Portland: Elvira Navarro on The Voices of Adriana with Kimberly King Parsons
7:00 pm PT
Powell’s City of Books | 1005 W. Burnside St. | Portland, OR
Powell’s City of Books welcomes Spanish author Elvira Navarro for the Portland stop of her US tour celebrating the English release of her novel The Voices of Adriana. She will be in conversation with Kimberly King Parsons.
A thrilling metafiction about grief, the internet, and the difficulty of knowing others, The Voices of Adriana combines the psychological acuity of Marguerite Duras with the creative possibility of One Thousand and One Nights.
Adriana has become obsessed with her father’s online dating. Recently widowed, he’s on a self-destructive, manic search for a partner to accompany him through his twilight years. At the same time, her life as an isolated grad student feels unreal, and to fill the void of her mother’s death, Adriana begins writing, trying on different voices. She builds worlds from the online profiles of her father’s flings, that is until more fundamental voices—those of her grandmother and mother—begin calling out to her in the night. The Voices of Adriana, the latest from Spanish writer Elvira Navarro, is an innovative novel about grief and how we might reanimate the voices of those we’ve lost, not as ghosts, but as living parts of ourselves.
Elvira Navarro (Huelva, Spain, 1978) has published both novels and short stories. Her novel A Working Woman, which addresses the impact of the economic crisis on the contemporary female experience, has established her as a leading voice in Spanish literature. She has been the recipient of numerous significant accolades in Spain, including the Jaén Novel Prize and the Andalusian Critics’ Prize. Additionally, Granta magazine has identified her as one of the twenty-two most distinguished Spanish writers under the age of thirty-five. Her collection of short stories, Rabbit Island, has been nominated for the 2021 National Book Award for Foreign Literature. Her most recent novel, The Voices of Adriana, has been awarded the 2023 Cálamo Special Prize.
Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the national-bestselling novel We Were the Universe, number two on TIME Magazine’s Best Books of 2024 and a Dakota Johnson Book Club pick the New York Times calls “a profound, gutsy tale of grief’s dismantling power.” Parsons’s debut collection, Black Light, was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. She lives with her partner and children in Portland, Oregon, and teaches fiction in the MFA Writing Program at Pacific University.