From historical fiction to presidential biography, there’s a little something for everyone at this year’s Portland Book Festival.
Be sure to register at PDXBookFest.org to catch these FREE live-streamed events, and RSVP at the event pages below.
THE COLD MILLIONS: JESS WALTER
Thu, November 5 at 6:00 p.m. PST
Book purchase required to attend
The author of the bestseller Beautiful Ruins delivers another “literary miracle” (NPR)—a propulsive, richly entertaining novel about two brothers swept up in the turbulent class warfare of the early twentieth century.
Purchasing a preorder from Powells.com entitles you to a ticket to the Portland Book Festival virtual event featuring Jess Walter.
The Cold Millions is a literary unicorn: a book about socio-economic disparity that’s also a page-turner, a postmodern experiment that reads like a potboiler, and a beautiful, lyric hymn to the power of social unrest in American history. It’s funny and harrowing, sweet and violent, innocent and experienced; it walks a dozen tightropes. Jess Walter is a national treasure.
Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See
AMERICAN TALES: GENEVIEVE HUDSON & C PAM ZHANG
Fri, November 6 at 5:00 p.m. PST
C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold is set against the twilight of the American gold rush, when two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home. Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and reimagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story and an unforgettable sibling story, exploring race in an expanding country and where immigrants are allowed to belong, the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.
Ferocious, dark and gleaming, a book erupting out of the interstices between myth and dream, between longing and belonging. How Much of These Hills Is Gold tells us that stories—like people, like the rough and stunning landscape of California itself—are constantly in the process of being made, broken, and finally remade into something tender and new.
Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
Jill Lepore, author of the acclaimed international bestseller These Truths, discusses her new book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future (longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction), a revelatory account of the Cold War origins of the data-mad, algorithmic twenty-first century.
Two chances to catch Jill Lepore at the Festival:
IF THEN: JILL LEPORE ON OPB
Thu, November 12 at 2:00 pm PST
LIVE WIRE RADIO WITH JILL LEPORE
Fri, November 20 at 1:30 pm PST
George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo
A person can’t help but feel inspired by the riveting intelligence and joyful curiosity of Jill Lepore. Knowing that there is a mind like hers in the world is a hope-inducing thing.
MAKING HISTORY: VERONICA CHAMBERS & ALEXIS COE
Thu, November 19 at 12:30 pm PST
Two books which shed new light on history—and the present—by revealing often untold stories and reexamining some of our foundational “truths.” Best-selling authors Alexis Coe (You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington) and Veronica Chambers (Finish the Fight!: The Brave and Revolutionary Women Who Fought for Right to Vote) bring their perspectives not only to the past, but to the present, as they discuss the revolutionary women who fought for the right to vote, and one of the first American revolutionaries, George Washington.
