On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life—the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.

Erin Yanke interviews Mark Baumgarten, author of the book Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music. Mark will be reading  in Portland July 12th, 7:30pm, at Powells Books on Burnside.  The reading and book signing will be followed by a K Records tribute concert at Valentine's (9pm, $3, 21+) with Clea Partridge, Grey Anne, and others.

http://loverockrev.com/

Host Jay Thiemeyer speaks with writer BK Loren about her new novel "Theft," whose main character Willa Robbins is a master tracker working to reintroduce the Mexican wolf, North America’s most endangered mammal, to the American Southwest. But when Colorado police recruit her to find her own brother, Zeb, a confessed murderer, she knows skill alone will not sustain her. Willa is thrown back into the past, surfacing memories of a childhood full of intense love, desperate mistakes, and gentle remorse. "Theft" is a story about family, about loss, and about a search for answers.

Adam Levin’s debut novel, The Instructions, published by McSweeney’s in 2010, arrived with a lot of buzz. An inventive, experimental book of over one thousand pages, its protagonist was Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, a 10 year old genius from Chicago, who may or may not be the Jewish Messiah. Levin’s short stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s and Esquire. He was the winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the 2004 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize among others.