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Powell's Books Author Events

Powell’s is excited to resume in-person author events at our City of Books and Cedar Hills Crossing locations.

We’re continuing to offer virtual events featuring authors from around the world. Please read our lineup of upcoming events carefully, to see whether the event you’d like to attend will be online or at one of our store locations.

Missed one of our virtual events? Watch them all on our YouTube channel.

Questions about how to attend our virtual events? Click here for our FAQ.


Everything I Need I Get from You

Kaitlyn Tiffany in Conversation With Lindsay Zoladz

Monday, June 27 @ 5pm (PT)

In 2014, on the side of a Los Angeles freeway, a One Direction fan erected a shrine in the spot where, a few hours earlier, Harry Styles had vomited. “It’s interesting for sure,” Styles said later, adding, “a little niche, maybe.” But what seemed niche to Styles was actually an irreverent signpost for an unfathomably large, hyper-connected alternative universe: stan culture. In Everything I Need I Get from You (MCD x FSG), Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a superfan herself, guides us through the online world of fans, stans, and boybands. Along the way we meet girls who damage their lungs from screaming too loud, fans rallying together to manipulate chart numbers using complex digital subversion, and an underworld of inside jokes and shared memories surrounding band members' allergies, internet typos, and hairstyles. In the process, Tiffany makes a convincing, and often moving, argument that fangirls, in their ingenuity and collaboration, created the social internet we know today, effectively making One Direction the first internet boyband. With humor, empathy, and an expert's eye, Everything I Need I Get from You reclaims internet history for young women, establishing fandom not as the territory of hysterical girls but as an incubator for digital innovation, art, and community. From alarming, fandom-splitting conspiracy theories about secret love and fake children, to the interplays between high and low culture and capitalism, Tiffany’s book is a riotous chronicle of the movement that changed the internet forever. Tiffany will be joined in conversation by critic, reporter, and essayist Lindsay Zoladz.

Register for the Zoom event  /  Buy the Book

Tracy Flick Can’t Win

Tom Perrotta

Monday, June 27 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Tracy Flick is back and, once again, the iconic protagonist of Tom Perrotta’s Election — and Reese Witherspoon’s character from the classic movie adaptation — is determined to take high school politics by storm. Tracy Flick is a hardworking assistant principal at a public high school in suburban New Jersey. Still ambitious but feeling a little stuck and underappreciated in midlife, Tracy gets a jolt of good news when the longtime principal, Jack Weede, abruptly announces his retirement, creating a rare opportunity for Tracy to ascend to the top job. Energized by the prospect of her long-overdue promotion, Tracy throws herself into her work with renewed zeal, determined to prove her worth to the students, faculty, and school board, while also managing her personal life — a ten-year-old daughter, a needy doctor boyfriend, and a burgeoning meditation practice. But nothing ever comes easily to Tracy Flick, no matter how diligent or qualified she happens to be. As she broods on the past, Tracy becomes aware of storm clouds brewing in the present. Is she really a shoo-in for the principal job? Is the superintendent plotting against her? Why is the school board president’s wife trying so hard to be her friend? And why can’t she ever get what she deserves? In classic Perrotta style, Tracy Flick Can’t Win (Scribner) is a sharp, darkly comic, and pitch-perfect reflection on our current moment. Flick fans and newcomers alike will love this compelling novel chronicling the second act of one of the most memorable characters of our time.

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Boys, Beasts & Men

Sam J. Miller in Conversation With Fonda Lee

Monday, June 27 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

In Nebula Award-winning author Sam J. Miller’s devastating debut short-fiction collection, Boys, Beasts & Men (Tachyon), queer infatuation, inevitable heartbreak, and brutal revenge seamlessly intertwine. Whether innocent, guilty, or not even human, the boys, beasts, and men roaming through Miller’s gorgeously crafted worlds can destroy readers, yet leave them wanting more. Despite his ability to control the ambient digital cloud, a foster teen falls for a clever con-man. Luring bullies to a quarry, a boy takes clearly enumerated revenge through unnatural powers of suggestion. In the aftermath of a shapeshifting alien invasion, a survivor fears that he brought something out of the Arctic to infect the rest of the world. A rebellious group of queer artists create a new identity that transcends even the anonymity of death. Miller, author of Blackfish City and The Art of Starving, shows his savage wit, unrelenting candor, and lush imagery in this essential career retrospective collection, taking his place alongside legends of the short-fiction form such as Carmen Maria Machado, Carson McCullers, and Jeff VanderMeer. Miller will be joined in conversation by Fonda Lee, author of the Green Bone Saga.

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One Beautiful Spring Day

Jim Woodring in Conversation With Gary Groth

Tuesday, June 28 @ 5pm (PT)

Jim Woodring has been chronicling the adventures of his cartoon everyman, Frank, for almost 30 years. These stories are a singular rarity in the comics form — both bone-chillingly physical in their depictions of Frank’s travails and profoundly metaphysical at the same time. Not since George Herriman’s Krazy Kat has the comics language been so exquisitely distilled into pure, revelatory aesthetic expression. One Beautiful Spring Day (Fantagraphics) combines three previously published volumes — Congress of the Animals, where Frank embarked upon a life-changing voyage of discovery; Fran, where he learned, then forgot, that things are not always what they seem; and Poochytown, in which Frank demonstrated his dizzying capacity for both nobility and ignominy — along with 100 dazzling new pages conceived and drawn by Woodring. The result is a seamless graphic narrative that forges a new and even more poignantly realized single story that takes readers deep into the hidden meanings of the previous stories and offers the most full, complete, astonishing exposition of Frank and his supercharged world to date. Frank’s curiosity and risk-taking mixed with a dose of, let’s face it, wanton recklessness, takes him on a series of terrifying peregrinations that often leave his soul and body shattered, and the reader in a state of creative exaltation. Suffice to say that if you are a friend to Frank, you will find One Beautiful Spring Day to be a thousand-course feast of agonizing bliss, soul-stirring mystery, and luminous depth. Woodring will be joined in conversation by Gary Groth, co-founder of The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books.

