Shopping Bag
My AccountToday’s Featured Book Event:
Reading with J.C. Hallman (The Writers Dojo, @7:30pm): Join editor J.C. Hallman for a reading from The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature, published by Tin House Books. Hallman has pored through countless collected essays of notable authors, searching for the piece in which the author approaches literature from a personal angle. With over thirty essays written by authors as diverse as Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf to Cynthia Ozick and Salman Rushdie, this collection offers an invaluable course on literature as well as a look into “Creative Criticism,” a form of critical essay that involves a personal perspective.
J.C. Hallman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Chess Artist and The Devil is a Gentleman. A collection of his short fiction, The Hospital for Bad Poets, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2009.
Other Book Events Today:
Walking with Ramona (Hollywood Library, @10:30am): Join Portland walking author Laura O. Foster on a tour back in time, to the 1950s world of Ramona Quimby and friends. Explore the Northeast Portland landscape that inspired Beverly Cleary’s best-selling children’s books, from the 1951 “Ellen Tebbits” to the 1999 “Ramona’s World.” See the supermarket where mud claimed Ramona’s boot, the park where Henry hunts for night crawlers, and the Portland school that inspired Glenwood School. Plus lots more, including a stroll along the streets where both Ms. Cleary, Ramona and her friends lived.
The tour begins at the Hollywood Library, 4040 NE Tillamook Street. It is accessible, on flat terrain, and lasts about 1.5 hours. Families are welcome.
Foster is the author of “Portland Hill Walks,” “Portland City Walks” and the editor of Metro’s Walk There!
The Writer/Editor Relationship (Portland State University, SMU 327, @4:00pm): A conversation between Joshua Kendall, Senior Editor at Viking/Penguin in New York and Tom Bissell, fiction and nonfiction writer and professor in the PSU Creative Writing MFA program.
Vince Flynn (Powells Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, @7:00pm): Deadly and charismatic hero Mitch Rapp wages a war against a new enemy in Pursuit of Honor (Atria), the new thriller by New York Times-bestselling author Vince Flynn.
Timothy Egan presents The Big Burn (Annie Bloom’s Books, @7:30pm): Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn is the story of the largest-ever forest fire in America and the tragedy that cemented Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy in the land. The Big Burn was a 1910 forest fire that devastated millions of acres in the Pacific Northwest. Egan also recounts how the heroism of the rangers who fought the fire helped Teddy Roosevelt to pioneer the notion of conservation and the creation of our National Parks.
Alicia Silverstone (Powells City of Books, @7:30pm): Best known for her role in Clueless, Alicia Silverstone shares how her journey toward a vegan and now macrobiotic diet has left her feeling better than ever. The Kind Diet (Rodale) features nearly 100 easy, earth-friendly recipes.
Gina Ochsner (The Press Club, @7:30pm): Please join Mountain Writers Series for a reading by Gina Ochsner. Come early for dinner or one of the fine wine specials at The Press Club.
Gina Ochsner lives in Keizer, Oregon and divides her time between writing and teaching with the Seattle Pacific Low-Residency MFA program. Ochsner has been awarded a John L. Simon Guggenheim grant and a grant from the National Endowment of Arts. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Glimmer Train and the Kenyon Review. She is the author of the short story collection The Necessary Grace to Fall, which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the story collection People I Wanted to Be. Both books received the Oregon Book Award. Her novel The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight (Portobello Press) is a finalist for the 2009 Oregon Book Award for Fiction.
You can find other events on your community Libraries schedule using these links: Washington County, Multnomah County, Clackamas County. For other book events this week, please check the list.
