Tonight 3-4: Jennie Shortridge and Erica Bauermeister at Broadway Books

Today’s Featured Book Event:

Jennie Shortridge and Erica Bauermeister (Broadway Books, @7:00pm): Jennie Shortridge and Erica Bauermeister will read from their new novels. Jennie’s novel is When She Flew (New American Library), the story of a girl and her father found living off the grid in Forest Park. Inspired by real events that many of us remember, this novel is a warm-hearted story that imagines what happens when an injured war veteran and his 12-year-old naturalist daughter are brought back to “civilized” life after being on their own. Erica’s novel is The School of Essential Ingredients (Berkley), a tale of a cooking teacher and her students that navigates readers through each character’s personal dramas, memories and musings as they handle, slice, chop, blend, smell and taste. It is a remarkable debut novel that creates a captivating culinary world where the pleasures of sophisticated food come to mean much more than simple epicurean indulgence.

Other Book Events Today:

First Thursday Book Club (St. John’s Books, @5:30pm): Join us for the inaugural meeting of our First Thursday Book Club. Get in on the ground floor of a book club in the making! Our first selection is Jane Austen’s immortal, inimitable Pride & Prejudice. We invite you to read (or reread) this classic tale of money and marriage in Regency England–then sit down with us to discuss it over tea and cookies.. Future discussion books will be selected at this meeting.

MADAME XANADU – The Art of Joëlle Jones (Floating World Comics, @6:00pm): This March First Thursday, join writer Matt Wagner and artist, Joëlle Jones, as we present her enchanting artwork from the hit Vertigo series, Madame Xanadu.  We will have Joëlle’s original artwork on display and Matt Wagner will attend to talk with fans and sign books.

Yeti Art Opening (IPRC, @6:00pm): Ever since Justin and AM began to inhabit the Staff Cabin at the IPRC, there has been much talk of a yeti (or more than one!) entering the office late at night. In order to figure out exactly what’s been happening here at the IPRC, the computer lab will be turned into the Yeti Research Station. Please join us for the debut of this creative (and scientific) project. The event will be furry and free!

Contributing artists include: Scrappers, Betsy Walton, Jill Bliss, Brent Wick, Jess Hirsch, Jess Fogel, Apak, Todd Edward Bak, Bwana Spoons, Tim Karpinsky, BT Livermore, Nicole Georges and MORE!

Visiting Writers Series: David Shields (Reed College, Psychology 105, @6:30pm): Audacious, sharp-eyed, hilarious, and self-deprecating all at once, David Shields is one of the strongest voices in contemporary American nonfiction and fiction. His nonfiction story, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, is forthcoming from Knopf. Shields lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington. Co-sponsored by Reed Arts Week. For more information, visit the Visiting Writers website.

First Thursday: Camille Rose Garcia (Powells City of Books, @6:30pm): The Basil Hallward Gallery is pleased to present Creepcakes and Doomdreams: Selections from the Printworks of Camille Rose Garcia. The artist herself will join us in person next week, Thursday the 11th, to discuss and sign her newly illustrated edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

VoiceCatcher Reading (Cover to Cover Books-Vancouver, @7:00pm): Join us for a reading by several of the authors in VoiceCatcher4, an anthology of writing–poetry, prose, essays–by Portland and Vancouver area women writers. Featured this evening will be Frances Bates, Kristin Berger, Jenny Chu, and Cover to Cover Books favorites Carolyn A. Martin and Toni Partington (author of Wind Wing). This is a special event we’ve been looking forward to for a long time. Cover to Cover Books is committed to supporting local writers, and the VoiceCatcher series is a large part of what makes that possible.  Free admission. Come early for good seats. For more information about VoiceCatcher, visit their website.

Honorable Mention: Installation and Prints by Brittany Powell (Reading Frenzy, @7:00pm): Brittany Powell is coming to work her contact paper cutting magic on the walls of Reading Frenzy! She will install a near life size parade of about 20 dogs on the upper portion of the walls and gocco dog prints on display below.

Jane Mead (Portland State, Smith Center, Rm 236, @7:00pm): Critic/poet Christine Pugh wrote of Meads newest book, The Usable Field (Alice James Books): “How beautifully she has inaugurated a collection that is so infused with the combined and paradoxical virtues of simplicity, lyricism, and unstinting thought.”

Eric Puchner (Powells Books on Hawthorne, @7:30pm): The “heartrending first novel” (Publishers Weekly) from award-winning writer Eric Puchner, Model Home (Scribner) is a bitterly funny, deeply moving novel about a family reckoning with failure, guilt, and love.

You can find other events on your community Libraries schedule using these links: Washington County, Multnomah County, Clackamas County, and the rest of this weeks Portland book events here.

Image credits IndieBound.