Register for the Zoom event  /  Buy the Book

Thrust

Lidia Yuknavitch in Conversation With Vanessa Veselka

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

As rising waters — and an encroaching police state — endanger her life and family, a girl with the gifts of a carrier travels through water and time to rescue vulnerable figures from the margins of history. Lidia Yuknavitch has an unmatched gift for capturing stories of people on the margins — vulnerable humans leading lives of challenge and transcendence. Now, Yuknavitch offers an imaginative masterpiece: the story of Laisve, a motherless girl from the late 21st century who is learning her power as a carrier, a person who can harness the power of meaningful objects to carry her through time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as the Brook, she discovers a talisman that will mysteriously connect her with a series of characters from the past two centuries: a French sculptor; a woman of the American underworld; a dictator's daughter; an accused murderer; and a squad of laborers at work on a national monument. Through intricately braided storylines, Laisve must dodge enforcement raids and find her way to the present day, and then, finally, to the early days of her imperfect country, to forge a connection that might save their lives — and their shared dream of freedom. A dazzling novel of body, spirit, and survival, Thrust (Riverhead) will leave no reader unchanged. Yuknavitch will be joined in conversation by Vanessa Veselka, author of The Great Offshore Grounds.

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So Help Me Golf

Rick Reilly CANCELLED

Tuesday, June 28 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

We are sorry to report that this event has been cancelled.

In So Help Me Golf (Hachette), beloved author and golf aficionado Rick Reilly channels his insatiable curiosity, trademark sense of humor, and vast knowledge of the game in a treasure trove of original pieces about what the game has meant to him and to others. This is the book Reilly has been writing in the back of his head since he fell in love with the game of golf at eleven years old. He unpacks and explores all of the wonderful, maddening, heart-melting, heart-breaking, cool, and captivating things about golf that make the game so utterly addictive. We meet the PGA Tour player who robbed banks by night to pay his motel bills, the golf club maker who takes weekly psychedelic trips, and the caddy who kept his loop even after an 11-year prison stint. We learn how a man on his third heart nearly won the U.S. Open, how a Vietnam POW saved his life playing 18 holes a day in his tiny cell, and about the course that's absolutely free. Reilly expounds on all the great figures in the game, from Phil Mickelson to Bobby Jones to the simple reason Jack Nicklaus is better than Tiger Woods. He explains why we should stop hating Bryson DeChambeau unless we hate genius, the greatest upset in women’s golf history, and why Ernie Els throws away every ball that makes a birdie. Plus all the Greg Norman stories Reilly has never been able to tell before, and the great fun of being Jim Nantz. Connecting it all will be the story of Reilly’s own personal journey through the game, especially as it connects to his tumultuous relationship with his father, and how the two eventually reconciled through golf. This is Reilly’s valentine to golf, a cornucopia of stories that no golfer will want to be without.

Fight Like Hell

Kim Kelly in Conversation With Shane Burley

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

Fight Like Hell (Atria/One Signal) is a revelatory and inclusive history of the American labor movement, from independent journalist and Teen Vogue labor columnist Kim Kelly. Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the working-class heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law. The names and faces of countless silenced, misrepresented, or forgotten leaders have been erased by time as a privileged few decide which stories get cut from the final copy: those of women, people of color, LGBTQIA people, disabled people, sex workers, prisoners, and the poor. In this definitive and assiduously researched work of journalism, Kelly excavates that untold history and shows how the rights the American worker has today — the 40-hour workweek, workplace-safety standards, restrictions on child labor, protection from harassment and discrimination on the job — were earned with literal blood, sweat, and tears. Fight Like Hell comes at a time of economic reckoning in America. From Amazon’s warehouses to Starbucks cafes, Appalachian coal mines to the sex workers of Portland’s Stripper Strike, interest in organized labor is at a fever pitch not seen since the early 1960s. Inspirational, intersectional, and full of crucial lessons from the past, Fight Like Hell shows what is possible when the working class demands the dignity it has always deserved. Kelly will be joined in conversation by Shane Burley, author of Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse.

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Summer in the City of Roses

Michelle Ruiz Keil in Conversation With Emilly Prado

Wednesday, June 29 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

Inspired by the Greek myth of Iphigenia and the Grimm fairytale "Brother and Sister," Michelle Ruiz Keil's second novel follows two siblings torn apart, struggling to find each other in early '90s Portland. All her life, 17-year-old Iph has protected her sensitive younger brother, Orr. But this summer, with their mother gone at an artist residency, their father decides it’s time for 15-year-old Orr to toughen up at a wilderness boot camp. When their father brings Iph to a work gala in downtown Portland and breaks the news, Orr has already been sent away against his will. Furious at her father’s betrayal, Iph storms off and gets lost in the maze of Old Town. Enter George, a queer Robin Hood who swoops in on a bicycle, bow and arrow at the ready, offering Iph a place to hide out while she tracks down Orr. Orr, in the meantime, has escaped the camp and fallen in with The Furies, an all-girl punk band, and moves into the coat closet of their ramshackle pink house. In their first summer apart, Iph and Orr must learn to navigate their respective new spaces of music, romance, and sex-work activism — and find each other before a fantastical transformation fractures their family forever. Told through a lens of magical realism and steeped in myth, Keil’s Summer in the City of Roses (Soho Teen) is a dazzling tale about the pain and beauty of growing up. Keil will be joined in conversation by Emilly Prado, author of Funeral for Flaca.

