Colson Whitehead is a novelist, essayist, and reviewer whose most recent works include 2019’s The Nickel Boys and 2016’s The Underground Railroad, a New York Times best seller which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by theNew York Times Book Review. NPR hailed The Underground Railroad as “an American masterpiece, as much a searing document of a cruel history as a uniquely brilliant work of fiction.” Whitehead’s other books include The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. The 35th season…
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Celebrate the power of books to create a stronger community by attending the 2020 Everybody Reads author event with Tommy Orange. Literary Arts is proud to host an evening with award-winning author Tommy Orange as the culminating event of Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program. This year’s programming will center on Orange’s debut novel, There There. Tickets start at $15, available at Portland5.com With the selection of There There, Everybody Reads 2020 centers around the experience of urban Native Americans in Oakland, California. Through a shared reading experience, we will explore a multitude of themes in the book, from identity and ownership to the urban-rural divide. About There There: Orange’s shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow,…
Comments closedSusan Orlean is an author and journalist, and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992. She has written eight books, including, most recently, The Library Book, a New York Times best seller and a Washington Post Top 10 Book of the Year for 2018. Her other books include Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. Orlean has been called “a national treasure” by the Washington Post, and the New York Times has said that her work “has that elusive quality to it: exquisitely written, consistently entertaining and irreducible to anything so obvious and pedestrian as a theme.” The 35th season of Portland Arts & Lectures features some of the most engaging writers at work today. Our 2019/2020 season features George Packer, Amor Towles, Min Jin Lee, Susan Orlean, and Colson…
Comments closedNicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, bestselling authors of Half the Sky, return with a deeply personal new book, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope. Looking with clear eyes at our nation’s governmental failures over the past half-century, Kristof and WuDunn examine the contemporary crisis in working-class America through the lens of the families Kristof grew up with in the rural, working-class town of Yamhill, Oregon. Yamhill prospered for much of the 20th century, but, like many working class towns, has been devastated as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the kids Kristof grew up with have died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. “We wanted to understand more deeply what had happened to Nick’s friends on the school bus,” they write, and “how our…
Comments closedMin Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017. The San Francisco Chronicle lauds it as “beautiful. . . Lee’s sweeping four-generation saga of a Korean family is an extraordinary epic.” It was on over 75 best books of the year lists, and will be translated into 27 languages. Her debut novel, 2007’s Free Food for Millionaires, was also a national best seller as well as a Top 10 Books of the Year for The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. Lee is a recipient of fellowships in fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard. The 35th season of Portland Arts & Lectures features some of the most engaging…
Comments closedJoin us every Saturday for kids’ storytime. Today we’re reading Caveboy Crush by Beth Ferry.
Comments closedJoin us every Saturday for kids’ storytime. Today we’re reading The Shortest Day by Susan Cooper.
Comments closedHey kids! Join us for special appearances by Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch and stick around for a reading of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (TM and © Dr. Seuss Enterprises L.P. All rights reserved.)
Comments closedMost outdoor enthusiasts understand the phrase “turn around time” as that point in an adventure when you must cease heading out in order to have enough time to safely return to camp or home. For novelist David Guterson, it is also a metaphor for where we find ourselves in the middle of our lives, and his new narrative poem, Turn Around Time (Mountaineers), explores this idea through a lyrical journey along a trail, much like those in Washington’s mountain ranges he hiked while growing up.
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