating, the first person she's seen seriously since her husband was killed. In a case where the stakes are high and the truth is elusive, there is seemingly no way to win or direction to turn that will leave Robin Lockwood unscathed. Betrayal (Minotaur) is the new novel from author Phillip Margolin. Margolin will be joined in conversation by James Byrne, author of Deadlock.

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High Bias

Marc Masters in Conversation With Melissa Maerz

Thursday, November 9 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities. Marc Masters's entertaining new book, High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (UNC Press), charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth of compact discs to resurgence among independent music makers. Scorned by the record industry for "killing music," the cassette tape rippled through scenes corporations couldn't control. For so many, tapes meant freedom — to create, to invent, to connect. Masters introduces readers to the tape artists who thrive underground; concert tapers who trade bootlegs; mixtape makers who send messages with cassettes; tape hunters who rescue forgotten sounds; and today's labels, which reject streaming and sell music on cassette. Their stories celebrate the cassette tape as dangerous, vital, and radical. Masters will be joined in conversation by Melissa Maerz, author of Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused.

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The Kuiper Belt Job

David D. Levine

Thursday, November 9 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

In a solar system well inhabited by humanity but far from settled, a gang of grifters and thieves — the scattered survivors of a big job gone very wrong ten years ago — must reunite to break the gang's erstwhile leader out of captivity. But after ten years, no one is who they were… and some are not what they seem. Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author David D. Levine’s The Kuiper Belt Job (Caezik) is a caper picture in space, a mash-up of Firefly, Leverage, and The Expanse. It's an ensemble piece with complex character relationships and a twisty, compelling plot, but beneath the entertaining surface, it raises deep questions about identity and personhood. In a world where minds can be copied, what does it mean to be "me"?

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Again and Again

Jonathan Evison in Conversation With Willy Vlautin

Friday, November 10 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Eugene “Geno” Miles is living out his final days in a nursing home, bored, curmudgeonly, and struggling to connect with his new nursing assistant, Angel, who is understandably skeptical of Geno's insistence on having lived not just one life but many — all the way back to medieval Spain, where, as a petty thief, he first lucked upon true love only to lose it and spend the next thousand years trying to recapture it. Who is Geno? A lonely old man clinging to his delusions and rehearsing his fantasies, or a legitimate anomaly, a thousand-year-old man who continues to search for the love he lost so long ago? As Angel comes to learn the truth about Geno, so, too, does the reader, and as his miraculous story comes to a head, so does the biggest truth of all: that love — timeless, often elusive — is sometimes right in front of us. From Jonathan Evison, author of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!, comes Again and Again (Dutton), a poignant and endlessly surprising story about love lost, found, and redeemed. Evison will be joined in conversation by Willy Vlautin, author of The Night Always Comes.

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Beatles Blackouts

Jack Marriott

Friday, November 10 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets a drunken Eat, Pray, Love in this unique tour of global Beatlemania. Did you know that there's a Beatles monument in Kazakhstan? Jack Marriott didn't, and he thought he knew everything there was to know about the storied band from Liverpool, England. He did some investigating and found that there were Beatles monuments, statues, and shrines all around the world, from Brazil to Mongolia, Peru to Japan. Meanwhile, his life in England was quickly deteriorating into drunkenness, the staff of his bar having walked out and his girlfriend having left him. So he did what anyone would do: "borrowed" a press pass and set off on a two-year quest through 23 countries, relying on the kindness of fellow fans to help him find these Beatles monuments and connect with the communities that built them. His goal: to find new stories about the Beatles, win back his girlfriend, and remind an increasingly insular post-Brexit Britain what the Beatles mean to the world. He just needed to push through the hangovers to do it. How hard could it be? Find out in Beatles Blackouts (Microcosm), the real-life account of one man's quest to find every Beatles monument.

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Invitation to a Banquet

Fuchsia Dunlop

Saturday, November 11 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese laborers began to settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese has the curious distinction of being both one of the world’s best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication — but today that is beginning to change. In Invitation to a Banquet (W. W. Norton), James Beard Award–winning writer and cook Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy, and techniques of Chinese culinary culture. In each chapter, she examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a distinctive aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it’s the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients, or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Meeting food producers, chefs, gourmets, and home cooks as she tastes her way across the country, Dunlop invites readers to join her on an unforgettable journey into Chinese food as it is cooked, eaten, and considered in its homeland. Weaving together history, mouthwatering descriptions of food, and on-the-ground research conducted over the course of three decades, Invitation to a Banquet is a lively, landmark tribute to the pleasures and mysteries of Chinese cuisine.

