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.
Kids’ Storytime With Ana Velez
Saturday, August 24 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Everyone’s heard of the three little pigs, but what about the three little guinea pigs? Way up in the Andes Mountains, Urku, Inti, and Nina have just finished building three new homes when a surprise visitor arrives. It’s Fox, and being pigs, the guineas are quick to judge that he’s up to no good, though he wears a stylish scarf and patiently calls, “Guinea pigs, guinea pigs, come with me. I have something for your family.” As young readers familiar with the traditional story will recall, many a pig has been tricked before, so it’s not surprising that the trio wishes to huddle inside. What the guinea pigs don’t see is how the animals are banding together to help them. In the end, it just might take the whole mountain of creatures to show them that things aren’t always as they seem and traditional fairytale foes could actually be friends. Set in Andean South America, Ana Velez’s The Three Little Guinea Pigs and the Andean Fox (Page Street Kids) is a fresh, lighthearted twist on a classic tale which invites readers to challenge assumptions, embrace community, and trust in teamwork.
Ismet Prcic in Conversation With Lidia Yuknavitch
Monday, August 26 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Unspeakable Home (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster) is a stunningly original, stylistically brilliant, and brutally honest novel from an award-winning Bosnian refugee and writer who, decades after escaping his war-torn home country, looks back on his childhood, imploded relationships, and battles with addiction — offering powerful insight into the human cost of conflict. It’s been two years since our narrator divorced his beloved and lost his safest and most adoring home when he fled Bosnia as a teenager. The marriage couldn’t survive his brokenness, the trauma so entrenched and insidious that it became impossible to communicate to anyone outside of himself — even the person he loved most. But, as he writes in the first of many courageously candid fan letters to the comedian Bill Burr, he knows he must try. A linguistically adventurous, structurally ambitious, and emotionally brave odyssey, Ismet Prcic’s Unspeakable Home takes us through the memories and confessions of our refugee narrator as he reflects on his bomb-ravaged childhood, the implosion of his relationships, and an agonizing battle with alcoholism. As multiple narrators surface in fragments with increasingly tenuous connections to reality, Prcic unearths the psychological cost of exile and shame with a roving, kinetic energy and a sharp, searching sense of humor. What emerges is a vivid and poignant exploration of the stories we create to hide the deepest parts of our identity from ourselves, as well as a hard-won, life-affirming promise of redemption. Prcic will be joined in conversation by Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust.
Craig Rosebraugh
Tuesday, August 27 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Burning Rage of a Dying Planet (Microcosm) is a harrowing, captivating firsthand history of the rise of the radical environmental movement the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). Since 1997, the ELF has inflicted over $100 million in damages on entities they believe to be causing environmental destruction, mostly through brazen arson attacks on timber companies, ski resorts, and car dealerships. Former ELF spokesperson Craig Rosebraugh charts the history and ideology of the ELF and explores its tactics, successes, and limitations. Rosebraugh examines the question of whether or not violence is justifiable, along with the short- and long-term political benefits and drawbacks of using violence. He also offers a primer on the tactics of state repression and strategies the US government uses to destroy activist movements. Whatever your view of direct action or violence, Burning Rage of a Dying Planet is an illuminating read for anyone seeking to understand radical environmental movements and the government’s response to them.
David Daley
Wednesday, August 28 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Equal parts Dark Money and Democracy in Chains, Antidemocratic (Mariner) is a riveting yet disturbing history of the fifty-year Republican plot to hijack voting rights in America, its profound implications for the 2024 presidential election, and the crucial role that Chief Justice John Roberts has played in determining how we vote. In 1981, a young lawyer, fresh out of Harvard law school, joined the Reagan administration’s Department of Justice, taking up a cause that had been fomenting in Republican circles for over a decade by that point. From his perch inside the Reagan DOJ, this lawyer would attempt to bring down one of the defining pieces of 20th century legislation — the Voting Rights Act. His name was John Roberts. Over thirty years later in 2013, these efforts by John Roberts and the conservative legal establishment culminated when Roberts, now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote Shelby County vs. Holder, one of the most consequential decisions of modern jurisprudence. A dramatic move that gutted the Voting Rights Act, Roberts’s decision — dangerously premised on the flawed notion that racism was a thing of the past — emboldened right-wing, antidemocratic voting laws around the country immediately. No modern court decision has done more to hand elections to Republicans than Shelby. Now lauded investigative reporter David Daley reveals the urgent story of this plot to end the Voting Rights Act and encourage minority rule in their party’s favor. From the bowels of Reagan’s DOJ to the walls of the conservative Federalist Society to the moneyed Republican resources bankrolling restrictive voting laws today, Daley reveals a hidden history as sweeping as it is troubling. Through careful research and exhaustive reporting, he connects Shelby to a well-funded, highly-coordinated right-wing effort to erode the power of minority voters and Democrats at the ballot box — an effort that has grown stronger with each election cycle. In the process Roberts and his conservative allies have enabled fringe conservative theories about our elections with the potential to shape the 2024 election and topple the foundations of our democracy. Timely and alarming, Daley offers a powerful message that, while Shelby was the misguided end of the Voting Rights Act, it was also the beginning of something far darker.
Brendan Shay Basham in Conversation With Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.
Thursday, August 29 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Suffering the unbearable loss of his little brother, Kai, Damien heads as far south as his old truck and his legs will allow, landing in a fishing village beyond the reach of his past where he hopes to finally forget. But the village carries grief of its own. Mourning the death of a young woman from the community’s most powerful family, they do not trust this stranger new to their town. The object of gossip and suspicion, Damien is ignored by all except the dead woman’s mother, Ana María, who offers him a room and a job. Grateful for her kindness, Damien soon begins to fall under Ana María’s charismatic spell. But how long can he resist the rumors linking her and her daughter’s death? Or deny his strange kinship with one of Ana María’s surviving daughters, Marta, who knows too well the grief that follows the loss of a sibling — and who is driven by a fierce need for revenge? Swiftly, Damien finds himself caught in a power struggle between the brujas, a whirlwind battle that threatens to sweep the whole village out to sea. Resonant with the Diné creation story and the unshakable weight of the Long Walk — the forced removal of the Navajo from their land — Swim Home to the Vanished (Harper Perennial) is a mesmerizingly original tale that brilliantly, poignantly explores our capacity for grief and resilience and its lasting effects on the soul. Brendan Shay Basham’s haunting debut novel is inspired, in part, by Diné history and thought. Basham will be joined in conversation by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., the Tilikum Professor and Chair of Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University and author of Pour One for the Devil.
Kids’ Storytime
Saturday, August 31 @ 10:30am (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Join us every Saturday for kids’ storytime. Today we’re reading Ready to Soar by Cori Doerrfeld.
Leave a Comment