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Tilt by Emma Pattee
Annie, nine months pregnant, is crib shopping at Ikea (our Ikea) when the big one hits. This adrenaline-pumping, tear duct–activating novel follows her long walk back toward her husband—and her future. Every Portlander will love following Annie’s path through our town, which is illustrated by a hand-drawn map and includes real-world landmarks. Pattee is local and, yes, a close friend of mine—but you don’t have to take my word for this recommendation. Tilt was also a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, USA Today bestseller, NPR Favorite Fiction Read of 2025, and the first-ever Powell’s Pick for Portland. JAMIE CATTANACH.
Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts by Karleigh Frisbie Brogan
Written by a local author, Holding is about so much more than heroin addiction—but on that front, it doesn’t hold back. While the narrator is holding her fix, we’re holding our breaths, certain she’s never going to get out of it. At its heart, though, Holding explores what it means to care—and how care, or its lack, can change everything. JAMIE CATTANACH.
Waiting for Britney Spears by Jeff Weiss
A wonderful companion piece to Spears’ memoir The Woman in Me, told from the perspective of a paparazzo who was paid to follow her around in the 2000s, including during the 2007 shaved head/umbrella incident. It’s nearly 400 pages, but, oh, the places you’ll go, from the side of a cliff to the high school gym where the “Baby, One More Time” video was shot. Soul searching about the harm caused? Not much. Just shot after shot after shot. RACHEL SASLOW.
Local Woman by jzl jmz
Glamour and melancholy combined are a powerful catnip for gay men, but jzl jmz’s latest poetry collection Local Woman is more than that. Charles Bukowski glamourized the sleazy side of reality, but the stakes were never as high for Chuckie B. as they are for jmz, who writes from a perspective that is still not properly appreciated by wider society. Yet anyone who’s seen jmz in person knows how artfully she cultivates her presence, on the page and in person. With Local Woman, jmz’s exquisite sadness and righteous fury makes Portland’s gloomy, rainsoaked streets seem as noirish and pulpy as the Los Angeles of yesteryear. ANDREW JANKOWSKI.
Yellow Flower Gills Me Whole by Sid Ghosh
College poetry courses could be taught around how Ghosh arranges his words. His teacup-sized poems contain galaxies. The short poems are not easily digestible, yet one can return to them repeatedly to ponder their mysteries. This early introduction promises there’s nowhere to go but up with his potential. ANDREW JANKOWSKI.
A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
In this sequel to the Hugo-winning The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett returns to the world of Ana and Din, magically enhanced neurodivergent investigators in a peculiar fantasy empire combining Japanese, Thai, Indian and Ottoman elements. Think Knives Out by way of Terry Pratchett. ERIC ASH.
Trying: A Memoir by Chloé Caldwell
They say life is what happens while you’re busy making plans—and our lives never change in quite the ways we’ve imagined. Starting in a familiar place of maybe-too-late baby fever, Trying traces a major life transition, but not the one readers might expect. The prose in this perfectly titled, bifurcated memoir is agile, surprising and spare. JAMIE CATTANACH.
Empire of the Dawn by Jay Kristoff
Kristoff concludes the much-loved vampire trilogy with 750 more pages of eldritch horror and virally witty dialogue. As to where the whole Empire of the Vampire saga ends, Kristoff should pay for his readers to see spinal and behavioral health specialists alike for sheer emotional whiplash. ERIC ASH.
Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
This year opened with Suzanne Collins releasing the story of Haymitch Abernathy’s time in the Hunger Games—24 years before Katniss Everdeen would volunteer as tribute. Ever the grim social commentator, Collins pulls back the curtain and shines the harshest light yet on how artificial this genre of “reality” truly is, and how low Panem will go for its pageantry. ERIC ASH.
Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker
A propulsive, suspenseful read—it took me one weekend—by local novelist Chelsea Bieker. Madwoman’s protagonist is Clove, a young Portland mother with a buried past and a job in the wellness section of a health food store. (Perusing the supplements aisle at New Seasons hasn’t felt the same since meeting Clove.) The rich descriptions have stayed with me, despite my quick consumption, and there was a great plot twist toward the end that I didn’t see coming. RACHEL SASLOW.
Murderland by Caroline Fraser
Anyone interested in true crime knows about the unsettling spike in serial rape and murder across the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s and 80s, when Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer and the I-5 Killer were all active. Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Fraser makes the compelling case that the deadly trend was due, in part, to environmental pollution from sources such as the Tacoma smelter, which spewed poisonous lead and arsenic until 1985. It’s an ambitious, dense read where the corporate horror is almost as terrifying as the corporeal stuff. RACHEL SASLOW.