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Girlhood

Melissa Febos in Conversation With Genevieve Hudson

Thursday, June 30 @ 5pm (PT)

Winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award, Melissa Febos’s Girlhood (Bloomsbury) examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them. When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defenses she’d developed over years of trying to meet others’ expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs. Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny. Written with Febos’ characteristic precision, lyricism, and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self. Febos will be joined in conversation by Genevieve Hudson, author of Boys of Alabama.

Register for the Zoom event  /  Buy the Book

Kaleidoscope

Cecily Wong in Conversation With Kimberly King Parsons

Tuesday, July 5 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Everybody’s heard of The Brightons. From rags to riches, sleepy Oregon to haute New York, they are the biracial Chinese American family that built Kaleidoscope, a glittering, ‘global bohemian’ shopping empire sourcing luxury goods from around the world. Statuesque, design savant, and family pet — eldest daughter Morgan Brighton is most celebrated of all. Yet despite her favored status, both within the family and in the press, nobody loves her more than Riley. Smart and nervy Riley Brighton — whose existence is forever eclipsed by her older sister’s presence. When a calamity dismantles the Brightons’ world, it is Riley who’s left with questions about her family that challenge her memory, identity, and loyalty. She sets off across the globe with an unlikely companion to seek truths about the people she thought she knew best — herself included. Using the brightly colored, shifting mosaic patterns of a kaleidoscope as its guide, and told in arresting, addictive fragments, Cecily Wong’s Kaleidoscope (Dutton) is at once a reckoning with one family’s flawed American Dream, and an examination of the precious bond between sisters. It reveals, too, the different kinds of love left to grow when tightly held stories are finally let go. At turns devastating and funny, warm and wise, sexy and transportive, Riley’s journey confronts the meaning of freedom and travel, youth and innocence, and what it looks like to belong, grieve, and love on one’s own terms. Wong will be joined in conversation by Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light.

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Unmask Alice

Rick Emerson in Conversation With Chelsea Cain

Wednesday, July 6 @ 5pm (PT)

In 1971, Go Ask Alice reinvented the young adult genre with a blistering portrayal of sex, psychosis, and teenage self-destruction. The supposed diary of a middle-class addict, Go Ask Alice terrified adults and cemented LSD's fearsome reputation, fueling support for the War on Drugs. Five million copies later, Go Ask Alice remains a divisive bestseller, outraging censors and earning new fans, all of them drawn by the book's mythic premise: A Real Diary, by Anonymous. But Alice was only the beginning. In 1979, another diary rattled the culture, setting the stage for a national meltdown. The posthumous memoir of an alleged teenage Satanist, Jay's Journal merged with a frightening new crisis — adolescent suicide — to create a literal witch hunt, shattering countless lives and poisoning whole communities. In reality, Go Ask Alice and Jay's Journal came from the same dark place: Beatrice Sparks, a serial con artist who betrayed a grieving family, stole a dead boy's memory, and lied her way to the National Book Awards. Rick Emerson’s Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries (BenBella) is a true story of contagious deception. It stretches from Hollywood to Quantico, and passes through a tiny patch of Utah nicknamed "the fraud capital of America." It's the story of a doomed romance and a vengeful celebrity. Of a lazy press and a public mob. Of two suicidal teenagers, and their exploitation by a literary vampire. Unmask Alice… where truth is stranger than nonfiction. Emerson will be joined in conversation by Chelsea Cain, author of Heartsick and One Kick.

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The Angel of Rome: And Other Stories

Jess Walter

Wednesday, July 6 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

From the author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions comes a stunning collection about those moments when everything changes — for the better, for the worse, for the outrageous — as a diverse cast of characters bounces from Italy to Idaho, questioning their roles in life and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places. We all live like we’re famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don’t want others to see. In The Angel of Rome: And Other Stories (Harper), the riveting new collection of stories from Jess Walter, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place to care for the old man. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the romantic title story, a shy 21-year-old studying Latin in Rome during “the year of my reinvention” finds himself face-to-face with the Italian actress of his adolescent dreams. Funny, poignant, and redemptive, Walter’s collection of short fiction offers a dazzling range of voices, backdrops, and situations. With his signature wit and bighearted approach to the darkest parts of humanity, Walter tackles the modern condition with a timeless touch, once again “solidifying his place in the contemporary canon as one of our most gifted builders of fictional worlds” (Esquire).

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Stealing Infinity

Alyson Noël in Conversation With Tracy Wolff

Thursday, July 7 @ 5pm (PT)

My life goes completely sideways the moment I meet the mysterious Braxton. Sure, he’s ridiculously hot, but he’s also the reason I’ve been kicked out of school and recruited into Gray Wolf Academy — a remote island school completely off the grid. I never should have trusted a face so perfect. But the reality of why Gray Wolf wanted me is what truly blows my mind. It’s a school for time travelers. Tripping, they call it. This place is filled with elaborate costumes and rare artifacts, where every move is strategic and the halls are filled with shadows and secrets. Here, what you see isn’t always what it appears. Including Braxton. Because even though there’s an energy connecting us together, the more secrets he keeps from me, the more it feels like something is pulling us apart. Something that has to do with this place — and its darker purpose. It’s all part of a guarded, elaborate puzzle of history and time… and I might be one of the missing pieces. Now I have all the time in the world. And yet I can’t shake the feeling that time is the one thing I’m about to run out of… fast. Dan Brown meets Leigh Bardugo in Alyson Noël’s Stealing Infinity (Entangled), the clever, fast-paced new series from the author of the Immortals series. Noël will be joined in conversation by Tracy Wolff, author of the Crave series.

