Golden’s Shouting Out Loud is a biography of the Raincoats, the London band founded in the late 1970s that has been a foundational influence for a huge swath of the post-punk diaspora, including queer punk, riot grrrl, and much of feminist music from the last millennium. Golden, who published an oral history of Factory Records in the US last year, compiled this book from new and archival images and interviews with band members, peers, and bands that have carried on the Raincoats’ sound, including Sonic Youth, Hole, Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Big Joanie, and Liz Phair. At this Powell’s event, Golden will chat about the book with Sleater-Kinney singer and guitarist Corin Tucker, The Raincoats’ former US manager Sheri Hood, and cofounder of the beloved fanzine Chickfactor Gail O’Hara. 

Hood’s debut, how to be a good girl, made a splash in 2020 when it took apart the cultural archetype: a “good girl.” In Trauma Plot, she fights for another common theme of feminine stories. Responding to criticisms that, in so many words, every modern novel seemed to hinge on the crutch of a traumatic experience, Hood recounts her own rape and places her story in conversation with survivors portrayed in art ranging from Ovid’s Philomela to David Lynch’s Laura Palmer. “Implicit in her project is an acknowledgment that human beings will always have deeply upsetting experiences, and they will always write about them,” Bekah Waalkes writes in the Atlantic. “The only question is how.” 

Three novels from local publisher Tin House center at this reading. Nini Berndt’s There Are Reasons for This is a dystopian story of climate change quelled by pharmaceutical drugs with a protagonist that’s a professional cuddler. Claire Jia’s debut, Wanting, follows childhood friends reuniting in Beijing; their lives have taken very different turns, and both women are about to marry men that would ostensibly cement the paths they’re on, until they start having affairs. And in Olufunke Grace Bankole’s The Edge of Water, a Nigerian woman immigrates to New Orleans after winning a visa lottery, and lands in her new home soon before hurricane Katrina hits. 

Raymond is perhaps best known for the screenplays he’s written with Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Showing Up) and Todd Haynes (the Emmy-winning 2011 HBO adaptation of Mildred Pierce). Though he is just as prolific as a novelist, and many of the movies he’s worked on have been adapted from his fiction. In his latest novel, God and Sex, a quasi-academic author who’s into spiritualism putters around Ashland, falls into a love triangle, and kinda sorta witnesses an instance of divine intervention. Raymond will unpack the book with Portland writer Justin Taylor at this event. 

If you missed the launch events around Nostrana chef Cathy Whims’s cookbook this spring—or even if you didn’t—check out this second wind event with wine and snacks. Instead of cataloging her legendary Italian restaurant, Whims made her first cookbook, The Italian Summer Kitchen, a daydream of simple Italian recipes. It’s also styled like a throwback to Chez Panisse with watercolor illustrations by Kate Lewis in lieu of photography. 

Goodwin is a presidential historian and Pulitzer-winning author. As part of the Oregon Historical Society’s Mark O. Hatfield lecture series, she’s coming to town to lecture on her latest, An Unfinished Love Story. Her husband, Richard Goodwin, who died in 2018, was a speechwriter for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and a fixture of 1960s Washington; he was with Bobby Kennedy when he was assassinated. As the subtitle, “a personal history of the 1960s,” suggests, this latest book tells of the White House of the ’60s through the unique vantage of Richard’s personal archive.

Zumas, a Portlander, paints a nuanced portrait of this country’s abysmal system of intergenerational care in her third novel, Wolf Bells. In exchange for their help caring for other residents, young people live rent free in a home for the elderly and disabled. A former punk singer runs the place, and a constant stream of jokes fly between age groups. But when a young woman and her disabled cousin turn up on the doorstep, both of whom are minors, the home’s accepting philosophy of no-questions refuge is put to the test.