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!

Delve Seminar: Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

“Only in chaos are we conceivable.” Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel 2666 attempts to explore the totality of evil in the 20th century. Ranging from World War II to Detroit to the deserts of Mexico, the nearly 1000-page book presents a huge cast of characters, each individual offering their pain and hope as exemplifications of the current human condition. The novel spirals around two points: hundreds of murdered young women in the Sonora Desert, and the elusive author Benno von Archimboldi. As the plot dilates, the text examines issues hugely relevant to our current socio-political conversations. Is journalism as we know it doomed? How do countries born of war and genocide heal? How do communities successfully resist oppression? This novel has been celebrated in many languages,…

$220

Delve Readers Seminar: Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren’t any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.” Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower   “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed   When the unimaginable is occurring, how do we navigate the chaos? When violence is rampant and further disasters loom, where might we find guidance? Perhaps to books that have imagined the potential dystopias that we now seem to be approaching, books like The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin and Parable of…

$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Love in the Time of Cholera

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

This iconic novel, that Thomas Pynchon called “shining and heartbreaking,” is absolutely what its name implies: A love story (or really many love stories) that occur during a cholera outbreak along the Carribean coast of Colombia. Following Fermina Daza, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, & Florentino Ariza, the book explores all the facets of love—from the innocent to the cruel, from the honest to the disgusting—all against a backdrop of death, showing us that even in the hardest conditions, we will fall in love. The narrative spans decades, & like the best of García Márquez’s work, it feels infinite: everything is presented in intoxicating detail. Delve Access Program We want Delve seminars to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition…

$160

Delve Readers Seminar: The Book of Embraces

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The vignetted format of this text sometimes expands into short stories and sometimes shrinks into prose-poems, but regardless of any section’s length, this book is always intimate, charming, and transportive. Galeano uses journalistic research, autobiographical anecdotes, and interviews to emphasize how there really is no distinction between the personal and the political. He writes of the military dictatorship in Uruguay that forced him into exile, an Italian pantomime performance that reminded him the importance of loving your craft, a pet guinea pig that’s too afraid to leave its cage, the Chilean government’s despoiling of Pablo Neruda’s home, the fantastic dreams of his wife, and a few hundred other vignettes that advocate for love, friendship, and determination. A powerful text that uplifts humanity in the face…

$110

Delve Readers Seminar: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is one of the most celebrated & impactful books ever written. Since its publication over 50 million copies of the novel have been sold. The story follows the Buendía family & the other residents of Macondo through seven generations, depicting everything from civil war to flying carpets. The lush prose creates a transportive narrative that ever expands in all directions, exploring & complexifying the themes of colonialism & imperialism, the malleability of time, familial elitism, & humanity’s struggle to justify life. “Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to…

$240

Delve Readers Seminar: An Intensive Study of Totality: Jorge Luis Borges

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

The Argentine genius Jorge Luis Borges explored every facet of the word during his lifetime of writing. From sonnets about dream tigers to stories about detectives in Buenos Aires to essays on the collapse of time, Borges oeuvre reads as if limitless, always imbuing the reader with a sense of total expansion. This seminar will draw from his Collected Fictions, Selected Poems, Selected Non-fiction in an attempt to construct (& deconstruct) the scope of one of the most boundless authors of the 20th century. Texts: Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges Selected Non-fictions by Jorge Luis Borges Access Program We want our classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure…

$245