Register for the Zoom event  /  Buy the Book

Take No Names

Daniel Nieh

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

Victor Li is a man without a past. To his new employer, Mark, he’s just an anonymous hired hand to help with the dirty work. Together, they break into storage units that contain the possessions of the recently deported, pocketing whatever is worth selling. Only Victor and his sister, Jules, know that he’s a wanted man. Amid the backpacks and suitcases, Victor makes the find of a lifetime: a gem rare and valuable enough to change his fortunes in an instant. But selling it on the sly? Nearly impossible. Thankfully, its former owner, a woman named Song Fei, also left a book of cryptic notes — including the name of a gemstone dealer in Mexico City. When Victor and Mark cross the southern border, they quickly realize that this gem is wrapped up in a much larger scheme than they imagined. In Mexico City, shadowy international interests are jockeying for power, and they may need someone with Victor’s talents — the same ones that got him in trouble in the first place. On the heels of his knockout debut Beijing Payback, Daniel Nieh delivers Take No Names (Ecco), a white-knuckled and whip-smart thriller that races to an electrifying finish.

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Jackie & Me

Louis Bayard in Conversation With Julia Claiborne Johnson

Monday, July 11 @ 5pm (PT)

Louis Bayard, author of The Pale Blue Eye and The Black Tower, is back with a brilliantly wrought, witty, and sensitive novel about the young Jacqueline Bouvier before she became that Jackie — and about a marriage that almost never happened. In the spring of 1951, debutante Jacqueline Bouvier, working as the Inquiring Photographer for the Washington Times-Herald, meets Jack Kennedy, a charming congressman from a notorious and powerful family, at a party in Washington, DC. Young, rebellious, eager to break free from her mother, Jackie is drawn to the elusive young politician, and soon she and Jack are bantering over secret dinner dates and short work phone calls. Jack, busy with House duties during the week and Senate campaigning on the weekend (as well as his other now-well-known extracurricular activities) convinces his best friend and fixer, Lem Billings, to court Jackie on his behalf. Only gradually does Jackie begin to realize that she is being groomed to be the perfect political wife, whether Jack is interested in settling down or not. Taking place mostly during the spring and summer before Jack and Jackie’s wedding, and narrated by an older Lem as he looks back at his own relationship with the Kennedys and his role in this complicated marriage, Jackie & Me (Algonquin) is a searching story about a young woman of a certain class with narrow options, two people who loved each other, and two people who realized too late that they devoted their lives to Jack at their own expense. Sharply written, steeped in the era and with witty appearances by members of the extended Kennedy clan, this is Jackie as never before seen, in a story about love, sacrifice, friendship, and betrayal. Bayard will be joined in conversation by Julia Claiborne Johnson, author of Be Frank With Me and Better Luck Next Time.

Register for the Zoom event  /  Buy the Book

Sex and the Single Woman

Tiana Clark, Vanessa Friedman & Shayla Lawson in Conversation With Katherine Morgan

Tuesday, July 12 @ 5pm (PT)

In May 1962, Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl sent shockwaves through the United States, selling more than two million copies in three weeks. The future Cosmopolitan Editor-in-Chief’s book promoted the message that a woman’s needs, ambition, and success during her single years could actually take precedence over the search for a husband. While much of Brown’s advice is outdated and even offensive by today’s standards, her central message remains relevant. In their exceptional anthology, Sex and the Single Woman (Harper Perennial), editors Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson bring together insights from many of today’s leading feminist thinkers and writers to pay homage to Brown’s original work and reinterpret it for a new generation. These contributors provide a much-needed reckoning while addressing today’s central issues, from contraception and abortion (topics the publisher banned from the original) to queer and trans womanhood, racial double standards, dating with disabilities, sexual consent, singlehood by choice, single parenting, and more. Written for today’s women, this revisionist anthology honors Brown’s irreverent spirit just as it celebrates and validates women’s sexual lives and individual eras of singlehood, encouraging us all to reclaim joy where it’s so often been denied. This event will feature a panel discussion with Sex and the Single Woman contributors Tiana Clark, Vanessa Friedman, and Shayla Lawson, in conversation with Katherine Morgan, author of No Self-Respecting Woman.

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Invisible Things

Mat Johnson in Conversation With Cari Luna

Tuesday, July 12 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

When sociologist Nalini Jackson joins the SS Delany for the first manned mission to Jupiter, all she wants is a career opportunity: the chance to conduct the first field study of group dynamics on long-haul cryoships. But what she discovers instead is an entire city encased in a bubble on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. Even more unexpected, Nalini and the rest of the crew soon find themselves joining its captive population. New Roanoke is a city riven by wealth inequality and governed by a feckless, predatory elite, its economy run on heedless consumption and income inequality. But in other ways it's different from the cities we already know: It’s covered by an enormous dome, populated by alien abductees, and happens to be terrorized by an invisible entity so disturbing that no one even dares acknowledge its existence. Albuquerque chauffer Chase Eubanks is pretty darn sure aliens stole his wife. So when his philanthropist boss funds a top-secret rescue mission to save New Roanoke's abductees, Chase jumps at the chance to find her. The plan: get the astronauts out and provide the population with the tech they need to escape this alien world. Mat Johnson’s Invisible Things (One World) is a sharp, allegorical novel and a madcap, surreal adventure into a Jovian mirror world, one grappling with the same polarized politics, existential crises, and mass denialism that obsess and divide our own. Will New Roanoke survive? Will we? Johnson will be joined in conversation by Cari Luna, author of The Revolution of Every Day.