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Vengeance of the Pirate Queen

Tricia Levenseller in Conversation With Courtney Gould

Sunday, November 12 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Pirates of the Caribbean meets The Mummy in Vengeance of the Pirate Queen (Feiwel & Friends), Tricia Levenseller's triumphant return to the Daughter of the Pirate King universe. You can't be afraid of the dark when you're the monster lurking in the shadows. As an assassin working for the pirate queen, Sorinda is surprised when Alosa's next task for her is not to kill a new target, but to captain a handpicked crew on a rescue mission. Unfortunately, her sailing master is Kearan. He may be the best helmsman the pirate queen has, but Sorinda finds him a real pain in the arse. Sadly, there are few places on a ship to hide from an attentive man. As the crew of the Vengeance faces dangerous waters and deadly sea creatures, they accidentally awaken the King of the Undersea, a being who can control the dead. Their rescue mission quickly turns into a fight to save the world, but first, Sorinda must save herself from becoming an undead queen. Levenseller will be joined in conversation by Courtney Gould, author of Where Echoes Die and The Dead and the Dark.

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Mother, Nature

Jedidiah Jenkins in Conversation With Cheryl Strayed

Monday, November 13 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

When his mother, Barbara, turns 70, Jedidiah Jenkins is reminded of a sobering truth: our parents won't live forever. For years, he and Barbara have talked about taking a trip together, just the two of them. They disagree about politics, about God, about the project of society — disagreements that hurt. But they love thrift stores, they love eating at diners, they love true crime, and they love each other. Jedidiah wants to step into Barbara's world and get to know her in a way that occasional visits haven't allowed. They land on an idea: to retrace the thousands of miles Barbara trekked with Jedidiah's father, travel writer Peter Jenkins, as part of the Walk Across America book trilogy that became a sensation in the 1970s. Beginning in New Orleans, they set off for the Oregon coast, listening to podcasts about outlaws and cult leaders — the only media they can agree on — while reliving the journey that changed Barbara's life. Jedidiah discovers who Barbara was as a thirty-year-old writer walking across America and who she is now, as a parent who loves her son yet holds on to a version of faith that sees his sexuality as a sin. Along the way, he peels back the layers of questions millions are asking today: How do we stay in relationship when it hurts? When do boundaries turn into separation? When do we stand up for ourselves, and when do we let it go? Tender, smart, and profound, Mother, Nature (Convergent Books) is a story of a remarkable mother-son bond and a moving meditation on the complexities of love. Jenkins will be joined in conversation by Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things.

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First Meal

Kirk Johnson in Conversation With Theo Downes-Le Guin

Wednesday, November 15 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Wrongful convictions haunt the American criminal justice system, as revealed in recent years by DNA and other investigative tools. And every wrongfully convicted person who walks free, exonerated after years or decades, carries part of that story. From those facts, artist Julie Green posed a seemingly simple question: When you have been denied all choice, what do you choose to eat on the first day of freedom? In the small details of life at such pivotal moments, a vast new landscape of the world can emerge, and that is the core concept of First Meal (Oregon State University Press). Partnering with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, Green and her coauthor, award-winning journalist Kirk Johnson, have created a unique melding of art and narration in the portraits and stories of 25 people on the day of their release. Food and punishment have long been intertwined. The tradition of offering a condemned person a final meal before execution, for example, has been explored by psychologists, filmmakers, and others — including Green herself in an earlier series of criminal-justice themed paintings, The Last Supper. First Meal takes on that issue from the other side: food as a symbol of autonomy in a life restored. Set against the backdrop of a flawed American legal system, First Meal describes beauty, pain, hope and redemption, all anchored around the idea — explored by writers from Marcel Proust to Michael Pollan — that food touches us deeply in memory and emotion. First Meal seeks to inform and spread awareness, but also celebrate the humanity that unites us, and the idea that gratitude and euphoria — even as it mixes with grief and the awareness of loss — can emerge in places we least expect. Johnson will be joined in conversation by Theo Downes-Le Guin, literary executor for author Ursula K. Le Guin and head of the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation.

