A resource for the PDX literary community. Produced by Old Pal.
LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.
For details regarding specific events please contact the organizers or venues. If you are an organizer or venue and would like to reach out to us please feel free to contact us or submit an event using our submission form. We’d love to hear from you!
Everyone welcome! 😊 The next cycle of the Ulysses Support Group will begin on Monday, July 15th from 6-8pm. This relaxed group of readers will meet weekly in the snug with the goal of finishing the novel by next Bloomsday (June 16, 2020). No need to be experienced in reading Joyce, but please bring your own copy of the book (any edition is fine). 📖
This book club is ran by the teens who attend. No adults allowed. The teens have chosen Speed of Life by J.M. Anthony this month. Impoverished eighteen-year-old Crystal and her twin make a pact to raise their baby together and create a better life for them all. But when an opportunity arises to go to college to learn to restore classic cars, Crystal is left with a difficult choice: follow her dreams or stay behind and honor her promise. Available at a 15% discount to order if you plan on attending the book club. Email us to order it or come in!
Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Club will alternate monthly between Science Fiction and Fantasy. August will be a Fantasy Pick. We will discuss The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins. After she and a dozen other children found them being raised by "Father," a cruel man with mysterious powers, Carolyn and her "siblings" begin to think he might be God. When Father disappears, they square off against each other to determine who will inherit his library, which may hold the power to all Creation. As Carolyn gathers the tools she needs for the battle to come she has a plan. The only trouble is that in the war to make a new God, she's forgotten to protect the things that make her human ... Available at a…
This month our group meets to discuss Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. Join us!
Following her acclaimed debut, Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow, Peg Alford Pursell explores and illuminates love and loss in 78 hybrid stories and fables. A Girl Goes Into the Forest (Dzanc) immerses readers in the complex desires, contradictions, and sorrows of daughters, wives, and husbands, artists, siblings, and mothers. In forests literal and metaphorical, the characters try, fail, and try again to see the world, to hear each other, and to speak the truth of their longings. Powerful, lyrical, and precise, Pursell’s stories call up a world at once mysterious and recognizable. A Girl Goes Into the Forest invites fans of Lydia Davis and Helen Oyeyemi into a world where “no one can deter a person from her mistakes.” Pursell will be…
Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland author Kay Jennings to read from her debut mystery, Shallow Waters. The last thing Port Stirling Chief of Police Matt Horning needed on day one of his new job was for the mayor’s daughter to turn up dead in a tunnel on the Oregon beach. Horning, escaping professional troubles in Texas, accepts the vacant job in Port Stirling, Oregon, looking for a fresh start in what he thought would be a sleepy coastal town. Nothing much ever happens here…or does it? With only a ragtag county crime team to assist him, Horning must match wits with a diabolical killer, the likes of which this peaceful village has never seen. For one week in wild and stormy January, Horning calls on all…
Accepting short stories of 3,000 words max and flash pieces up to 1,000 words for their 14th issue, Shirley Magazine looks for “prose first, plot second, but we need both. Give us a slice of the sublimely strange. We want the eerie, the weird, the beautiful. We’re interested in the body and its grotesqueries, the brain and its tricks. We want stories that don’t clearly belong to any one genre, stories that will get our hands dirty, stories that expose the worms crawling under the rock.” Simultaneous submissions welcome, but no previously published works. Women, nonbinary, and writers of color are especially encouraged to submit work. Shirley Magazine‘s next reading period (after this one ending in August) will not accept work by cis men (see…
We will discuss The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld. Three years ago, Madison Culver disappeared when her family was choosing a Christmas tree in Oregon's Skookum National Forest. She would be eight-years-old now--if she has survived. Desperate to find their beloved daughter, certain someone took her, the Culvers turn to Naomi, a private investigator with an uncanny talent for locating the lost and missing. Available at a 15% discount to order if you plan on attending the book club. Email us to order it or come in!
Kimberly King Parsons’s debut story collection, Black Light (Vintage), is a love letter to Texas’s most scrappy, beastly, and strange – and a paean to characters who dare furiously to dream despite being trapped in places devoid of hope. With raw, poetic ferocity, Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows – those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In her debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood. Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt…
Join us August 17th (all day!) for Bookstore Romance Day! We'll have fun activities and a Book Club at 2 pm. We'll have a place to share a beautiful moment for our pin-board and we'll have some lovely specials on some items in the store. Write a romance novel! This is a continuous novel writing experience- where each person takes off from where the previous person ended. This continues the story in a fun and entertaining way and with no pressure (it's anonymous!). At 2 pm join us to discuss The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts by Annie Darling for a Book Club (all welcome!). This adorable romance takes place in a bookshop in London! So much fun and highly recommended by Candace. In addition…