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The Pallbearers Club

Paul Tremblay in Conversation With Stewart O'Nan

Wednesday, July 13 @ 5pm (PT)

The Pallbearers Club (William Morrow) is a cleverly voiced psychological thriller about an unforgettable — and unsettling — friendship, with blood-chilling twists, crackling wit, and a thrumming pulse in its veins — from Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and Survivor Song. What if the coolest girl you've ever met decided to be your friend? Art Barbara was so not cool. He was a 17-year-old high school loner in the late 1980s who listened to hair metal, had to wear a monstrous back-brace at night for his scoliosis, and started an extracurricular club for volunteer pallbearers at poorly attended funerals. But his new friend thought the Pallbearers Club was cool. And she brought along her Polaroid camera to take pictures of the corpses. Okay, that part was a little weird. So was her obsessive knowledge of a notorious bit of New England folklore that involved digging up the dead. And there were other strange things — terrifying things — that happened when she was around, usually at night. But she was his friend, so it was okay, right? Decades later, Art tries to make sense of it all by writing The Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. But somehow this friend got her hands on the manuscript and, well, she has some issues with it. And now she's making cuts. Seamlessly blurring the lines between fiction and memory, the supernatural and the mundane, The Pallbearers Club is an immersive, suspenseful portrait of an unusual and disconcerting relationship. Tremblay will be joined in conversation by Stewart O'Nan, author of Ocean State and Emily, Alone.

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Husbandry

Matthew Dickman in Conversation With Chelsea Bieker

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

Guided by acclaimed poet Matthew Dickman’s signature “clarity and ability to engage” (David Kirby, New York Times), Husbandry (W. W. Norton) is a love song from a father to his children. Written after a separation and during overwhelming single-fatherhood in the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, Husbandry refuses romantic notions of parenting and embraces all its mess, anguish, humor, fear, boredom, and warmth. Dickman composes these poems entirely in vivid couplets that animate the various domestic pairs of broken-up parents, two sons, love and grief. He explores the terrain of his children’s dreams and nightmares, the almost primal fears that spill into his own, and the residual impacts of his parents’ failures. Threading his anxieties with bright moments of beauty and gratitude, the volume delights in seeing the world through the clear eyes of childhood and finds meaning in the domestic work — repetitive, exhausting, and sublime — of sustaining three lives. With tender, aching precision, Husbandry reveals the poet’s hunger to be a husband without ever being one, and his search for a father that ends with becoming one himself. Dickman will be joined in conversation by Chelsea Bieker, author of Heartbroke and Godshot.

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Human Blues

Elisa Albert in Conversation With Kimberly King Parsons

Thursday, July 14 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

From an author whose writing has been praised as “blistering” (The New Yorker), “virtuosic” (The Washington Post), and “brilliant” (The New York Times) comes a provocative and entertaining novel about a woman who desperately wants a child but struggles to accept the use of assisted reproductive technology — a hilarious and ferocious send-up of feminism, fame, art, commerce, and autonomy. On the eve of her fourth album, singer-songwriter Aviva Rosner is plagued by infertility. The twist: as much as Aviva wants a child, she is wary of technological conception, and has poured her ambivalence into her music. As the album makes its way in the world, the shock of the response from fans and critics is at first exciting — and then invasive and strange. Aviva never wanted to be famous, or did she? Meanwhile, her evolving obsession with another iconic musician, gone too soon, might just help her make sense of things. Told over the course of nine menstrual cycles, Elisa Albert’s Human Blues (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster) is a bold, brainy, darkly funny, utterly original interrogation of our cultural obsession with childbearing. It’s also the story of one fearless woman at the crossroads, ruthlessly questioning what she wants and what she’s willing — or not willing — to do to get it. Albert will be joined in conversation by Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light.

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 Self-Portrait with Ghost

Meng Jin & K-Ming Chang in Conversation With Rachel Khong

Monday, July 18 @ 5pm (PT)

Meng Jin’s debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as “spectacular and emotionally polyphonic" (Omar El-Akkad) and “meticulously observed, daringly imagined” (Claire Messud). Now Jin turns her considerable talents to short fiction, in ten thematically linked stories. Written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming-of-age and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships, and surprising moments of connection. Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost (Mariner) considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly endless access to knowledge, and little actual power. Gods of Want (One World) features stories that center the bodies, memories, myths, and relationships of Asian American women, in the vein of the electrifying relationships in Killing Eve and Yellowjackets — from K-Ming Chang, the National Book Award "5 Under 35" honoree and author of Bestiary. With each tale, Chang gives us her own take on a surrealism that mixes myth and migration, corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian. Stunningly told in her feminist fabulist style, these are uncanny stories peeling back greater questions of power and memory. Jin and Chang will be joined in conversation by Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin.

Register for the Zoom event  /  Buy the Book (Jin) / Buy the Book (Chang)

Pretty Baby

Chris Belcher in Conversation With Katherine Morgan

Monday, July 18 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The dominatrix is the id of American femininity. She says the words that we all wish we could say when we find ourselves frozen in the presence of men. No is principal among them. So writes Chris Belcher, who appeared destined for a life of conventional femininity after she took first place in an infant beauty contest — a minor glory that can follow you around a working-class town of 1,600 people in rural West Virginia. But when she came out as queer, the conservative community that had once celebrated its prettiest baby turned on her. A decade later, living in Los Angeles and trying to stay afloat in the early years of a PhD program, Belcher plunges into the work of a pro domme. Branding herself as LA’s Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix, she specializes in male clients who want a domme to make them feel worthless, shameful, and weak — all the abuse regularly heaped upon women for free. A queer woman whom men can trust with the unorthodox sides of their sexualities, Belcher is paid to be the keeper of the fantasies that they can’t enact in their everyday relationships. But moonlighting as a sex worker also carries risks, like the not-so-submissive who tries to turn the tables and the jealous client out for revenge. As Belcher moves between the embodied world of the pro domme and the abstract realm of academia, she discovers how lessons from the classroom apply to the dungeon, and vice versa. Still, fear that her doctoral program won’t approve burdens her with a double life. Pretty Baby (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster) is her second coming out. In her sharp and discerning memoir, we see through Belcher’s eyes how power and desire can be renegotiated — or reinforced. Belcher will be joined in conversation by Katherine Morgan, author of No Self-Respecting Woman.

