LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.

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Erik Davis

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

A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, Erik Davis’s High Weirdness (MIT) charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality – but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Davis – America's leading scholar of high strangeness – examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time…

Free

Chris Rush

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

Chris Rush was born into a prosperous, fiercely Roman Catholic, New Jersey family. But underneath the gleaming mid-century house, the flawless hostess mom, and the thriving businessman dad ran an unspoken tension that, amid the upheaval of the late 1960s, was destined to fracture their precarious facade. His older sister Donna introduces him to the charismatic Valentine, who places a tab of acid on 12-year-old Rush’s tongue, proclaiming: “This is sacrament. You are one of us now.” After an unceremonious ejection from an experimental art school, Rush heads to Tucson to make a major drug purchase and, still barely a teenager, disappears into the nascent American counterculture. Stitching together a ragged assemblage of lowlifes, prophets, and fellow wanderers, he seeks kinship in the communes of…

Free