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Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche in Conversation With Tim Olmsted

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

At 36 years old, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche was a rising star within his generation of Tibetan masters and the respected abbot of three monasteries. Then one night, telling no one, he slipped out of his monastery with the intention of spending the next four years on a wandering retreat, following the ancient practice of holy mendicants. Soon he became deathly ill from food poisoning – and his journey took a startling turn. His lifelong meditation practice had prepared him to face death, and he now had the opportunity to test the strength of his training. In his powerful, candid account of the inner workings of a Buddhist master, In Love With the World (Spiegel & Grau), Rinpoche shares the lessons he learned from his near-death…

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Kevin Scott

Powell's Books on Hawthorne 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR, United States

In The Voice of This Stone (Carpe Diem), a respected volcanologist with five decades of scientific study and boots-on-the-ground experience shares his expert knowledge. Through more than a dozen case studies from around the globe, Kevin Scott offers chilling details about what happened before, during, and after infamous volcanic cataclysms. During his lengthy career as a field geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Scott traveled extensively to visit sites that were dramatically altered by forces within the earth. Scott’s case studies highlight some of the best known events and advance warnings regarding future episodes. By deciphering the histories of other disasters, Scott proposes, lives can and will be spared.

Free

Ed Levine in Conversation With J. Kenji López-Alt

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

In 2005, Ed Levine was a freelance food writer with an unlikely dream: to control his own fate and create a different kind of food publication. He wanted to unearth the world’s best bagels, the best burgers, the best hot dogs – the best of everything edible. Against all sane advice, he created a blog for $100 and called it… Serious Eats. The site quickly became a home for obsessives who didn’t take themselves too seriously. In Serious Eater (Portfolio), the James Beard Award winner finally tells the moving, mouthwatering, heart-stopping story of building – and almost losing – one of the most acclaimed and beloved food sites in the world. Levine will be joined in conversation by J. Kenji López-Alt, James Beard Award-winning author…

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Shawn Levy

Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, OR, United States

We welcome Portland author Shawn Levy to the store, reading from his newest book, The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont. For ninety years, Hollywood's brightest stars have favored the Chateau Marmont as a home away from home. Perched above the Sunset Strip like a fairytale castle, the Chateau seems to come from another world entirely. Its singular appearance houses an equally singular history. An apartment house-turned-hotel, it has been the backdrop for generations of gossip and folklore. Much of what's happened inside the Chateau's walls has eluded the public eye. Until now. With wit and insight, Levy recounts the wild revelries and scandalous liaisons, the creative breakthroughs and marital breakdowns, the births and deaths that the Chateau…

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Chelsea Biondolillo in Conversation With Rene Denfeld

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

From award-winning essayist Chelsea Biondolillo, The Skinned Bird (Kernpunkt) is about all the ways we break our own hearts. In lyric, fragmented essays – full of geological, ornithological, and photographic interventions, with landscapes, loss, and longing – Biondolillo travels the terrain of leaving and finding home, while keeping her sights fixed firm on the natural world around her. Biondolillo will be joined in conversation by Rene Denfeld, author of The Child Finder.

Free

Stories My Mother & Father Told Me: Dmae Roberts

Portland Chinatown Museum 127 NW Third Ave, Portland, OR, United States

Renowned writer, producer, media and theater artist, and founder of Portland's Theater Diaspora, Dmae Roberts will screen her 2015 documentary film Mei Mei: A Daughter's Song and read from her recent book Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed Race Family (2016).

$10 – $12

Sarah Townsend and Liz Scott Reading and in Conversation about their Memoirs

Mother Foucault's Bookshop 523 SE Morrison St, Portland, OR, United States

Authors Sarah Townsend and Liz Scott in conversation about their memoirs. Setting the Wire by Sarah Townsend is a memoir of postpartum psychosis and a meditation on containment: what we hold and what holds us together. A lyric exploration of motherhood, mental illness, and familial ties, Sarah Townsend’s debut work weaves together personal anecdote, film, music, visual art, and psychology. Setting the Wire is a visceral reflection on the experience of fragmentation as a young psychotherapist and new mother. Liz Scott’s memoir, This Never Happened, goes in search of the answers to the mysteries of her family. In her relentless quest to uncover the truth, she mines photographs and letters, leaving no one, including herself, unexamined. This is a spare work, alternately heartbreaking and darkly…

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Sarah Townsend and Liz Scott Reading in Conversation about their Memoirs

Mother Foucault's Bookshop 523 SE Morrison St, Portland, OR, United States

Authors Sarah Townsend and Liz Scott in conversation about their memoirs. Thursday, June 27,  2019 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm Setting the Wire by Sarah Townsend is a memoir of postpartum psychosis and a meditation on containment: what we hold and what holds us together. A lyric exploration of motherhood, mental illness, and familial ties, Sarah Townsend’s debut work weaves together personal anecdote, film, music, visual art, and psychology. Setting the Wire is a visceral reflection on the experience of fragmentation as a young psychotherapist and new mother. Liz Scott’s memoir, This Never Happened, goes in search of the answers to the mysteries of her family. In her relentless quest to uncover the truth, she mines photographs and letters, leaving no one, including herself, unexamined. This is a spare work, alternately…

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Bruce Berger

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Occupying a space between traditional nature writing, memoir, journalism, and prose poetry, Bruce Berger’s essays are beautiful, subtle, and haunting meditations on the landscape and culture of the American Southwest. Combining new essays with selections from his acclaimed trilogy of “desert books” – The Telling Distance, There Was a River, and Almost an Island – A Desert Harvest (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a career-spanning selection of the best work by this unique and undervalued voice. Wasteland architecture, mountaintop astronomy, Bach in the wilderness, the mind of the wood rat, the canals of Phoenix, and the numerous eccentric personalities who call the desert their home all come to life in these fascinating portraits of America’s seemingly desolate terrains.

Free

Joshua A. Douglas

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

In contrast to the anxiety surrounding our voting system, with stories about voter suppression and manipulation, there are actually quite a few positive initiatives toward voting rights reform. Professor Joshua A. Douglas, an expert on our electoral system, examines these encouraging developments in his inspiring new book about how regular Americans are working to take back their democracy, one community at a time. Told through the narratives of those working on positive voting rights reforms, Vote for US (Prometheus) includes chapters on expanding voter eligibility, easing voter registration rules, making voting more convenient, enhancing accessibility at the polls, providing voters with more choices, finding ways to comply with voter ID rules, giving redistricting back to the voters, pushing back on big money through local and…

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