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Tree Thieves

Lyndsie Bourgon in Conversation With Ed Jahn

Tuesday, July 19 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

There's a strong chance that chair you are sitting on was made from stolen lumber. In Tree Thieves (Little, Brown Spark), Lyndsie Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the illegal timber market. As she traces three timber poaching cases, she introduces us to tree poachers, law enforcement, forensic wood specialists, the enigmatic residents of former logging communities, environmental activists, international timber cartels, and indigenous communities along the way. Old-growth trees are invaluable and irreplaceable for both humans and wildlife, and are the oldest living things on earth. But the morality of tree poaching is not as simple as we might think: stealing trees is a form of deeply rooted protest, and a side effect of environmental preservation and protection that doesn't include communities that have been uprooted or marginalized when park boundaries are drawn. As Bourgon discovers, failing to include working class and rural communities in the preservation of these awe-inducing ecosystems can lead to catastrophic results. Featuring excellent investigative reporting, fascinating characters, logging history, political analysis, and cutting-edge tree science, Tree Thieves takes readers on a thrilling journey into the intrigue, crime, and incredible complexity sheltered under the forest canopy. Bourgon will be joined in conversation by Ed Jahn, Executive Editor, OPB Science & Environment.

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Hollywood Park

Mikel Jollett

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

Hollywood Park (Celadon) is a remarkable memoir of a tumultuous life. Mikel Jollett, frontman for The Airborne Toxic Event, was born into one of the country’s most infamous cults, and subjected to a childhood filled with poverty, addiction, and emotional abuse. Yet, ultimately, his is a story of fierce love and family loyalty told in a raw, poetic voice that signals the emergence of a uniquely gifted writer. His story opens in an experimental commune in California, which later morphed into the Church of Synanon, one of the country’s most infamous and dangerous cults. Per the leader’s mandate, all children, including Jollett and his older brother, were separated from their parents when they were six months old, and handed over to the cult’s “School.” When Mikel was five, his mother escaped the cult with both of her children. But in many ways, life outside Synanon was even harder and more erratic. In his raw, poetic, and powerful voice, Jollett portrays a childhood filled with abject poverty, trauma, emotional abuse, delinquency, and the lure of drugs and alcohol. Raised by a clinically depressed mother, tormented by his angry older brother, subjected to the unpredictability of troubled stepfathers and longing for contact with his father, a former heroin addict and ex-con, Jollett slowly, often painfully, builds a life that leads him to Stanford University and, eventually, to finding his voice as a writer and musician. Hollywood Park is told at first through the limited perspective of a child, and then broadens as Jollett begins to understand the world around him. Although Jollett’s story is filled with heartbreak, it is ultimately an unforgettable portrayal of love at its fiercest and most loyal.

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Other Terrors

Vince A. Liaguno & Rena Mason in Conversation With Tananarive Due, Jennifer McMahon, Alma Katsu & Nathan Carson

Thursday, July 21 @ 5pm (PT)

Other Terrors (William Morrow) is an anthology of original new horror stories edited by Bram Stoker Award winners Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason that showcases authors from underrepresented backgrounds telling terrifying tales of what it means to be, or merely to seem, “other.” Offering original new stories from some of the biggest names in horror, as well as some of the hottest up-and-coming talents, Other Terrors will provide the ultimate reading experience for horror fans who want to celebrate fear of “the other.” Be they of a different culture, a different background, a different sexual preference, a different belief system, or a different skin color, some people simply aren’t part of the dominant community — and are perceived as scary. Humans are almost instinctively inclined to fear what’s different, as foolish as that may be, and there are a multitude of individuals who have spent far too long on the outside looking in. And the thing about the outside is… it’s much larger than you think. Liaguno and Mason will be joined in conversation by Other Terrors contributors Tananarive Due (The Living Blood), Jennifer McMahon (The Winter People), Alma Katsu (The Hunger), and Nathan Carson (Starr Creek).

Register for the Zoom event  /  Buy the Book

Hawk Mountain

Conner Habib

Thursday, July 21 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

An English teacher is gaslit by his charismatic high school bully in a tense story of deception, manipulation, and murder from Conner Habib, host of the Against Everyone with Conner Habib podcast. Single father Todd is relaxing at the beach with his son, Anthony, when he catches sight of a man approaching from the water’s edge. As the man draws closer, Todd recognizes him as Jack, who bullied Todd relentlessly in their teenage years but now seems overjoyed to have “run into” his old friend. Jack suggests a meal to catch up. And can he spend the night? What follows is a fast-paced story of obsession and cunning. As Jack invades Todd’s life, pain and intimidation from the past unearth knife-edge suspense in the present. Set in a small town on the New England coast, Habib’s debut introduces characters trapped in isolation by the expansive woods and the encroaching ocean, their violence an expression of repressed desire and the damage it can inflict. Both gruesome and tender, Hawk Mountain (W. W. Norton) offers a compelling look at how love and hate are indissoluble, intertwined until the last breath.

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Cheese War

Marilyn Milne & Linda Kirk

Thursday, July 21 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

In the 1960s, Tillamook County, Oregon was at war with itself. As the regional dairy industry shifted from small local factories to larger consolidated factories, and as profit margins for milk and cheese collapsed, Tillamook farmers found themselves in a financial crisis that fueled multiple disputes. The ensuing Cheese War included lies and secrets, as well as spies, high emotion, a shoving match, and even a death threat. Sisters Marilyn Milne and Linda Kirk, children of the Cheese War, conducted years of research and have integrated it with tales of their experiences as farm kids living through the all-consuming fight. As Americans become ever more interested in food supply chains and ethical consumption, Cheese War (Oregon State) is the story of the very human factors behind one of Oregon’s most iconic brands.

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Do the Work!

