Powell's Presents: Ryan Boudinot & Rebecca Brown in Conversation With Kevin Sampsell

Lee is one of the most celebrated American novelists of the 1980s, not to mention an obnoxious, womanizing jerk. His body of work just happens to have been created by artificial intelligence in the future and delivered to him by some guy named Max. Broken Utopia (Publication Studio) locates Lee and Max in a cosmos divided into three interdependent layers — the eternal Town, the User Platform, and the Substrate — all ruled by Vicarious, a company that converts human experiences into drugs. Residents of the Town enjoy lives on a loop of endless enrichment and wonder, as inhabitants of the User Platform eke out harrowing routines of addiction and delusion. Meanwhile, in the Substrate, a near future earth teeters at the edge of a mass extinction event that — for better or worse — is only temporary. Ryan Boudinot's first new novel since 2012's Blueprints of the Afterlife follows a cast of mystics, frauds, and profoundly incompetent cult leaders through Iceland, Seattle, black holes, and your own blown mind on a quest to reboot reality itself.

Rebecca Brown's new prose collection, Obscure Destinies (Publication Studio), is a compact tour de force of prose writing that takes a single theme and drives it through four genres — story, memoir, play script, and essay — showing Brown's astonishing range of skills, handling the most intimate and enduring subject matter: the encounter of the living with loved ones who are dying. It is her first new book in three years.

Boudinot and Brown will be joined in conversation by writer, collage artist, bookseller, and publisher Kevin Sampsell, author of I Made an Accident and Sean the Stick.

Buy the book: https://www.powells.com/events/ryan-boudinot-rebecca-brow-9781624622120-9781624622144