Taylor Zajonc joins us to read from his debut novel, The Wrecking Crew.

The Wrecking Crew is a thrilling adventure set in the world's last frontier, the story of a deep-water salvage diver set free from a Moroccan prison and forced to lead a covert mission into pirate-infested Somali waters. When his expedition threatens to expose the true source of an oceanic plague, he must assemble an unproven crew of former enemies and fight for the fate of the entire region.

Taylor Zajonc is an Explorers Club member and avid world traveler.  As a maritime historian and shipwreck expert, his real-life adventures parallel those of his fictional counterparts. In addition to personally setting a deep-ocean depth record, he did archival field research that contributed to the discovery of some of the most incredible treasure shipwrecks in history, including a 110-ton trove of sunken World War II silver. He and his wife have just welcomed their first child, so he'll be running on little sleep but lots of love and enthusiasm.

We welcome Natalie Serber to read from her new memoir Community Chest. Diagnosed with breast cancer, Serber did the only thing she could: she wrote her way through the confusion and fear. In this charming and good-humored memoir, she tries to maintain her sense of gratitude and grace.

Natalie Serber received an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Bellingham Review and Gulf Coast.  She has been shortlisted for Best American Short Stories and her awards include the John Steinbeck Award and Tobias Wolff Award. She teaches writing at various universities and lives with her family in Portland. Shout Her Lovely Name is her debut collection of short stories.

We are thrilled that Megan Kruse has been selected as one of the six winners of this year's awards from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association for her debut novel Call Me Home, published by Hawthorne Books. Please join us for an evening of celebration as we present this award to Megan. We'll have cake and a toast to Megan and her wonderful novel.

Call Me Home has an epic scope and braids the stories of a family in three distinct voices. At its heart, this is a novel about family, our choices and how we come to live with them, what it means to be queer in the rural West, and the changing idea of home. Megan was also honored as one of this year's "5 Under 35" by the National Book Foundation. The 5 Under 35 program honors five young fiction writers selected by past National Book Award Winners and Finalists, or previous 5 Under 35 Honorees.

The annual PNBA book award is presented to authors who reside in Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Montana, Idaho, or British Columbia. The award winners are selected by owners and staff of independent bookstore members of PNBA. Joining Megan as winners this year are Martha Brockenbrough (Seattle) for The Game of Love and Death, Patrick deWitt (Portland) for Undermajordomo Minor, Brian Doyle (Portland) for Children & Other Wild Animals, Thor Hanson (San Juan Island) for The Triumph of Seeds, and Dana Simpson (Auburn) for Unicorn On a Roll.

This event is open to the public. Please join us in celebrating Megan Kruse.

Portland author Ruth Wariner joins us to read from her debut memoir The Sound of Gravel. Wariner was the thirty-ninth of her father's forty-two children. Growing up on a farm in rural Mexico, where authorities turned a blind eye to the practices of the local Mormon community, she lived in a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing or electricity. After her father was brutally murdered by his brother in a bid for church power, her mother remarried, becoming the second wife of another faithful congregant.

Gradually she came to realize that perhaps the community into which she was born was not the right one for her. As she began to doubt her family's beliefs and question her mother's choices, she struggled to balance her fierce love for her siblings with her determination to forge a better life for herself.

Along with Megan Kruse, Brian Doyle has also been selected as one of the six winners of this year's PNBA awards for his collection Children and Other Wild Animals, published by Oregon State University Press. We are equally thrilled for Brian!  Please join us for Brian's award ceremony as we have cake and toast Brian; we suspect he'll have a few words to share with us.

A novelist and essayist -- a storyteller at heart -- Doyle describes encounters with astounding beings of every sort and shape in this collection of short vignettes. The book gathers previously unpublished work along with selections that have been published in Orion, The Sun, and The American Scholar. He is also the author of Mink River, The Plover, Martin Marten, How the Light Gets In, and several other books. He is the editor of The University of Portland's award-winning magazine. We'll be hosting Mr. Doyle again on April 7th to read from his forthcoming novel Chicago.

