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Emme Lund in Conversation With Vanessa Friedman

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

Emme Lund’s The Boy with a Bird in His Chest (Atria) is a “poignantly rendered and illuminating” (The Washington Post) coming-of-age story about “the ways in which family, grief, love, queerness, and vulnerability all intersect” (Kristen Arnett). Though Owen Tanner has never met anyone else who has a chatty bird in their chest, medical forums would call him a Terror. From the moment Gail emerged between Owen’s ribs, his mother knew that she had to hide him away from the world. After a decade spent in isolation, Owen takes a brazen trip outdoors and his life is upended forever. Suddenly, he is forced to flee the home that had once felt so confining and hide in plain sight with his uncle and cousin in Washington.…

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Erika Bolstad in Conversation With Lydia Kiesling

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

At first, Erika Bolstad knew only one thing about her great-grandmother, Anna: she was a homesteader on the North Dakota prairies in the early 1900s before her husband committed her to an asylum under mysterious circumstances. As Erika's mother was dying, she revealed more. Their family still owned the mineral rights to Anna's land — and oil companies were interested in the black gold beneath the prairies. Their family, Erika learned, could get rich thanks to the legacy of a woman nearly lost to history. Anna left no letters or journals, and very few photographs of her had survived. But Erika was drawn to the young woman who never walked free of the asylum that imprisoned her. As a journalist well versed in the effects…

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Curtis White

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

In Transcendent (Melville House), celebrated cultural critic Curtis White asks what Buddhism will look like in the future. Do we want a secular Buddhism that looks like corporations and neuroscience? Or do we want a Buddhism that still provides refuge from the debased world of money and things? Transcendence is not about magic realms where spirits fly about; the world is, as Shunryu Suzuki put it, its own magic. We only need to reclaim it and reclaim our humanity while we’re at it. The problem White suggests is a culture that recognizes only "things," capitalist things and science things, and aggressively denies the idea that the world of things has a beyond. We're told by science ideologues like the New Atheists that we live in…

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Kids’ Storytime

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

Join us every Saturday for kids’ storytime. Today we’re reading My Parents Won’t Stop Talking! by Emma Hunsinger and Tillie Walden. Buy the Book

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Alison Mariella Désir in Conversation With Peter Bromka

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

Running saved Alison Désir’s life. At rock bottom and searching for meaning and structure, Désir started marathon training, finding that it vastly improved both her physical and mental health. Yet as she became involved in the community and learned its history, she realized that the sport was largely built with white people in mind. Running While Black (Portfolio) draws on Désir’s experience as an endurance athlete, activist, and mental health advocate to explore why the seemingly simple, human act of long distance running for exercise and health has never been truly open to Black people. Weaving historical context — from the first recreational running boom to the horrific murder of Ahmaud Arbery — together with her own story of growth in the sport, Désir unpacks…

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Deb Perelman in Conversation With Liz Crain

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

Deb Perelman is the author of two bestselling cookbooks (The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook and Smitten Kitchen Every Day), one of the internet's most successful food bloggers, the creator of a homegrown brand with more than a million Instagram followers, and the self-taught cook with the tiny kitchen who obsessively tests her recipes to make sure that no bowls are wasted and that the results are always worth the effort. In her new book, Smitten Kitchen Keepers: New Classics for Your Forever Files (Knopf), Perelman gives us 100 recipes (including a few favorites from her site) that aim to make shopping easier, preparation more practical and enjoyable, and food more reliably delicious for the home cook. These are the fail-safe, satisfying recipes you’ll rely on for…

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Kevin Maloney in Conversation With Jon Raymond

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

Provocative, poignant, and resoundingly hilarious, Kevin Maloney’s The Red-Headed Pilgrim (Two Dollar Radio) is the tragicomic tale of an anxious red-head and his sordid pursuit of enlightenment and pleasure (not necessarily in that order). On a sunny day in a business park near Portland, Oregon, 42-year-old web developer Kevin Maloney is in the throes of an existential crisis that finds him shoeless in a field of Queen Anne’s lace, reflecting on the tumultuous events that brought him to this moment. Growing up in the suburbs, young Kevin suffered “a psychological break that ripped me from my humdrum existence” mainlining high fructose corn syrup and episodes of The Golden Girls. Thus begins a journey of hard-earned insights and sexual awakening that takes Kevin from angst-ridden Beaverton…

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Gabrielle Bates in Conversation With Luther Hughes

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

Gabrielle Bates’s electric debut collection, Judas Goat (Tin House), plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book’s eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared, and its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of forty poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the “forbidden felt language” of sexual and sacred love. Bates’s poems conjure encounters with figures from scriptures, domesticated animals eyeing the wild, and mothering as a shape-shifting, spectral force; they question what it means to love another person and how to exorcise childhood fears. All the while, the Deep South haunts, and no matter how far away the speaker moves, the South always draws her back home. In confession,…

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Kids’ Storytime

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

Join us every Saturday for kids’ storytime. Today we’re reading Telling Stories Wrong by Gianni Rodari. Buy the Book

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Stephen Markley in Conversation With Omar El Akkad

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

From Stephen Markley, author of Ohio, comes a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity. In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters — a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that…

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