Search 
Charlie Jane Anders in Conversation With Kirk Read
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
Powell’s Books welcomes award-winning, nationally bestselling author Charlie Jane Anders to its store at Cedar Hills Crossing. Anders will discuss her new novel, Lessons in Magic and Disaster. Kirk Read, acclaimed collage artist and author of How I Learned to Snap, will join Anders in conversation. This event is free and open to the public.
Copies of Lessons in Magic and Disaster will be available for purchase at the venue. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Purchase a copy of the featured book to sustain the author series.
About Lessons in Magic and Disaster:
In the vein of Alice Hoffman and Charlie Jane Anders’s own All the Birds in the Sky comes a novel full of love, disaster, and magic. In this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, and the power of love, a young witch teaches her mother how to do magic—with very unexpected results. Jamie is basically your average New England academic in-training–she has a strong queer relationship, an esoteric dissertation proposal, and inherited generational trauma. But she has one extraordinary secret: she’s also a powerful witch. Serena, Jamie’s mother, has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, grieving the death of her wife and the simultaneous explosion in her professional life. All she has left are memories. Jamie’s busy digging into a three-hundred-year-old magical book, but she still finds time to teach Serena to cast spells and help her come out of her shell. But Jamie doesn’t know the whole story of what happened to her mom years ago, and those secrets are leading Serena down a destructive path. Now it’s up to this grad student and literature nerd to understand the secrets behind this mysterious novel from 1749, unearth a long-buried scandal hinted therein, and learn the true nature of magic, before her mother ruins both of their lives.
Kirk Read is a writer, analog collage artist and performance artist. He is the author of How I Learned to Snap (Hill Street Press, Penguin/Putnam), a memoir which was an American Library Association Honor Book. He makes analog collage and lives in Portland, where he co-leads the Pacific Northwest Collage Collective with Kellette Elliott.