Authors Joe Meno & Nathan Larson with Portland Musician Kim Baxter

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Authors Joe Meno & Nathan Larson with Portland Musician Kim Baxter

Start: 07/11/2012 7:00 pm

End: 07/11/2012 7:00 pm

We're looking forward to this fun event! Authors Joe Meno and Nathan Larson will read from their new paperback novels. They'll be joined by Portland indie-pop singer-songwriter Kim Baxter.

Joe Meno's Office Girl is about young people doing interesting things in the final moments of the last century. Odile is a lovely twenty-three-year-old art-school dropout, a minor vandal, and a hopeless dreamer. Jack is a twenty-five-year-old shirker who's most happy capturing the endless noises of the city on his out-of-date tape recorder. Together they decide to start their own art movement in defiance of a contemporary culture made dull by both the tedious and the obvious. Set in February 1999—just before the end of one world and the beginning of another—Office Girl is the story of two people caught between the uncertainty of their futures and the all-too-brief moments of modern life.

Nathan Larson, who's an award-winning film composer and the former guitarist for '90s band Shudder to Think, found acclaim for his 2011 debut novel, The Dewey Decimal System. The Nervous System is that novel's follow-up, in which an ad-hod librarian and bodyguard nicknamed "Dewey Decimal" stumbles upon information concerning the gruesome murder of a prostitute and a prominent US senator's involvement. Immediately he finds himself chasing ghosts and fighting for his life, pursued by Blackwater-style private military contractors and the ever-present specter of his own past. Decimal confronts a twilight world of Korean hostess bars, childhood bogeymen, and the face of the military-industrial complex gone haywire—all framed by a city descending toward total chaos.

Kim Baxter is a member of buzzy, catchy Northwest indie rock band All-Girl Summer Fun Band. She's just released her winsome solo album, The Tale of Me and You, which you can listen to at her Bandcamp page. She'll be performing acoustic renditions of her songs during the evening.