Red Hands is a deeply compelling tale of a woman caught inside the destruction of a regime. Iordana is a normal girl, brought up with all the perks of Romania's corrupt communist regime. Then she falls in love and marries the eldest son of her parents' arch-rival, Romania's monstrous dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. They become the in-laws from hell, but she brings them their only grandson. And then there's the 1989 revolution, when crowds will kill anyone with the Ceausescu name. In all the blood and chaos, can Iordana keep her little son alive? Drawn from eighty hours of unique interviews and told in Iordana's own voice; a true-life tale that spins readers into the pleasures, excesses and horrors of late twentieth-century Europe.
This highly visual book marries style and substance to give Portland and the people who love her the guidebook they deserve: a curated and creative collection of more than 130 outings in and around Portland to inspire romance and adventure. Secret spots, beloved locales, and unexpected destinations offer endless options for date night or a weekend getaway. Finally, a stylish, cheeky, curated guidebook of cool places for Portlanders (and visitors) to go on dates/outings/field trips/adventures. These range from one-hour coffee and ice cream dates in Portland's neighborhoods to multiday expeditions to Hood River and Mount St. Helens. The authors have a bead on the obscure and fascinating, and the descriptions are motivating enough to prompt even the lazy to head out the door. The book will have serious pickup power and will become an essential resource and armchair read for Portland-area Gen X, millennial, and Gen Z couples (and singles with friends) interested in learning about off-the-beaten-path things to do, see, and taste. No more FOMO! In-the-know authors and tastemakers Eden Dawn and Ashod Simonian will reveal where the cool and quirky go, while educating readers on this beloved city.
“Willy Vlautin is not known for happy endings, but there’s something here that defies the downward pull. In the end, Lynette is pure life force: fierce and canny and blazing through a city that no longer has space for her, and it’s all Portland’s loss.”—Portland Monthly Magazine Award-winning author Willy Vlautin explores the impact of trickle-down greed and opportunism of gentrification on ordinary lives in this scorching novel that captures the plight of a young woman pushed to the edge as she fights to secure a stable future for herself and her family. Barely thirty, Lynette is exhausted. Saddled with bad credit and juggling multiple jobs, some illegally, she’s been diligently working to buy the house she lives in with her mother and developmentally disabled brother Kenny. Portland’s housing prices have nearly quadrupled in fifteen years, and the owner is giving them a good deal. Lynette knows it’s their last best chance to own their own home—and obtain the security they’ve never had. While she has enough for the down payment, she needs her mother to cover the rest of the asking price. But a week before they’re set to sign the loan papers, her mother gets cold feet and reneges on her promise, pushing Lynette to her limits to find the money they need. Set over two days and two nights, The Night Always Comes follows Lynette’s frantic search—an odyssey of hope and anguish that will bring her face to face with greedy rich men and ambitious hustlers, those benefiting and those left behind by a city in the throes of a transformative boom. As her desperation builds and her pleas for help go unanswered, Lynette makes a dangerous choice that sets her on a precarious, frenzied spiral. In trying to save her family’s future, she is plunged into the darkness of her past, and forced to confront the reality of her life. A heart wrenching portrait of a woman hungry for security and a home in a rapidly changing city, The Night Always Comes raises the difficult questions we are often too afraid to ask ourselves: What is the price of gentrification, and how far are we really prepared to go to achieve the American Dream? Is the American dream even attainable for those living at the edges? Or for too many of us, is it only a hollow promise?
Portland has 196 public staircases, an irresistible asset to this pedestrian-friendly city. In The Portland Stairs Book, Portland's walking guru Laura Foster has gathered the best and most interesting in a handy pocket-sized guide. From Mount Tabor's epic 282 steps to the glass cupola atop 115 steps in Pioneer Courthouse, The Portland Stairs Book features details on twenty outdoor stairs that have amazing stories and something unique to offer an urban explorer. The stairs include the Willamette River Bridge Stairs, The Westover Terraces Steps, and Rocky Butte's Grand Staircase. The book also features indoor stairs that are perfect for a rainy Portland day and five Stair Trails that lead readers on urban treks that contain hundreds of steps in five different areas of town.
In this cinematic thriller set in the Pacific Northwest, two sisters fight for survival after a natural disaster. In the shadow of Mount Hood, sixteen-year-old Tennant is checking rabbit traps with her eight-year-old sister Sophie when the girls are suddenly overcome by a strange vibration rising out of the forest, building in intensity until it sounds like a deafening crescendo of screams. From out of nowhere, their father sweeps them up and drops them through a trapdoor into a storm cellar. But the sound only gets worse . . .
In Yellow Earth, John Sayles introduces an epic cast of characters, weaving together narratives of competing agendas and worldviews with lyrical dexterity, insight, and wit. When rich layers of shale oil are discovered beneath the town of Yellow Earth, all hell breaks loose. Locals, oil workers, service workers, politicians, law enforcement, and get-rich-quick opportunists—along with an earnest wildlife biologist—commingle and collide as the population of the town triples overnight. Harleigh Killdeer, chairman of the tribal business council of the neighboring Three Nations reservation, entertains visions of "sovereignty by the barrel" and joins forces with a fast-talking entrepreneur. From casino dealers to activists and high school kids, everyone in the region is swept up in the unsparing wave of an oil boom. Sayles’s masterful storytelling draws an arc from the earliest exploitation of this land and its people all the way to twenty-first-century privatization schemes. Through the intertwining lives of its characters, Yellow Earth lays bare how the profit motive erodes human relationships, as well as our living planet. The fate of Yellow Earth serves as a parable for our times.
Portland's historic cemeteries are some of the most beautiful and overlooked cultural treasures in the city. Full of fascinating secrets and eerie tales, these greenspaces are also the perfect spots for walking, biking and birding. Explore twenty-five burial grounds with public art in the form of remarkable tombstones that vary as much as the Portlanders they commemorate, including suffragists, spiritualists, Romani kings, politicians and murderers. From a photographer who captured the golden age of Broadway musicals to a celebrity orangutan, Portland's graves are full of surprises. Come along with cemetery sleuths Teresa Bergen and Heide Davis as they share their insights into the Rose City's remarkable past.
Runner up: 2016 New England Book Festival Award, General Fiction This book does for 1920s Boston what E.L. Doctorow did for New York in Ragtime: it grabs a city out of history, mixes in some fiction and makes it vivid. Be it the high style of Boston's Parker House Hotel; the flagrant, fragrant set who dance attendance on the poet Amy Lowell; the scientists and shipbuilders and politicians and utter rogues who raise the city from the dirt; it all mmers into reality as an outsider leads us into its quaking heart. Raffi, a young Italian, is our guide. He left more than his country behind in Rome. Snipped by a bishop as the last castrato, he is bundled off to America when the Church takes shame. Forbidden to use his voice, other skills steal him into the society of 1920s Boston. Raffi enters the hardest quest of all--the search for a genuine love song.
