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Kimberly King Parsons in Conversation With Claire Vaye Watkins

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

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…

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Free

Another Fortune & Other Poems Book Release & Performance

The Hallowed Halls 4420 SE 64th Ave, Portland, OR, United States

Live from The Hallowed Halls, harpist Lily Breshears joins forces with poet Liz Lampman for a one-off performance of Another Fortune & Other Poems, the debut collection by Lampman, and most recent release from Buckmxn Publishing. Another Fortune & Other Poems delivers a revitalizing jolt to the world of poetry. Lampman’s masterly craft doesn’t get in the way of approachability, and her word choices are sharp, delivering descriptions of rare accuracy that put the reader into the poet’s shoes. The collection also features watercolor illustrations by Lettie Jane Rennekamp, which amplify the lust and longing in Lampman’s words. Willamette Week describes Lily Breshears’ band as “a real treat” and “almost a genre unto themselves.” While Portland Mercury says of Lily’s music, “strange but beautiful, like…

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Free

Book Launch for Beyond the Third Door by Maria Heckinger

Angst Gallery 1015 Main St, Vancouver, WA, United States

Book Launch for Maria Heckinger’s Beyond the Third Door 6pm Thursday, August 22, 2019 Angst Gallery 1015 Main Street Vancouver, WA 98660 angstgallery.com Join us on August 22 for an event to celebrate the publication of Maria Heckinger’s astounding memoir debut, Beyond the Third Door. The author will be present to read from and sign copies of her new book. Maria Heckinger’s memoir Beyond the Third Door tells an incredible story which straddles the fine line between blind luck and unexplained miracles. On a Greek island in 1952, 15-year-old Hariklea’s life is changed in an instant. Sent by her father to a doctor on the mainland, the girl discovers she is pregnant. Given the social taboos of the time, Hariklea is exiled to the streets…

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Free

Madeline Stevens in Conversation With Kevin Sampsell

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

Ella is flat broke: wasting away on bodega coffee, barely making rent, seducing the occasional strange man who might buy her dinner. Unexpectedly, an Upper East Side couple named Lonnie and James rescues her from her empty bank account, offering her a job as a nanny and ushering her into their moneyed world. Ella’s days are now spent tending to the baby in their elegant brownstone or on extravagant excursions with the family. Both women are just 26 – but unlike Ella, Lonnie has a doting husband and son, unmistakable artistic talent, and old family money. Ella is mesmerized by Lonnie’s girlish affection and disregard for the normal boundaries of friendship and marriage. Convinced there must be a secret behind Lonnie’s seemingly effortless life, Ella…

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Free

Sandra Yannone and Alissa Hattman

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

Sandra Yannone joins us at 7 pm on Tuesday, September 24th, to read from her debut poetry collection Boats for Women, published by Salmon Poetry. Reading with Yannone will be Portland poet Alissa Hattman. Using a range of free verse and traditional forms, Yannone’s poems plot intersections and transgressions of the personal and the historical like a cartographer drafting a nautical chart, along the way documenting how women discover and recover from the intimacies of loving each other through time. Yannone grew up in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Her poems, book reviews, and articles have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Seattle Review, and The Gay and Lesbian Review. Her work has received the Academy of American Poets Prize and…

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Free

Three Ways to Disappear – Katy Yocom

Another Read Through 3932 N Mississippi Ave, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for a reading of Three Ways to Disappear, a debut novel by Katy Yocom. Leaving behind a nomadic career as a journalist, Sarah DeVaughan returns to India, country of her childhood and of unspeakable family tragedy, to help preserve the endangered Bengal tigers. Meanwhile, at home in Kentucky, her sister, Quinn, fears that India will be Sarah’s undoing. As Sarah’s new job is made complicated by complex local politics and a forbidden love, Quinn copes with their mother’s refusal to discuss the past, her son’s life-threatening illness, and her own increasingly troubled marriage. When Sarah asks Quinn to join her in India, Quinn realizes that the only way to overcome the past is to return to it, and it is in this place of…

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Free

Mark Mallman

Music Millennium 3158 E Burnside St, Portland, OR, United States

The musician reads from his debut book The Happiness Playlist, about his experiences trying to recover from personal trauma through feel-good music therapy.

Free

Mesha Maren

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

Set within the charged insularity of rural West Virginia, Mesha Maren’s Sugar Run (Algonquin) is a searing and gritty debut about making a break for another life, the use and treachery of makeshift families, and how, no matter the distance we think we’ve traveled from the mistakes we’ve made, too often we find ourselves standing in precisely the place we began.

Free

Jim Tilley and Cai Emmons

Another Read Through 3932 N Mississippi Ave, Portland, OR, United States

Join us for readings from Against the Wind, the debut novel from Jim Tilley, and Weather Woman, the latest from Cai Emmons. Against the Wind is an elegantly written story of relationships involving six principal characters, the strands of whose lives braid together after a chance reunion among three of them. A successful environmental lawyer is forced to take himself to task when he realizes that everything about his work has betrayed his core beliefs. A high school English teacher asks her former high school love to take up her environmental cause. A transgender adolescent male raised by his grandparents struggles to excel in a world hostile to his kind. A French Canadian political science professor finds himself left with a choice between his cherished…

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Free

Melissa Anne Peterson

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

Set against the backdrop of a decaying Pacific Northwest lumber town, Melissa Anne Peterson’s Vera Violet (Counterpoint) is a debut that explores themes of poverty, violence, and environmental degradation as played out in the young lives of a group of close-knit friends. Peterson’s voice is powerful and poetic, her vision unflinching. Peterson’s brilliant, explosive debut establishes her as a fresh, raw voice and a writer to be reckoned with.

Free
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