- This event has passed.
Portland Book Festival, Main Stage
Stranger Things: Fiction from the Edge
Three books that explore the liminal spaces – between waking and dreaming, between genre, between reality and fantasy. In his graphic novel The River at Night, Kevin Huizenga delves deep into consciousness. What begins as a simple, distracted conversation between husband and wife, Glenn and Wendy Ganges—him reading a library book and her working on her computer—becomes an exploration of being and the passage of time. Bestselling and award-winning author Molly Gloss’s first career retrospective of her short stories, Unforeseen, navigates the byways and channels between literary fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, and science fiction, with an eye toward the pastoral, the human response to wildness, and newly discovered shores. In Karen Thompson Walker’s The Dreamers, an ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep. Those affected by the illness, doctors discover, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what? Moderated by S. Zainab Williams of BookRiot.
Advance Portland Book Festival passes available now.
Molly Gloss
Molly Gloss is the author of several novels including The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses and Falling From Horses, as well as the story collection Unforeseen. She writes both realistic fiction and science fiction. Her work has received, among other honors, a PEN West Fiction Prize, an Oregon Book Award, two Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. A fourth-generation Oregonian, she lives in Portland.
Kevin Huizenga
Karen Thompson Walker
Karen Thompson Walker is the author of The Dreamers, and The Age of Miracles, which was named a best book of the year by People, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Financial Times, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Amazon. It was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and it was translated into twenty-seven languages. She was born and raised in San Diego and is a graduate of UCLA and the Columbia MFA program. Walker lives in Portland with her family, where she is a professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon.
