Thursday, June 2 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of BooksĬrossing Paths: A Pacific Crest Trailside Reader (Mountaineers Books) offers triumphs, terrors, and tales stretching 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada. Rees Hughes & Howard Shapiro in Conversation With Crystal Gail Welcome, Dorothy Brown-Kwaiser & Russ Mease Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book Zink will be joined in conversation by Justin Taylor, author of Riding with the Ghost. Exceedingly rich, ecstatically dark, and delivered with masterful humor, Avalon is the irresistible story of one teenager’s reckoning with society at large and her search for a personal utopia.
She knows how to survive, but her happiness depends on learning to call the shots. As the two begin a volatile and ostensibly doomed long-distance relationship, Bran searches for meaning in her own surroundings - attending disastrous dance recitals, house-sitting for strangers, and writing scripts for student films. And then she meets Peter, a beautiful, troubled, and charming train wreck of a college student from the East Coast, who launches his teaching career by initiating her into the world of literature and aesthetics. She spends her days tending plants, slogging through high school, and imagining what life could be if she had been born to a different family. After her mother joins a Buddhist colony, Bran is raised by her “common-law stepfather” on Bourdon Farms - a plant nursery that doubles as a cover for a biker gang.
Bran’s Southern California upbringing is anything but traditional. Nell Zink in Conversation With Justin Taylorįrom Nell Zink, one of America’s most original voices, comes Avalon (Knopf), a profound and singular story about a young woman searching for her place in the world.