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System Collapse

Martha Wells

Friday, November 17 @ 6pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Everyone's favorite lethal SecUnit is back in System Collapse (Tordotcom), the next installment in Martha Wells's Murderbot Diaries series. Am I making it worse? I think I'm making it worse. Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there's an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can't have the planet, they're sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize. But there's something wrong with Murderbot; it isn't running within normal operational parameters. ART's crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza's SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they're going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what's wrong with itself, and fast! Yeah, this plan is... not going to work.

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Low

Nick Flynn in Conversation With Mary Szybist

Friday, November 17 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Low (Graywolf) explores the jaggedness of memory and what is salvageable when the past is broken by loss, violence, and trauma. Punctuating Nick Flynn’s signature lyric poems are prose pieces and sequences, veering toward essays, including “Notes on a Calendar Found in a Stranger’s Apartment,” a truly strange experience of cataloging a deceased neighbor’s belongings and how quickly they become worthless; “Notes on Thorns & Blood,” a study of time and wounds; and “Notes on a Year of Corona,” a loose sonnet crown about the early stages of the pandemic and the unrest after racist police violence. Despite its existential reverberations, Low is a celebration of desire in all its forms — the desire for home, the desire to be held, the desire for people to be kind to one another, the desire to understand where we are from and what we can do to make the best of that. But how do we create a home, these poems ask, in a world of satellites and atom bombs and algorithms, those things designed to dehumanize and reduce us? To get low is to reconnect with the earth, to engage with the emotional state of the planet, to remember that “the cure all along grows beside us.” Flynn’s collection is a prismatic, even prophetic, experience, with new complexity and ardor at every turn. Flynn will be joined in conversation by Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine.

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Time Travel Inn 2

Bart King

Saturday, November 18 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Join Astrid, Trent, and Damien on another adventure through space and time that will take you to Elizabethan England and a futuristic world where people are mysteriously turning into ducks. Astrid and co. are back in Bart King’s Time Travel Inn 2 (Chooseco), the highly anticipated sequel to Choose Your Own Adventure’s hit, Time Travel Inn! Just weeks after the events of Time Travel Inn, the Inn gets an unwelcome visitor: a corrupt multiverse cop investigating the whereabouts of your grandmother Dolores. The problem is, you don't know where, or "when," she is, either. And meanwhile, your dad has developed an illness that's slowly turning him into… a duck? Your pals Trent and Damien join you (Astrid) as you travel through space and time to find a cure, and also help your grandmother evade capture.

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mahogany

erica lewis, Kazim Ali & Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Sunday, November 19 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

erica lewis’s mahogany (Wesleyan) takes its name from the dark wood prized for its durability, workability, and elegant look, and from the Diana Ross movie, whose theme song asks if what lies ahead is what you really want. This book is the third in a trilogy, and like the first two books, it is steeped in pop music. Each poem here takes its title from a line of a Diana Ross and The Supremes song, as well as songs from Diana Ross's solo career. Short lines flow down the page like postmodern psalms, connecting dailyness to timelessness, merging the historical and the beloved through reverence for family, music, and the life we actually live. mahogany is a lament for the passing of time and unimaginable loss, and at the same time it models the daily search for joy, and the deep shine that can arise from the darkest times.
 
Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work explores themes of identity, migration, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions. His poetry is known for its lyrical and expressive language, as well as its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. "Sukun" means serenity or calm, and a sukun is also a form of punctuation in Arabic orthography that denotes a pause over a consonant. Sukun (Wesleyan) draws a generous selection from Ali’s six previous full-length collections, and includes thirty-five new poems. It allows us to trace Ali's passions and concerns, and take the measure of his art: the close attention to the spiritual and the visceral, and the deep language play that is both musical and plain spoken.
 
