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

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A. M. Homes

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

In her first novel since the Women’s Prize award-winning May We Be Forgiven, A. M. Homes delivers us back to ourselves in a stunning alternative history that is both terrifyingly prescient, deeply tender, and devastatingly funny. The Big Guy loves his family, money, and country. Undone by the results of the 2008 presidential election, he taps a group of like-minded men to reclaim their version of the American Dream. As they build a scheme to disturb and disrupt, the Big Guy also faces turbulence within his family. His wife, Charlotte, grieves a life not lived, while his 18-year-old daughter, Meghan, begins to realize that her favorite subject — history — is not exactly what her father taught her. In a story that is as much…

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Buzz Bissinger

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

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, college football was at the height of its popularity. As the nation geared up for total war, one branch of the service dominated the aspirations of college football stars: the United States Marine Corps. Which is why, on Christmas Eve of 1944, when the 4th and 29th Marine regiments found themselves in the middle of the Pacific Ocean training for what would be the bloodiest battle of the war — the invasion of Okinawa — their ranks included one of the greatest pools of football talent ever assembled: former All-Americans, captains from Wisconsin and Brown and Notre Dame, and nearly 20 men who were either drafted or would ultimately play in the NFL. When the trash-talking between the 4th…

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Candice Carty-Williams in Conversation With Leni Zumas

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

Candice Carty-Williams, the author of the “brazenly hilarious, tell-it-like-it-is first novel” (Oprah Daily) Queenie, returns with another witty and insightful novel about the power of family — even when they seem like strangers. If you could choose your family… you wouldn’t choose the Penningtons. Dimple Pennington knows of her half-siblings, but she doesn’t really know them. Five people who don’t have anything in common except for faint memories of being driven through Brixton in their dad’s gold jeep, and some pretty complex abandonment issues. Dimple has bigger things to think about. She’s 30, and her life isn’t really going anywhere. An aspiring lifestyle influencer with a terrible and wayward boyfriend, Dimple’s life has shrunk to the size of a phone screen. And despite a small…

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Chelsea Martin in Conversation With Kimberly King Parsons

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

"A portrait of the artist as a work-in-progress" (Sharma Shields), Chelsea Martin’s hilarious and incisive coming-of-age novel about an art student from a poor family struggling to find her place in a new social class of rich, well-connected peers is perfect for fans of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and Weike Wang’s Chemistry. At her San Francisco art school, Joey enrolls in a film elective that requires her to complete what seems like a straightforward assignment: create a self-portrait. Joey inexplicably decides to remake Wes Anderson’s Rushmore despite having never seen the movie. As Martin’s Tell Me I’m An Artist (Soft Skull) unfolds over the course of the semester, the assignment hangs over her as she struggles to exist in a well-heeled world that is hugely…

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Margaret Killjoy in Conversation With Robert Evans

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

Spaceships, man-eating mermaids, swords, demons, ghouls, thieves, hitchhikers, and life in the margins. Margaret Killjoy’s stories have appeared for years in science fiction and fantasy magazines both major and indie. We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories (AK Press) collects the best previously published work along with brand new material. Ranging in theme and tone, these imaginative tales bring the reader on a wild and moving ride where they’ll encounter a hacker who programs drones to troll CEOs into quitting; a group of LARPers who decide to live as orcs in the burned forests of Oregon; queer, teen love in a death cult; the terraforming of a climate-changed Earth; polyamorous love on an anarchist tea farm during the apocalypse; and much more. Killjoy writes…

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Amy Fusselman in Conversation With Kevin Sampsell

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

The Means (Mariner) is the debut novel from “wholly original” (Vogue) memoirist Amy Fusselman, a tragicomic family saga that skewers contemporary issues of money, motherhood, and class through a well-to-do woman’s quest to buy a Hamptons beach house. Shelly Means, a wealthy, stay-at-home mom and disgraced former PTA president, is poised to get the one thing in life she really wants: a beach house in the Hamptons. Who would have guessed that Shelly, the product of frugal Midwesterners, or her husband George, an unrepentant thrift shopper, would ever be living among such swells? But Shelly believes it’s possible. It might be a very small house, and it might be in the least-fancy part of the Hamptons, but Shelly has a vision board, an architect, and…

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Hiron Ennes in Conversation With Sara A. Mueller

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

Hiron Ennes surreal and horrifying debut, Leech (Tordotcom) combines parasitic body horror with gothic family drama in a post-post-apocalyptic masterpiece — defying our understanding of identity, heredity, and bodily autonomy. In an isolated chateau, as far north as north goes, the baron’s doctor has died. The doctor’s replacement has a mystery to solve: discovering how the Institute lost track of one of its many bodies. For hundreds of years the Interprovincial Medical Institute has grown by taking root in young minds and shaping them into doctors, replacing every human practitioner of medicine. The Institute is here to help humanity, to cure and to cut, to cradle and protect the species from the apocalyptic horrors their ancestors unleashed. In the frozen north, the Institute's body will…

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Jonathan Hill in Conversation With Breena Bard

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

Drawing on the experiences of his Vietnamese American family and his love of ’80s sci-fi shows, award-winning creator Jonathan Hill crafts a funny, insightful graphic novel about the immigrant experience and the perils of middle school. Threatened with diminishing resources, Booger Lizk’t and his family flee their lizard community deep below Earth’s crust to survive above among humans. The Lizk’t family of Elberon now passes as the Tomkins family of Eagle Valley. “Tommy Tomkins” wears a human face to school but can’t seem to fit in no matter how he looks. The basketball team becomes a pipe dream when bullies label him a bug eater, and only Dung Tran, an immigrant from Vietnam and fellow outsider, sees Tommy for who he is inside, which is…

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Renée Watson

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

In Ways to Share Joy (Bloomsbury), Renée Watson — award-winning author of Piecing Me Together — continues her charming Ramona-esque series starring spirited Ryan Hart and her loving family. Ryan Hart is caught in the middle. She has an older brother and a baby sister, and she’s in a friendship tug-of-war with KiKi and Amanda who are both vying to be her best best friend. With all that’s going on, Ryan still finds a way to see the bright side of things. But it’s terribly hard to be cheery when her brother, Ray, pulls a prank and ruins her latest baking project. And who can think about being kind to a classmate who is relentless with his teasing? Ryan is determined not to let anything…

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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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