The Comma reading series, once again hosted and curated by writer Kirsten Rian, has returned, this month featuring Justin Hocking and Suzy Vitello.

Justin Hocking served as Executive Director of the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) from 2006 to mid-2014 and is highly active in creative community-building, small-press publishing, and the increasing synthesis of book arts with literary pursuits. His memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, won the 2015  Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. He is a recipient of the Willamette Writers' 2014 Humanitarian Award for his work in publishing, writing, and teaching, and he was named as one of "Ten Writers Who Made Portland" by Willamette Week.
 

As the long-time coordinator of a robust weekly writing workshop whose members include Chuck Palahniuk, Cheryl Strayed, Chelsea Cain, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Monica Drake, Suzy Vitello is committed to writing about love in all of its guises, styles, and languages. Her novels include The Moment Before, The Empress Chronicles, and, most recently, The Keepsake (the second book in the Empress Series).

Broadway Books welcomes Portland author Joyce Cherry Cresswell to read from her debut novel, A Great Length of Time. Based on the true story of a female doctor during the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of Dr. Rose Barnett, who was assigned to a hospital ship. As a pacifist, her greatest challenge is coming to grips with the terrible casualties of war. A Great Length of Time is a woman's view of the politics and gender roles of the day, offering a fresh look at the war and at the women who nursed its soldiers. 

The novel is loosely based on Cresswell's great-grandmother. Cresswell worked as a lawyer and then as a non-profit director until she retired in 2010, at which point she eagerly began this novel. She has considered herself to be a writer since she was eight years old but had only written for her children before publishing this first novel.

Monica Drake and Rios De La Luz join us to read from and discuss their newest works.

The Folly of Loving Life is a new collection of linked stories from novelist Monica Drake. Future Tense, the book's publisher, calls this collection "the best of what we love about Monica's writing - the sly laugh-out-loud humor, the sharp observations, the flawed but strong characters, and the shadowy Van Sant-ish Portland settings." Drake's previous novels are Clown Girl (a finalist for the Oregon Book Award for Fiction) and The Stud Book.  

According to Rios De La Luz, "The Pulse between Dimensions and the Desert is a mixture of stories from the perspectives of raw women, inquiring teenage minds, and children still enchanted by the environments around them." Her stories incorporate magical realism and a bit of science fiction, including one about a grandmother who travels in a time machine! This is her first published collection.

This wonderful new book is a history set in our backyard but truly of national interest. It is equal parts science, economics, and politics told in a clear prose and enriched by the personal stories of geologists, loggers, and thrill-seekers. Cowlitz County Sheriff Les Nelson emerges as a realist trying to prevent deaths when others were afraid to offend logging and commercial interests. The interplay between government responsibility and private property rights reminds us of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and even the recent turmoil at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. It's hard to imagine living in the Pacific Northwest and not wanting to read Eruption, and after you read the book it will be hard to resist leaping into your car to get a better look at our volcanic neighbor.

Bonus quote: President Carter came to tour the damage; while flying toward the volcano he looked out the window and said, "I'm amazed at all this destruction," only to be told,"We're not there yet, Mr. President. Those are clearcuts."

At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, by Sarah Bakewell
Break out your black turtlenecks and Gauloises, it's time to explore the lives and philosophies of those fabulous existentialists!  In At the Existentialist Cafe, Sarah Bakewell gives us serious subjects spiked with gossip. Yes, people who write books with titles like Being and Nothingness and Nausea also enjoy frivolous sex and fruit-flavored alcohol. Bakewell traces how existentialism was shaped by the times, and what times they were: global depression, Nazism, world war, decolonization, nuclear peril. Camus may have fought with the resistance, but Sartre and de Beauvoir are the major players in this history. De Beauvoir's Second Sex made her the first modern feminist intellectual, but she was also the first modern memoirist. James Baldwin and Iris Murdoch are two of the original minds drawn to scruffy cafes to talk about authenticity and freedom. Ah, we'll always have Paris!

Bakewell's previous book is the notable How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne.