The Most Anticipated Book Events in Portland This Winter
A thrilling lineup of new books from Oregon authors fill out this winter’s literary calendar.
The list of literary talents coming through Portland in the coming months reinforces that the city is a stop on the international literary circuit. Thanks in large part to institutions like Powell’s and nonprofits Literary Arts and Oregon Humanities, book events this winter feature a former White House national security advisor, a literal rock star, and rock star LGBTQ+ activist and Putin dissident. As it happens, plenty of internationally revered scribes live here, too, and a handful of them are putting out books this winter. Autocracy is unsurprisingly a popular topic. But the season also promises long-awaited follow-ups from some of Oregon’s biggest authors, including Lidia Yuknavitch and Karen Russell. Omar El Akkad is making his return to nonfiction. And the city’s most scrupulous true crime journalist, Leah Sottile, looks into the new age cult of wellness. It’s a busy season for books; below are the readings and talks we’re most looking forward to.
Ben Rhodes
7pm Wed, Jan 29 | Alberta Rose Theatre, $15–30
Rhodes was a White House national security advisor during the Obama administration and now he’s a leading American pundit on global politics. He wrote a memoir of his time in the Obama White House, 2018’s The World As It Is, and published a study of present day autocrats, After the Fall, in 2022. You might have seen him on MSNBC, or maybe you recognise the name from the podcast he cohosts, Pod Save the World, which promises to “not feel like homework” despite being about foreign policy. Rhodes is in town for Oregon Humanities’ Consider This series.
Lidia Yuknavitch
7pm Tue, Feb 4 | Powell’s City of Books, FREE
Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir The Chronology of Water is a cult favorite and exemplar of the genre. That story, which follows Yuknavitch from her abused childhood through her time working with Ken Kesey at the University of Oregon, is currently being adapted into a movie by Kristen Stewart. Its follow-up, Reading the Waves (her history of competitive swimming might have something to do with the aquatic titles), takes a meta approach, in that it investigates the ways digesting life experience in literature has shaped her growth as a person. By writing about past traumas, the jacket copy reads, Yuknavitch “can loosen the bonds that have enslaved her emotional growth.”
Neko Case
7:30pm Thu, Feb 6 | Revolution Hall, $40 (includes book)
In an early review, Kirkus writes that Case’s “songwriter’s gift for potent imagery” moves seamlessly from her songs to the page. The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, Case’s artistic coming-of-age memoir, starts at the beginning, tracing her neglected and dysfunctional childhood in rural Washington state through her traumatic journey to alt-country stardom. Though it delivers the candid industry tales you’d hope for in a musician’s life story, Kirkus adds that those “feel almost secondary to her study of her emotional growth.”
Masha Gessen
7:30–9pm Thu, Feb 13 | Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, SOLD OUT
Gessen is one of the world’s most prominent journalists covering LGBTQ+ rights and Russian culture and politics. They’re a New Yorker staff writer, a New York Times columnist, and the National Book Award–winning author of 11 books, including a moving tribute to Pussy Riot and what’s often regarded as the foremost takedown of Vladimir Putin. They’re speaking here as part of the 40th season of Literary Arts’ City Arts & Lecture series.
Omar El Akkad
7pm Tue, Feb 25 | Powell’s City of Books, FREE
Billed as a “heartsick breakup letter with the West,” Portlander Omar El Akkad’s latest book marks his return to nonfiction after two very successful novels, American War and What Strange Paradise. This book’s title, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, comes from a tweet El Akkad posted resharing a video of a decimated Gaza street weeks into the ongoing war. The current war is one among many examples El Akkad uses to expose the ways Western values promoting human lives and equality are so often and easily bent to make way for political interests.
Karen Russell
7pm Tue, Mar 11 | Powell’s City of Books, FREE
The Antidote, Russell’s long-awaited second novel, follows her Pulitzer Prize–finalist debut from 2011, Swamplandia! She’s published three story collections and a novella in the intervening years, but, needless to say, a lot of people are very excited about this second novel. It’s a witchy Dust Bowl epic set in the late spring of 1935 in Nebraska around a “Prairie Witch” who holds the town’s secrets. Maintaining her magical realist sensibilities, Russell brings together a group of disparate characters through natural and supernatural acts.
Javier Zamora
7:30–9pm Tue, Mar 11 | Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, $25–65
The biggest local book club there is, the Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program, culminates with this author event. For the past year, Javier Zamora’s novel Solito has been available for free (and to keep!) at MCLs throughout the metro area. When he was 9 years old, Zamora migrated, unaccompanied, to the US from El Salvador. Solito, his debut novel from 2022, recounts his journey by foot, bus, and boat through Mexico, Guatemala, and the Sonoran Desert.
Leah Sottile
7pm Thu, Mar 27 | Powell’s City of Books, FREE
Sottile, the Portland journalist behind true crime hits like When the Moon Turns to Blood and the podcast Bundyville, takes on the “pastel-colored world of love, light, and enlightenment” of new age wellness in her latest book, Blazing Eye Sees All. Sotille follows cult leader Amy Carlson (of Love Has Won, like the HBO doc) to trace the current vogue of new age spirituality far past the casual tarot and crystal hobby to assert that, Publishers Weekly writes, “cults are a feature, not a bug, of American spiritual life, functioning as an outlet for repressed women enmeshed in patriarchal belief structures.”
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