KINK-FM Radio news director and morning co-host Sheila Hamilton will read from her new memoir All the Things We Never Knew, Chasing the Chaos of Mental Illness.

Hamilton missed the unfolding signs that her husband, David, was suffering from mental illness until it was too late. Just six weeks after his bipolar diagnosis, her once hilarious and brilliant partner had taken his own life, leaving her and their nine-year-old daughter alone and financially destitute. All the Things We Never Knew takes us along the path of their early romance to the year after David's death.

This honest and poignant memoir takes a clear look at the role of mental illness in one family's situation and acts as a siren call for the understanding and detection of illnesses that affect many families.

Margaret Malone's debut story collection People Like You delivers an assemblage of characters and quandaries all at once funny, unsettling, subtle, and moving. Malone's people exist, like most of us, in the thick of everyday experience absent of epiphanies, and they are caught off-guard or cast adrift by personal impulses even while wide awake to their own imperfections. They win us over completely although we know they are bound to break our hearts with each confused and conflicted decision they make.

Malone's writing has appeared in The Missouri Review and Propeller Quarterly, as well as in the Forest Avenue Press anthology The Night, and the Rain, and the River. She is an Oregon Arts Commission and Literary Arts fellow, has received two Regional Arts & Culture Council Project Grants, and residencies at The Sitka Center and Soapstone.

Arthur Bradford's newest collection of stories, Turtleface and Beyond, is a finalist for a 2016 Oregon Book Award. Turtleface is described by Dave Eggers as "uncategorizable and unprecedented, but if pressed, you could call it the improbable spawn of Raymond Carver and Roald Dahl. The world of Bradford's fiction is populated by dreamers, doofuses, banalities, and mysteries, and somehow it's a world you don't want to leave."

Bradford is an O. Henry Prize winning writer and Emmy- nominated filmmaker. His work has appeared in Esquire, McSweeney's, Vice, and Men's Journal. Dogwalker is his previous collection of stories.

 
Broadway Books is thrilled to welcome back Portland's grand dame of the literary world, Ursula K. Le Guin, who will read from her newest collection of poetry, Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014, published by PM Press. The new collection seeks meaning in an ever-connected world, attempting to give voice to objects that may not speak a human language but communicate with us nevertheless.

Le Guin is a remarkably prolific writer. She has published twenty-one novels (including her 1969 breakthrough novel, The Left Hand of Darkness), eleven volumes of short stories (including the 2014 Oregon Book Award winner The Unreal and the Real, Volumes 1 and 2), four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, a guide to the essentials of the writers craft -- of which she knows a thing or two.

She has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Awards, the PEN-Malamud, the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the Oregon Book Award, and the Library of Congress Living Legends Award. In 2014 she was presented the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, where she took the world by storm with her bold truth-telling about the over-commercialization of literature: "I don't want to watch American literature get sold down the river." The video of Le Guin's speech became an internet sensation, making her for a time, as she likes to put it, "as popular as Maru the cat." [Good news: that speech is reprinted at the end of her new collection of poems.]
This reading is free and unticketed; however, Ms. Le Guin will only be signing books purchased at the store that night. The store will close at 5 pm that day and re-open for the reading at 6 pm.

David Cornwell: do you know him? If you do, you will relish John Le Carre: The Biography. If you don't but enjoy the works of Kate Atkinson, Ian McEwan, Graham Greene, William Boyd or even Susan MacNeal -- heck, maybe even J.K. Rowling -- this book has much to offer you. It's at once an exploration of twentieth century British social politics, a study of spycraft and the cold war, and a dissection of family and class dynamics. The story of the man who wrote The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, The Constant Gardener, and many other wonderful genre-transcending thrillers reads like anglophile fiction. Le Carre (aka Cornwell) gave us George Smiley, the anti-Bond who knew that history wasn't over, and we're still reaping the harvest.

Dark Money, by Jane Mayer
And while we're on the subject of shadowy powers massed against democracy, let's look at Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Republican Right by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Mayer, who sees herself as a reporter rather than an advocate, has written about the hidden influence of both George Soros and the Koch brothers; her newest book explores the connections between libertarian plutocrats and recent events, such as the rise of the Tea Party and the Citizens United decision. It's a careful expose, told in straightforward and unemotional prose, and as a long-time contributor to The New Yorker, Mayer knows how to keep arcane research interesting.