PEN Tour: Portland

Where: Powell’s Bookstore, 3723 SE Hawthorne

Powell’s joins PEN World Voices in celebrating international literature. Officially censored upon its Chinese publication and the subject of a bitter lawsuit between author and publisher, Dream of Ding Village (Grove) is Chinese novelist Yan Lianke’s most important novel to date. Set in a poor village in Henan province, it is a deeply moving and beautifully written account of a blood-selling scandal in contemporary China. In his dazzling debut novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Rahul Bhattacharya captures the heady adventures of travel, the overheated restlessness of youth, and the paradoxes of searching for life’s meaning in the escape from home.