W. Kamau Bell & Kate Schatz in Conversation With Megan Rapinoe

Tuesday, July 26 @ 5pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

W. Kamau Bell and Kate Schatz’s Do the Work! (Workman) is a hands-on workbook for anyone overwhelmed by racial injustice, who feels shocked by all the American histories they never learned, and who keeps asking the question “what can I DOOOOOO?!” Packed with humorous, thought-provoking activities — all are rooted in history and contemporary social justice concepts — Bell and Schatz’s new book helps readers move from "What can I do?" to... you know... actually doing the work. Revelatory and thought-provoking, their highly illustrated, highly informative interactive workbook gives readers a unique, hands-on understanding of systemic racism — and how we can dismantle it. Packed with activities, games, illustrations, comics, and eye-opening conversation, Do the Work! challenges readers to think critically and act effectively. Try the “Separate but Not Equal” crossword puzzle. Play “Bootstrapping, the Game” to understand the myth of meritocracy. Test your knowledge of racist laws by playing “Jim Crow or Jim Faux?” Bell and Schatz will be joined in conversation by Megan Rapinoe, Olympic gold medalist, two-time Women’s World Cup champion, and author of One Life.

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Denial

Jon Raymond in Conversation With Leni Zumas

Wednesday, July 27 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

Denial (Simon & Schuster) is a futuristic thriller about climate change by Jon Raymond, the acclaimed screenwriter of First Cow, Meek’s Cutoff, and HBO’s Mildred Pierce. The year is 2052. Climate change has had a predictably devastating effect: Venice submerged, cyclones in Oklahoma, megafires in South America. Yet it could be much worse. Two decades earlier, the global protest movement known as the Upheavals helped break the planet’s fossil fuel dependency, and the subsequent Nuremberg-like Toronto Trials convicted the most powerful oil executives and lobbyists for crimes against the environment. Not all of them. A few executives escaped arrest and went into hiding, including pipeline mastermind Robert Cave. Now, a Pacific Northwest journalist named Jack Henry who works for a struggling media company has received a tip that Cave is living in Mexico. Hoping the story will save his job, he travels south and, using a fake identity, makes contact with the fugitive. The two men strike up an unexpected friendship, leaving Jack torn about exposing Cave — an uncertainty further compounded by the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and a new romance with an old acquaintance. Who will really benefit from the unmasking? What is the nature of justice and punishment? How does one contend with mortality when the planet itself is dying? Denial is both a page-turning speculative suspense novel and a powerful existential inquisition about the perilous moment in which we currently live. Raymond will be joined in conversation by Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks.

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Some of It Was Real

Nan Fischer in Conversation with Chelsea Cain

Wednesday, July 27 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

In Nan Fischer’s Some of It Was Real (Berkley), a psychic on the verge of stardom who isn’t sure she believes in herself and a cynical journalist with one last chance at redemption are brought together by secrets from the past that also threaten to tear them apart. Psychic-medium Sylvie Young starts every show with her origin story, telling the audience how she discovered her abilities. But she leaves out a lot — the plane crash that killed her parents, an estranged adoptive family who tend orchards in rainy Oregon, panic attacks, and the fact that her agent insists she research some clients to ensure success. After a catastrophic reporting error, Thomas Holmes’s next story at the L.A. Times may be his last, but he’s got a great personal pitch. “Grief vampires” like Sylvie who prey upon the loved ones of the deceased have bankrupted his mother. He’s dead set on using his last-chance article to expose Sylvie as a conniving fraud and resurrect his career. When Sylvie and Thomas collide, a game of cat and mouse ensues, but the secrets they’re keeping from each other are nothing compared to the mysteries and lies they unearth about Sylvie’s past. Searching for the truth might destroy them both — but it’s the only way to find out what’s real. Fischer will be joined in conversation by Chelsea Cain, author of Heartsick and One Kick.

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This Is Your Mind on Plants

Michael Pollan in Conversation With Dave Miller / TICKETED EVENT

Wednesday, July 27 @ 7:30pm (PT) / Newmark Theatre

From Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, comes a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants — and the equally powerful taboos. Of all the things humans rely on plants for — sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber — surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a "drug"? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime? In This Is Your Mind on Plants (Penguin Press), Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs — opium, caffeine, and mescaline — and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings? In his unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively — as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Pollan’s groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world. Pollan will be joined in conversation by Dave Miller, host of OPB's Think Out Loud.
 
Please note: Tickets for this event are $28 (before service charges) and include admission, as well as one paperback copy of This Is Your Mind on Plants. Books distributed at event.

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Clementine Book One

Tillie Walden in Conversation With Terry Blas

Thursday, July 28 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing

From the world of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead… Clementine lives! In Tillie Walden’s Clementine Book One (Image), Clementine is back on the road, looking to put her traumatic past behind her and forge a new path all her own. But when she comes across an Amish teenager named Amos with his head in the clouds, the unlikely pair journeys North to an abandoned ski resort in Vermont, where they meet up with a small group of teenagers attempting to build a new, walker-free settlement. As friendship, rivalry, and romance begin to blossom amongst the group, the harsh winter soon reveals that the biggest threat to their survival… might be each other. Walden will be joined in conversation by writer-illustrator Terry Blas, author of Dead Weight and Lifetime Passes.

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The Wild Hunt

Emma Seckel in Conversation With Craig Popelars

Wednesday, August 3 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The islanders have only three rules: don’t stick your nose where it’s not wanted, don’t mention the war, and never let your guard down during October. Leigh Welles has not set foot on the island in years, but when she finds herself called home from life on the Scottish mainland by her father’s unexpected death, she is determined to forget the sorrows of the past — her mother’s abandonment, her brother’s icy distance, the unspeakable tragedy of World War II — and start fresh. Fellow islander Iain MacTavish, an RAF veteran with his eyes on the sky and his head in the past, is also in desperate need of a new beginning. A young widower, Iain struggles to return to the normal life he knew before the war. But this October is anything but normal. This October, the sluagh are restless. The ominous, birdlike creatures of Celtic legend — whispered to carry the souls of the dead — have haunted the islanders for decades, but in the war’s wake, there are more wandering souls and more sluagh. When a young man disappears, Leigh and Iain are thrown together to investigate the truth at the island’s dark heart and reveal hidden secrets of their own. Rich with historical detail, a skillful speculative edge, and a deep imagination, Emma Seckel’s propulsive and transporting debut The Wild Hunt (Tin House) unwinds long-held tales of love, loss, and redemption. Seckel will be joined in conversation by Craig Popelars, publisher of Tin House Books.

