Notes from The Oregonian/OregonLive books desk.
Writers at Marylhurst: The 2017-2018 Marylhurst Reading Series, featuring a mix of national and local writers, begins in November with Ohio poet Shane McCrae, whose collection "In the Language of My Captor" (Wesleyan University Press, 108 pages, $24.95) is one of five finalists for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry.
McCrae will read his poetry at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 9, in the Belluschi Pavilion at Marylhurst University, 17600 Pacific Highway (Oregon 43), Lake Oswego.
Here's a look at the rest of the series; all readings are free.
- Brandon Shimoda and Stacey Tran: Shimoda is a poet who's won the William Carlos Williams Award from Poetry Society of America; Tran is a Portland writer who curates the Tender Table storytelling series. They'll appear at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 7, in the Old Library in the BP John Administration Building.
- Chuck Caruso: Caruso teaches in the Department of Literature & Art at Marylhurst. He'll read from his new crime thriller, "T
- Martha Grover: The Portland author and zine publisher reads from her memoir "
April Henry: Congratulations to Portland author April Henry, whose young-adult thriller "The Girl I Used to Be" (Henry Holt and Co., 240 pages, $17.99) won the 2017 Anthony Award for Best Young Adult Novel. The awards, announced Oct. 15, recognize the best work by mystery writers. In Henry's novel, a teenager learns that the father who abandoned her has actually been dead for years - killed not far from where her mother was stabbed to death in southern Oregon, and on the same day. When the teen decides to try to find the killer, she finds herself in danger.
Jesse Donaldson: The title of Portland author Jesse Donaldson's latest book gets right to the point. "On Homesickness: A Plea" (Vandalia Press, 252 pages, $17.99) is a prose poem that explores themes of nostalgia, memory, connection and personal history and mythology. Donaldson uses each of his native Kentucky's 120 counties as a prompt for his extended meditation on how and why we call some places home and not others; though this name-checking occasionally seems gimmicky, it has an unexpected, sweet payoff at the end.
Oregon and the KKK: A new history of the 20th-century Ku Klux Klan devotes a full chapter to Oregon, which author and historian Linda Gordon describes as "arguably the most racist place outside the southern states, possibly even of all the states" for much of its history. Gordon's Portland roots don't keep her from glossing over "the Klan's high-velocity Oregon success" in "The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition" (Liveright, 288 pages, $27.95). She notes that a Klan member was elected in 1904 to Portland City Council and subsequently to the Oregon Legislature, where he became Speaker of the House. The Klan's top priority in Oregon, according to Gordon, was eliminating Catholic schools, which the Klan saw as tools in a plot by the Pope to take over America.