The debut novel by renowned poet and editor Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Trouble Finds You (Fonograf Editions) is a taut work of narrative fiction that deftly balances comedy and drama, mystery and tenderness. To say Harry Stables's life has hit a bit of a low patch lately is an understatement. In his mid-20s, he's been kicked out of his MFA program for fighting, his ex-girlfriend turned down his spur-of-the-moment marriage proposal, and he's spent the last ten days in his dad's falling-down Montana fishing cabin with his dog Greta trying to find out how his mother really died when he was a baby, something his father — now dying himself of cancer — has refused to tell either him or his sister their whole lives. On top of all this, he's just been to a party outside Missoula where he received a nasty dog bite and where he may have been an accessory to a fatal shooting. Set against the beauty of the American West, this is a novel of many colors: a thriller, a mystery, a coming-of-age story, and a family drama.

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No Use Pretending

Thomas A. Dodson in Conversation With Zoe Ballering

Tuesday, November 28 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The characters in Thomas A. Dodson’s new story collection, No Use Pretending (University of Iowa Press), have been forced into conditions of life that they find unbearable and the stories chart their often tragically misguided attempts to relieve their suffering via connections with other people or through the pursuit of addictive attachments (to opiates in one story, to sleep in another). Dodson’s collection encompasses diverse genres, from ecologically informed realism to a Kafkaesque fairy tale, from fabulist “weird fiction” to an episode from The Odyssey that becomes a meditation on what distinguishes human beings from animals. These stories invite the reader to reconsider moral and ideological certainties, to take a fresh look at such issues as fracking and drone warfare. In one story, a petroleum engineer discovers that one of his wastewater wells may be causing earthquakes, and in another the pilot of an Air Force drone seeks to reconcile his conflicting roles as protector and executioner, husband and soldier. The scientist and the serviceman are both presented with problems that have no easy or obvious solutions, situations that force them to confront the messy, compromising complexity of being human. Dodson will be joined in conversation by Zoe Ballering, author of There Is Only Us.

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Upcountry

Chin-Sun Lee in Conversation With Kimberly King Parsons

Wednesday, November 29 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Claire Pedersen and her husband are relocating from NYC to the Catskills — they have found a terrific deal on a property in foreclosure. The house has been in April Ives' family for three generations, but the single mother of three children from two different fathers needs the money. Claire and April are instantly antagonistic, but the sale proceeds, and renovations begin. Soon after, Claire's husband develops an erotic fascination with Anna, a young member of a nearby religious community called The Eternals. Two marriages — and one pregnancy — swiftly and dramatically end. Claire is left to finish the renovation and salvage the life she had imagined. April, meanwhile, is dealing with her ex who has just been released from prison on a drug charge and the decision of whether or not to let him build a relationship with the son he has never known. Life “upcountry” means close encounters between disparate social classes: Claire and April navigate mutual dislike and unanticipated empathy. The house remains a sore point for both. Anna is the unhappy fulcrum between the two older women. Shunned from The Eternals since the incident with Claire's husband, she yearns to return to their protection. Anna's strict views on transgression and penance are baffling to April; for Claire, Anna remains the embodiment of her ruined marriage. Upcountry (Unnamed Press) is the debut novel from author Chin-Sun Lee. Lee will be joined in conversation by Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light.

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Mischievous Creatures

Catherine McNeur in Conversation With Michelle Nijhuis

Thursday, November 30 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In Mischievous Creatures (Basic Books), historian Catherine McNeur uncovers the lives and work of Margaretta Hare Morris and Elizabeth Carrington Morris, sisters and scientists in early America. Margaretta, an entomologist, was famous among her peers and the public for her research on seventeen-year cicadas and other troublesome insects. Elizabeth, a botanist, was a prolific illustrator and a trusted supplier of specimens to the country's leading experts. Together, their discoveries helped fuel the growth and professionalization of science in antebellum America. But these very developments confined women in science to underpaid and underappreciated roles for generations to follow, erasing the Morris sisters's contributions along the way. Mischievous Creatures is an indelible portrait of two unsung pioneers, one that places women firmly at the center of the birth of American science. McNeur will be joined in conversation by Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts.

