Rachel DeWoskin in Conversation with Cheryl Strayed — THIS EVENT IS NOW SOLD OUT

This event is now sold out. You can call the store (503-284-1726) to be put on the wait list in case of cancellations.

Please join us on Wednesday, June 19th, at 7 pm for a special ticketed event with Rachel DeWoskin in conversation with Cheryl Strayed, discussing DeWoskin’s newly published novel Banshee. Tickets to the event are $16.95, which is the price of the paperback edition of Banshee, and each attendee will receive a copy of the book. Doors will open at 6 pm, and the reading will start at 7.

Samantha Baxter, the novel’s protagonist, has a full, sane life: creative job, lovely family, and all the trappings of middle-age happiness. But when she gets a cancer diagnosis that terrifies her, a lifetime of polite pleasing and putting others first ignites in her a surprising, pure rage. Maybe Sam will survive the surgery, and maybe not, but either way, she’ll spend the next three weeks burning her life down: sleeping with a student her daughter’s age, speaking every truth she’s ever swallowed, and refusing to apologize for her wildest, most essential self.

Gina Frangello says that in this new novel, DeWoskin “takes on the medical industrial complex, the institution of marriage, the power dynamics of academia, the false binaries of lust, and the intimate, unfathomably complex relationship between women’s private bodeis and public identities — but none of that can convey the raucous, white-hot, and page-turning brilliance of this novel.” And Cheryl Strayed calls the book “sexy and sad, dark and funny, ruthless and kind…a ferociously feminist masterpiece. Every page of it glitters with rage and with love.”

DeWoskin has previously written novels for both adults and young adults, including her latest YA novel, Someday We Will Fly. Her memoir Foreign Babes, about the years she spent in China as the unlikely star of a Chinese soap opera, is now in development at BBC America, where DeWoskin is co-writing a TV series based on the book. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Ploughshares, and Seneca Review. She is on the core fiction faculty and is an affiliated faculty member of Jewish Studies and East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Wild, the New York Times bestsellers Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough, and the novel Torch. Wild was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as her first selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 and was made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. Tiny Beautiful Things was adapted for the stage by Nia Vardalos. Strayed’s books have been translated into nearly forty languages around the world. Signed and/or personalized copies of all of Strayed’s books can be ordered at this link.

The first item in the list below is the ticket. Do not put the book in your shopping cart as well unless you are ordering additional copies. All tickets must be paid for in advance, so please do not select “pay in store” as a payment option. Tickets are non-refundable.