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

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What’s Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd, Beaverton, OR, United States

Like trigger warnings and gender-neutral bathrooms, pronouns are sparking a national debate, prompting new policies in schools, workplaces, even prisons, about what pronouns to use. Far more than a by-product of the culture wars, gender-neutral pronouns are nothing new. Based on linguist Dennis Baron’s own empirical research, What’s Your Pronoun? (Liveright) chronicles the story of the role pronouns have played – and continue to play – in establishing both our rights and our identities.

Free

Virtual Variety Show

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

A little of this and a little of that, dashes of everything we usually host at the Book Pub.  Music, poetry, prose, history and culture, comedy, and whatever else we devise. Cost: Free with optional cover charge Please consider contributing to this virtual event with an optional cover charge here: https://www.rosecitybookpub.com/shop/optional-cover-fee-for-virtual-events-5-suggested Link to Event:https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAufu6vpj0sE9VJSqP7frXq4b2IWiByEt7e

Free

Lecture with Eileen Isagon Skyers

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Eileen Isagon Skyers, an alumna of the MA in Critical Studies Program at PNCA, will share a talk covering her multifaceted practice and career in the arts. She will discuss our contemporary framework for viewing, making, and valuing art against a backdrop of rapidly shifting technology, and how that manifests in her own work and criticism about digital art and culture. Wednesday September 22 in PNCA’s Shipley-Collins Mediatheque and Livestreaming 6:30 pm Live Captioned PNCA LiveVideo on YouTube Eileen Isagon Skyers is an artist, writer, and curator based in New York City. Her work and research engages with identity, new media, and digital culture. She co-founded the New-York based gallery HOUSING, whose mission is to support artistic practices and aesthetic experiences that contour the limits…

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Free

Writing And/As the Mother with Amanda Montei

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Writers, artists, and theorists have long used the figure of The Mother to make sense of what we seek in writing, art, and politics. Today, The Mother remains a receptacle for all our cultural anxieties and longings. And yet, the work of taking care, cleaning up, and maintaining life—which someone must do to make space for creative practice— is too often rendered invisible. How have the body and labor of The Mother shaped our ideas of comfort, home, work, and novelty? How does caring for others, big and small, teach us to care on the page? Should the book be a space in which we are held, or perhaps something else entirely? In this 4-week course, we will discuss the cultural and political influences that…

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$350

Sallie Tisdale

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Sallie Tisdale, author of the acclaimed Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them) brings “her singular sensibility, her genius for language, her love of our deeply imperfect world” (Karen Karbo) to The Lie About the Truck: Survivor, Reality TV, and the Endless Gaze (Gallery), an insightful exploration of reality TV and the shifting definitions of truth in America. What is the truth? In a world of fake news and rampant conspiracy theories, the nature of truth has increasingly blurry borders. In her clever and timely cultural commentary, Tisdale tackles this issue by framing it in a familiar way — reality TV, particularly the long-running CBS show Survivor. With humor and in-depth superfan analysis, Tisdale explores the distinction between suspended disbelief and true authenticity,…

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Free

Cecily Wong in Conversation With Liz Crain

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Wonder is around every corner, and on every plate. The curious minds behind Atlas Obscura now turn to the hidden curiosities of food, which becomes a gateway to fascinating stories about human history, science, art, and tradition — like the first book, all organized by country, lavishly illustrated, and full of surprises. Covering all seven continents, Gastro Obscura (Workman) by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras serves up a loaded plate of incredible ingredients, food adventures, and edible wonders. Ready for a beer made from fog in Chile? Sardinia’s “Threads of God” pasta? Egypt’s 2000-year-old egg ovens? But far more than a menu of delicacies and unexpected dishes, Gastro Obscura reveals food’s central place in our lives as well as our bellies, touching on history (trace…

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Free

Paul Levy in Conversation With Andrew Harvey

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In its Native American meaning, wetiko is an evil cannibalistic spirit that can take over people's minds, leading to selfishness, insatiable greed, and consumption as an end in itself, destructively turning our intrinsic creative genius against our own humanity. Revealing the presence of wetiko in our modern world behind every form of destruction our species is carrying out, both individual and collective, Paul Levy shows how this mind-virus is so embedded in our psyches that it is almost undetectable — and it is our blindness to it that gives wetiko its power. Yet, as Levy reveals in striking detail in his new book, Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World (Inner Traditions), by recognizing this highly contagious mind parasite, by seeing wetiko, we can…

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Free

Chuck Klosterman

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The ’90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we’re still groping to understand. Beyond epiphenomena like “Cop Killer” and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the Internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it. In The Nineties (Penguin Press), Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the…

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Free

Kaitlyn Tiffany in Conversation With Lindsay Zoladz

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In 2014, on the side of a Los Angeles freeway, a One Direction fan erected a shrine in the spot where, a few hours earlier, Harry Styles had vomited. “It’s interesting for sure,” Styles said later, adding, “a little niche, maybe.” But what seemed niche to Styles was actually an irreverent signpost for an unfathomably large, hyper-connected alternative universe: stan culture. In Everything I Need I Get from You (MCD x FSG), Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a superfan herself, guides us through the online world of fans, stans, and boybands. Along the way we meet girls who damage their lungs from screaming too loud, fans rallying together to manipulate chart numbers using complex digital subversion, and an underworld of inside…

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Free

William Deresiewicz in Conversation With Audrey Bilger

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

What is the internet doing to us? What is college for? What are the myths and metaphors we live by? These are the questions that William Deresiewicz has been pursuing over the course of his award-winning career. His new book, The End of Solitude (Henry Holt), brings together more than 40 of his finest essays. Ranging widely across the culture, they take up subjects as diverse as Mad Men and Harold Bloom, the significance of the hipster, and the purpose of art. Drawing on the past, they ask how we got where we are. Scrutinizing the present, they seek to understand how we can live more mindfully and freely, and they pose two fundamental questions: What does it mean to be an individual, and how…

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Free
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