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Godly Heathens

H.E. Edgmon in Conversation With Courtney Gould

Friday, December 1 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Gem Echols is a nonbinary Seminole teen living in the tiny town of Gracie, Georgia. Known for being their peers' queer awakening, Gem leans hard on charm to disguise the anxious mess they are beneath. The only person privy to their authentic self is another trans kid, Enzo, who's a thousand long, painful miles away in Brooklyn. But even Enzo doesn't know about Gem's dreams, haunting visions of magic and violence that have always felt too real. So how the hell does Willa Mae Hardy? The strange new girl in town acts like she and Gem are old companions, and seems to know things about them they've never told anyone else. When Gem is attacked by a stranger claiming to be the Goddess of Death, Willa Mae saves their life and finally offers some answers. She and Gem are reincarnated gods who've known and loved each other across lifetimes. But Gem — or at least who Gem used to be — hasn't always been the most benevolent deity. They've made a lot of enemies in the pantheon — enemies who, like the Goddess of Death, will keep coming. It's a good thing they've still got Enzo. But as worlds collide and the past catches up with the present, Gem will discover that everyone has something to hide. Godly Heathens (Wednesday Books) is the first book in H. E. Edgmon's new YA contemporary fantasy duology. Edgmon will be joined in conversation by Courtney Gould, author of Where Echoes Die and The Dead and the Dark.

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California Against the Sea

Rosanna Xia in Conversation With Michelle Nijhuis

Monday, December 4 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Along California’s 1,200-mile coastline, the overheated Pacific Ocean is rising and pressing in, imperiling both wildlife and the maritime towns and cities that 27 million people call home. In California Against the Sea (Heyday), Los Angeles Times coastal reporter Rosanna Xia asks: as climate chaos threatens the places we love so fiercely, will we finally grasp our collective capacity for change? Xia, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, investigates the impacts of engineered landscapes, the market pressures of development, and the ecological activism and political scrimmages that have carved our contemporary coastline — and foretell even greater changes to our shores. From the beaches of the Mexican border up to the sheer-cliffed North Coast, the voices of Indigenous leaders, community activists, small-town mayors, urban engineers, and tenacious environmental scientists commingle. Together, they chronicle the challenges and urgency of forging a climate-wise future. Xia’s investigation takes us to Imperial Beach, Los Angeles, Pacifica, Marin City, San Francisco, and beyond, weighing the rivaling arguments, agreements, compromises, and visions governing the State of California’s commitment to a coast for all. Through graceful reportage, she charts how the decisions we make today will determine where we go tomorrow: headlong into natural disaster, or toward an equitable refashioning of coastal stewardship. Xia will be joined in conversation by Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts.

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The Ruined

Renée Ahdieh in Conversation With Laini Taylor

Thursday, December 7 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

The Sylvan Vale and the Sylvan Wyld are at war. Now that the unsteady truce between them has been broken, lines must be drawn. In an effort to protect the weakened Winter Court, Bastien rallies powerful allies and friends in New Orleans to come to their aid. Meanwhile, under protection alongside her injured mother in the Summer Court, Celine is uncertain of whom to trust. She cannot get word to Bastien, and does not understand why he has not returned. When she realizes war between the fey courts is imminent, she journeys with Ali in an effort to find the time-traveling mirror and change their fate. But when Celine’s rivals realize Bastien has rallied his allies in the mortal world, they decide to take the fight to him. The Ruined (G. P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers) is the stunning conclusion to Renée Ahdieh’s bestselling quartet that began with The Beautiful. Ahdieh will be joined in conversation by Laini Taylor, author of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy.

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The War Begins in Paris

Theodore Wheeler in Conversation With Jeff Alessandrelli

Monday, December 11 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

From Theodore Wheeler, author of Kings of Broken Things and In Our Other Lives, comes a provocative and stylish literary noir about two female war correspondents whose fates intertwine in Europe. Paris, 1938. Two women meet: Mielle, a shy pacifist and shunned Mennonite who struggles to fit in with the elite cohort of foreign correspondents stationed around the city; the other, Jane, a brash, legendary American journalist, who is soon to become a fascist propagandist. When World War II makes landfall in the City of Lights, Mielle falls under Jane’s spell, growing ever more intoxicated by her glamour, self-possession, and reckless confidence. But as this recklessness devolves into militarism and an utter lack of humanity, Mielle is seized by a series of visions that show her an inescapable truth: Jane Anderson must die, and Mielle must be the one to kill her. Structured as a series of dispatches filed from around Europe and based on the misadventures of a real journalist-turned-Nazi mouthpiece, The War Begins in Paris (Little, Brown) is a cat-and-mouse suspense that examines the relentlessness of propaganda, the allure of power, and how far one woman will go for the sake of her morality. Wheeler will be joined in conversation by Jeff Alessandrelli, author of And Yet and Fur Not Light.

