"Charlie Jane Anders writes the kind of stories that break your heart and expand your mind simultaneously." — Janelle Monáe
About this event:
Powell's Books welcomes Charlie Jane Anders to its store at Cedar Hills Crossing! Anders will be discussing her new novel, Lessons in Magic and Disaster. Anders will be joined in conversation by Kirk Read, collage artist and author of How I Learned to Snap. 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. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!
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.A young witch teaches her mother how to do magic--with very unexpected results--in this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, and the power of love.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.
About Charlie Jane Anders:
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster, coming August 2025 from Tor Books. Her other novels include All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she's currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
About Kirk Read:
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, Oregon where he co-leads the Pacific Northwest Collage Collective with Kellette Elliott. He was shortlisted for the 2024 Contemporary Collage Magazine awards in two categories. His collage has been featured in Contemporary Collage Magazine and Khora, a project of Corporeal Writing, where he is a Curated Artist who illustrates short stories using analog collage. His collage has been shown by the Kolaj Institute at LeMieux Galleries in New Orleans, Powell’s Books in Portland, the Independent Publishers Resource Center and the Radical Faerie Arts Festival, which he helped produce. He was the founder and director of Army of Lovers, which produced over 300 arts events in San Francisco, including many collaborations with public health agencies. His theater shows This is the Thing and Computer Face earned him San Francisco Weekly’s designation as “The freak prince of San Francisco.” He has toured extensively as a writer and taught workshops all over the United States. He works as a registered nurse and is married to the writer Ed Wolf.