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I Made an Accident

Kevin Sampsell, Janice Lee, and Jay Ponteri

Thursday, August 4 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In 2014, after the release of his debut novel, writer and publisher Kevin Sampsell switched gears and turned to a new creative obsession: making collage art. Initially influenced by the wild cutup language of William S. Burroughs, Sampsell soon discovered countless modern collagists that inspired him to take his art further and further from where it started. I Made an Accident (CLASH) showcases over 200 of Sampsell's collages, exploring a range of styles: hilarious sight gags, subtle cultural jabs, elegant mysteries, colorful surprises, fragmented hauntings, and gloriously strange accidents. Janice Lee’s Separation Anxiety (CLASH) is a complex and entangled text that explores inherited trauma, the presence of ghosts, interspecies communication, the dream world, grief, and human/animal separation. Weaving wisdom from her shamanic practice and the interstices of language, and in the difficult moments anticipating the deaths of her beloved dog companions, Separation Anxiety marks the first collection of poetry from the acclaimed prose writer and is a meditation on inhabitation and existence beyond the human. Written over the course of eight years, Jay Ponteri’s Someone Told Me (Widow and Orphan House), combines associative self-portraiture, lyric essay, literary criticism, and memory-based work. The experimental prose toggles between descriptions of daily domestic life, responses to art — such as Richard Linklater's Boyhood and Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things To Me — and dreams of artists and the art they make, including Robert Walser, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Anne Frank. Core themes include race, gender, heteronormativity, loneliness, shame, gentrification, attachment, parenthood, grief, and traumatic birth.

Preorder a Signed Edition (Sampsell) / Preorder a Signed Edition (Lee) / Preorder a Signed Edition (Ponteri)

Autoportrait

Jesse Ball in Conversation With Max Porter

Tuesday, August 9 @ 4pm (PT)

Jesse Ball has produced 14 acclaimed works of deeply empathetic absurdism in poetry and fiction. Now, he offers readers his first memoir, one that showcases his “humane curiosity” (James Wood) and invites the reader into a raw and personal account of love, grief, and memory. Inspired by the memoir Édouard Levé put to paper shortly before his death, Autoportrait (Catapult) is an extraordinarily frank and intimate work from one of America's most brilliant young authors. The subtle power of Ball's voice conjures the richness of everyday life. On each page, half-remembered moments are woven together with the joys and triumphs — and the mistakes and humiliations, too — that somehow tell us who we are and why we are here. Held at the same height as tragic accounts of illness or death are moments of startling beauty, banality, or humor: "I wake in the morning, I sit, I walk long distances. If there is somewhere to swim, I may swim. If I have a bicycle, I will ride it, especially to meet someone. There is no more preparing for me to do, other than preparing for death, and I do that by laughing. Not laughing at death, of course. Laughing at myself." An extraordinary memoir that reminds us what is possible and builds to the kind of power one might feel reading Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay," or Joe Brainard's I Remember. Autoportrait will leave you feeling utterly invigorated, inspired, and a little afraid. Ball will be joined in conversation by Max Porter, author of Lanny and Grief is the Thing with Feathers. This virtual launch event is presented in partnership with Community Bookstore, Seminary Co-op Bookstores, and Third Place Books and will be hosted by Community Bookstore on Zoom Webinar.

Register for the Zoom event  /  Buy the Book

Dirty Pictures

Brian Doherty

Wednesday, August 10 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

In the 1950s, comics meant POW! BAM! superheroes, family-friendly gags, and Sunday funnies, but in the 1960s, inspired by these strips and the satire of MAD magazine, a new generation of creators set out to subvert the medium, and with it, American culture. Their “comix,” spelled that way to distinguish the work from their dime-store contemporaries, presented tales of taboo sex, casual drug use, and a transgressive view of society. Embraced by hippies and legions of future creatives, this subgenre of comic books and strips was printed on out-of-date machinery, published in zines and underground newspapers, and distributed in head shops, in porno stores, and on street corners. Comix often ran afoul of the law, but that would not stop them from casting cultural ripples for decades to come, eventually moving the entire comics form beyond the gutter and into fine-art galleries. In Dirty Pictures (Abrams), Brian Doherty weaves together the stories of R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, Spain Rodriguez, Harvey Pekar, and Howard Cruse, among many others, detailing the complete narrative history of this movement that came to define “cool.” Dirty Pictures is the essential exploration of a truly American art form that recontextualized the way people thought about war, race, sex, gender, and expression.

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Anybody Home?

Michael J. Seidlinger in Conversation With Janice Lee

Thursday, August 11 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

What came first, the home or the desire to invade? A seasoned invader with multiple home invasions under their belt recounts their dark victories while offering tutelage to a new generation of ambitious home invaders eager to make their mark on the annals of criminal history. From initial canvasing to home entry, the reader is complicit in every strangling and shattered window. The fear is inescapable. Examining the sanctuary of the home and one of the horror genre's most frightening tropes, Michael J. Seidlinger’s Anybody Home? (Clash Books) points the camera lens on to the quiet suburbs and its unsuspecting abodes, any of which are potential stages for an invader ambitious enough to make it the scene of the next big crime sensation. Who knows? Their performance just might make it to the silver screen. Seidlinger will be joined in conversation by Janice Lee, author of Separation Anxiety and Imagine a Death.

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