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Being Henry

Henry Winkler / TICKETED EVENT

Tuesday, December 12 @ 7:30pm (PT) / Revolution Hall

From Emmy Award–winning actor, author, comedian, producer, and director Henry Winkler comes a deeply thoughtful memoir of the lifelong effects of stardom and the struggle to become whole. Winkler, launched into prominence by his role as “The Fonz” on the beloved Happy Days, has transcended the role that made him who he is. Brilliant, funny, and widely regarded as the nicest man in Hollywood (though he would be the first to tell you that it’s simply not the case, he’s really just grateful to be here), Winkler shares in his achingly vulnerable memoir the disheartening truth of his childhood, the difficulties of a life with severe dyslexia, the pressures of a role that takes on a life of its own, and the path forward once your wildest dream seems behind you. Since the glorious era of Happy Days fame, Winkler has endeared himself to a new generation with roles in such adored shows as Arrested Development, Parks and Recreation, and Barry, where he’s revealed himself as an actor with immense depth and pathos, a departure from the period of his life when he was so distinctly typecast as The Fonz, he could hardly find work. Filled with profound heart, charm, and self-deprecating humor, Being Henry (Celadon) is a memoir about so much more than a life in Hollywood and the curse of stardom. It is a meaningful testament to the power of sharing truth and kindness and of finding fulfillment within yourself.
 
Please note: Tickets for this event are $40 (before service charges) and include admission, as well as one hardcover copy of Winkler’s Being Henry. Books distributed at event.

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American Purgatory

Benjamin Weber in Conversation With Mic Crenshaw

Wednesday, December 13 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In his explosive new book, American Purgatory: Prison Imperialism and the Rise of Mass Incarceration (New Press), historian Benjamin Weber reveals how the story of American prisons is inextricably linked to the expansion of American power around the globe. A vivid work of hidden history that spans the wars to subjugate Native Americans in the mid-19th century, the conquest of the western territories, and the creation of an American empire in Panama, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, American Purgatory reveals how “prison imperialism” — the deliberate use of prisons to control restive, subject populations — is written into our national DNA, extending through to our modern era of mass incarceration. Weber also uncovers a surprisingly rich history of prison resistance, from the Seminole Chief Osceola to Assata Shakur — one that invites us to rethink the scope of America’s long freedom struggle. Weber’s brilliantly documented text is supplemented by original maps highlighting the global geography of prison imperialism, as well as illustrations of key figures in this history by the celebrated artist Ayo Scott. For readers of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, here is a bold new effort to tell the full story of prisons and incarceration — at home and abroad — as well as a powerful future vision of a world without prisons. Weber will be joined in conversation by Mic Crenshaw, independent hip hop artist, emcee, poet, educator, and activist.

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Better Days

Neal Allen in Conversation With Anne Lamott

Wednesday, December 20 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In his life-changing new book, Better Days (Namaste Publishing), writer and spiritual coach Neal Allen teaches us a stunning new method for quieting the inner critic. What if your superego has it wrong? That snarky little bully in your head… you know the one. You’ve lived under its weight for decades. You know that its scolding voice is harmful to you, but you can't will it away. You accept a life with short periods of peace and long stretches of stress and anxiety. But you don't have to. In his revolutionary new book, Allen examines a critical aspect of the human psyche that often gets ignored — the superego. Building on Freud’s idea that the superego necessarily forms a person’s moral conscience, Allen explains how this voice in your head develops in childhood as a survival mechanism, but when no longer needed for protection, camps out in your mind like a personal parasite. A parasite that doesn’t belong. Through simple and engaging exercises and explorations, Allen leads you into meeting, confronting, and ultimately quieting your own inner critic. By shedding off the burden of the superego, you can overcome tired patterns of reward and punishment, reduce the self-talk that harms you, and ultimately clear an open space for the life you deserve, one that is gentler and more peaceful. Just imagine… if all that nasty, negative chatter in your head just evaporated… what would you do next? Better days are just ahead. Allen will be joined in conversation by his wife, Anne Lamott, author of Dusk, Night, Dawn and Bird by Bird.

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