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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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Rinker Buck

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

Seven years ago, readers around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious curiosity about history launched him across the West in a covered wagon pulled by mules and propelled his book about the trip, The Oregon Trail, to ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, Buck returns to chronicle his latest incredible adventure: building a wooden flatboat from the bygone era of the early 1800s and journeying down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat Patience, accompanied by an eccentric crew of daring shipmates. Over the course of his voyage, Buck steers his fragile wooden craft through narrow channels dominated by massive cargo…

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Adalyn Grace in Conversation With Sara Gundell

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

Orphaned as a baby, 19-year-old Signa has been raised by a string of guardians, each more interested in her wealth than her well-being — and each has met an untimely end. Her remaining relatives are the elusive Hawthornes, an eccentric family living at Thorn Grove, an estate both glittering and gloomy. Its patriarch mourns his late wife through wild parties, while his son grapples for control of the family’s waning reputation and his daughter suffers from a mysterious illness. But when their mother’s restless spirit appears claiming she was poisoned, Signa realizes that the family she depends on could be in grave danger and enlists the help of a surly stable boy to hunt down the killer. However, Signa’s best chance of uncovering the murderer…

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Gary Shteyngart in Conversation With Carolyn Kellogg

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends, and friends-of-friends, gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months new friendships and romances take hold, while old betrayals emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters include: a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a young flame-thrower of an essayist, originally from the Carolinas; and a movie star, The Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family. In his latest novel, Gary Shteyngart documents through fiction the emotional toll…

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Kristin Ohlson in Conversation With Lee van der Voo

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

What if Nature is more cooperative, and less competitive, than we think? In the follow-up to her previous book, The Soil Will Save Us, Kristin Ohlson’s Sweet in Tooth and Claw (Patagonia) extends the concept of cooperation in nature to the life-affirming connections among microbes, plants, fungi, insects, birds, and animals — including humans — in ecosystems around the globe. For centuries, people have debated whether nature is mostly competitive — as Darwin theorized and the poet Tennyson described as “red in tooth and claw” — or innately cooperative, as many ancient and indigenous peoples believed. In the last 100 or so years, a growing gang of scientists have studied the mutually beneficial interactions that are believed to benefit every species on earth. Sweet in…

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Aiden Thomas in Conversation With Alex Abraham

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

Welcome to The Sunbearer Trials (Feiwel & Friends), where teen semidioses compete in a series of challenges with the highest of stakes, in an electric new Mexican-inspired fantasy from Aiden Thomas, author of Cemetery Boys. As each new decade begins, the Sun's power must be replenished so that Sol can keep traveling along the sky and keep the chaotic Obsidian gods at bay. Sol selects ten of the most worthy semidioses to compete in the Sunbearer Trials. The winner carries light and life to all the temples of Reino del Sol, but the loser has the greatest honor of all — they will be sacrificed to Sol, their body melted down to refuel the Sun Stones, protecting the world for another ten years. Teo, a…

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Sasha Fletcher in Conversation With Lydia Kiesling

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

It’s Brooklyn. It’s winter. It’s so cold outside you could execute billionaires in the street about it. Sam lives with Eleanor and they are in love. He has three or four outstanding invoices that would each cover rent for a month. At some point, the President is going to make some absolutely wild announcements that will only end in doom. In a surreal, funny, and heart-breaking version of reality, Sasha Fletcher’s highly anticipated debut novel occupies that rare register that manages to speak to an increasingly incomprehensible world. Through scenes that poetically transform the mundane into the sublime and the absurd into the tragic, Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World (Melville House) is about the exquisite beauty of being in…

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Kristina McMorris in Conversation With Rene Denfeld

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

From Kristina McMorris, author of Sold on a Monday, comes a sweeping World War II tale of an illusionist whose recruitment by British intelligence sets her on a perilous, heartrending path. As a little girl raised amid the hardships of Michigan's Copper Country, Fenna Vos learned to focus on her own survival. That ability sustains her even now as the Second World War rages in faraway countries. Though she performs onstage as the assistant to an unruly escape artist, behind the curtain she's the mastermind of their act. Ultimately, controlling her surroundings and eluding traps of every kind helps her keep a lingering trauma at bay. Yet for all her planning, Fenna doesn't foresee being called upon by British military intelligence. Tasked with designing escape…

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Madeline Ostrander in Conversation With Michelle Nijhuis

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

How do we find a sense of home and rootedness in a time of unprecedented upheaval? What happens when the seasons and rhythms in which we have built our lives go off-kilter? Once a distant forecast, climate change is now reaching into the familiar, threatening our basic safety and forcing us to reexamine who we are and how we live. In At Home on an Unruly Planet (Henry Holt), science journalist Madeline Ostrander reflects on this crisis not as an abstract scientific or political problem but as a palpable force that is now affecting all of us at home. She offers vivid accounts of people fighting to protect places they love from increasingly dangerous circumstances. A firefighter works to rebuild her town after catastrophic western…

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Mike Duncan

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

From Mike Duncan, author of The Storm Before the Storm and host of the Revolutions podcast, comes Hero of Two Worlds (PublicAffairs), the thrilling story of the Marquis de Lafayette’s lifelong quest to defend the principles of liberty and equality. Few in history can match the revolutionary career of the Marquis de Lafayette. Over 50 incredible years at the heart of the Age of Revolution, he fought courageously on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a soldier, statesman, idealist, philanthropist, and abolitionist. As a teenager, Lafayette ran away from France to join the American Revolution. Returning home a national hero, he helped launch the French Revolution, eventually spending five years locked in dungeon prisons. After his release, Lafayette sparred with Napoleon, joined an underground…

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