Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tom Perrotta, Claire Messud and Lemony Snicket Come to Portland For Maybe Wordstock’s Biggest Line-up Ever

Nearly half of the authors on the line-up come from the Pacific Northwest.

On Tuesday, Literary Arts announced the mammoth, 103-author line-up for Portland's Wordstock book festival, the massive book festival that will take over the Portland Art Museum, multiple churches and the entire Portland Center for Performing Arts on November 11.

There are some major, major names coming to town—and one of the biggest is author and Atlantic columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer Toni Morrison has said filled the intellectual void left by James Baldwin; his forthcoming book of essays, We Were Eight Years in Power, is an elegy for the aftermath of the Obama presidency.

Other huge news? Massively best-selling Tom Perrotta, author of Election, is coming to town with a brand-new novel about sex, schools and suburbia, Ms. Fletcher. Other major novelists rolling in? Claire Messud (The Emperor's Children) and Jeffrey Eugenides  (Virgin Suicides).

Other touring authors will include poet and writer-about-poetry Matthew Zapruder, prodigious young comics star Tillie Walden, Hugo-winning (and George R.R. Martin-optioned) sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor, and children's author Lemony Snicket, both as Snicket and as his alter-ego Daniel Handler.

Nearly half of the Wordstock authors will be drawn from the Pacific Northwest, including Carson Ellis and the Decemberists' Colin Meloy, Oregon Book Award-winner Kate Carroll de Gutes, multi-Oregon Book Award-winner Lidia Yuknavitch, novelist and frequent Todd Haynes collaborator Jon Raymond, and future-dystopian novelist Omar El Akkad, among many others.

Here's the full list of Wordstock authors.

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