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Karen Thompson Walker in Conversation With Karen Russell

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

The Dreamers (Random House) is a mesmerizing novel about a town transformed by a strange illness that locks victims in a perpetual sleep and triggers life-altering dreams – by Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles. In an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a freshman girl stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep – and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics who carry her away, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. Then a second girl falls asleep, and then another, and panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. As the number of cases multiplies, classes are canceled, and stores…

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Free

PHR Launch Party at AWP 2019

Blackfish Art Gallery 420 NW 9th Ave, Portland, OR, United States

Porter House Review will be celebrating our launch at AWP 2019 in Portland, Oregon. Join us for readings by Karen Russell, Lauren K. Alleyne, Michelle Donahue, Cheston Knapp, Tomás Q. Morín, and Luisa Muradyan; giveaways of signed books and broadsides; food and drinks; and a celebration of literary community. Emcee: Cecily Parks Please join us to celebrate the launch of Porter House Review, a new journal based out of Texas State University that is dedicated to supporting writers who interrogate the prevailing social challenges of our time. We invite you for a night of food, drink, games, giveaways, readings, and literary community.

Free

Karen Russell in Conversation With Leni Zumas

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

Pulitzer Prize finalist Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner lives is on full display in the eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories in her new collection, Orange World and Other Stories (Knopf). Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master, showcasing Russell’s extraordinary, irresistible gifts of language and imagination. Russell will be joined in conversation by Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks.

Free

Kristen Arnett in Conversation With Karen Russell

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

One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo’s wife — and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with — walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother’s art escalates — picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose — and the Mortons reach a…

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Free

Street Books Celebration & Fundraiser: Special Guest Karen Russell

Lagunitas Community Room 237 NE Broadway St #300, Portland, OR, United States

Join us as we celebrate the ninth year of operation and honor the patrons who have checked out books all summer long. There will be a taco bar by Los Gorditos, an onsite photo booth by artist Julie Keefe, and back by popular demand: the Book Divinator Machine. Put a token into the slot to have a book magically divined for you. Emceed by the fabulous Paul Susi, there will be a short program featuring librarians and patrons from the season, and time to enjoy wine and beer (included in the ticket price) with friends. We'll see you there! Street Books, a bicycle-powered mobile library serving people who live outside & at the margins, will hold its annual fundraiser and nine-year anniversary celebration on Thursday,…

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$30

Portland Book Festival: Margaret Atwood in Conversation With Karen Russell

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In Dearly, Margaret Atwood's first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature, and zombies. While many are familiar with the author's fiction — including her groundbreaking and bestselling novels The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, Oryx and Crake, among others — she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. Her new poetry collection is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived. This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry…

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$27.99

Jeff VanderMeer in Conversation With Karen Russell

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Software manager Jane Smith receives an envelope containing a list of animals along with a key to a storage unit that holds a taxidermied hummingbird and salamander. The list is signed “Love, Silvina.” Jane does not know a Silvina, and she wants nothing to do with the taxidermied animals. The hummingbird and the salamander are, it turns out, two of the most endangered species in the world. Silvina Vilcapampa, the woman who left the note, is a reputed ecoterrorist and the daughter of a recently deceased Argentine industrialist. By removing the hummingbird and the salamander from the storage unit, Jane has set in motion a series of events over which she has no control. Instantly, Jane and her family are in danger, and she finds…

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Free

Julian Aguon in Conversation With Karen Russell

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

Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist and human rights lawyer Julian Aguon’s No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies (Astra House) is a coming-of-age story and a call for justice — for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples. In bracing poetry and compelling prose, Aguon weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary about matters ranging from nuclear weapons to global warming. Undertaking the work of bearing witness, wrestling with the most pressing questions of the modern day, and reckoning with the challenge of truth-telling in an era of rampant obfuscation, he culls from his own life experiences — from losing his father to pancreatic cancer to working for Mother Teresa to an edifying chance encounter with Sherman…

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Free

TAP@PBF: Oregon Symphony

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Stay tuned for a special podcast-only Portland Book Festival episode of Literary Arts’ The Archive Project! A conversation between Oregon Symphony creative chair Gabriel Kahane and author Karen Russell (Sleep Donation). This event is podcast only, and will be released on The Archive Project wherever you get your podcasts as part of the 2022 Portland Book Festival. Karen Russell Karen Russell won the 2012 and the 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written Orange World and, most recently, Sleep Donation. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, the "5 under 35" prize from the National Book Foundation, the NYPL Young Lions Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and is a former fellow of…

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Free
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