The Lizk’t family continues on, disguised as humans, as the Tomkins family settles into Eagle Valley in Portland graphic novelist Jonathan Hill’s Lizard Boy 2: The Most Perfect Summer Ever. In this middle-grade series, teenage “cryptids, immigrants, and outsiders” band together in the face of similar struggles. Hill has a slew of local events scheduled: the launch at Literary Arts April 8, a reading at Floating World Comics April 26, another the next night at Powell’s, and yet another on May 3 at Green Bean Books. 

Tanner’s debut novel, Worry, made a huge splash last spring—on pretty much every best book of the year list—and Tanner is in town to celebrate the paperback release. The jacket copy somehow mentions both Seinfeld and Sally Rooney. The Cut headline says the millennial sisterhood saga “Will Worry You Just the Right Amount.” 

For 20 years now, Cathy Whims has been serving some of the city’s most no-nonsense Italian food (stiff negronis, fire-freckled margherita pizzas, silky risottos, and handmade pastas) at Nostrana. Which means her debut cookbook, The Italian Summer Kitchen, will certainly hold some well-seasoned recipes, not to mention a full suite of dreamy illustrations by Kate Lewis in lieu of photography. 

Oregonian housing and real estate reporter Jonathan Bach’s High Desert, Higher Costs presents Bend, Oregon, as a case study of how the nationwide housing crisis, coupled with remote work and growing wealth disparities, forces long-term residents out of rural areas known for seasonal recreation: ski towns, hiking havens, and rafting sites in western states like Montana, Idaho, and Colorado. 

The hugely influential poet and writer Maggie Nelson’s latest book, Pathemata: Or, The Story of My Mouth, is described as a sibling to her 2009 prose poem meditation on the color blue, Bluets. Except Pathemata—a reference to the Greek proverb pathemata mathemata, often translated as something like “learning through suffering”—confronts agony more directly, taking Nelson’s decade of jaw pain as its central thread. 

Nguyen, whose debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, is touring a new essay collection, To Save and to Destroy. Originally composed as a six-part lecture series on the concept of the literary other, the book takes up Nguyen’s personal history as a Vietnamese refugee, literary figures including Ralph Ellison and Maxine Hong Kingston, political history of so-called model minorities, and theoretical quandaries on how to combat the silencing of populations.

Portland artist and writer Jessica Poundstone’s Museum of Dogs pairs relics of Ancient Greece and Egypt and paintings, sculptures, and antiques from 1800s Russia, Japan, and Mexico with jokey annotations, giving quick context to what is apparently one of art history’s most enduring fascinations: canines. 

Solnit’s formally inventive ode to embracing uncertainty, an essay collection titled No Straight Road Takes You There, melds feminist politics and literature with climate themes, picking up a conversation she started with her bestselling 2004 book Hope in the Dark.  

Oregon Symphony violinist Ling Ling Huang made her literary debut in 2023 with Natural Beauty, a novel set at the horrific intersection of technology and cosmetic “self-improvement.” Now Huang’s going below the surface. Immaculate Conception follows two artist friends who grow apart as one finds success. Desperate to remain connected, the lesser artist but much wealthier friend enlists a technology to literally put herself inside the other’s head, getting at, per the publisher’s note, “the tenuous line between love and possession.”

Forty years ago, at age 27, PSU professor emeritus Michael N. McGregor took an 11-hour ferry to Patmos, a remote Greek island, in search of solitude. He spent two months alone, thinking, writing, walking, and basking in a formative solitude. While writing this slim, 166-page memoir, An Island to Myself, McGregor journeyed back to Patmos, perhaps escaping a much busier time, in search of what he found there in a nearly pre-Internet world, perhaps juxtaposing his present self with past.