Host Kathleen Stephenson speaks with Portland author Anne Mendel, who discusses her debut novel, Etiquette for an Apocalypse.

It’s the 2020 Apocalypse and Sophie Cohen, former social worker turned neighborly drug dealer, must keep her family alive amid those pesky end of the world issues: starvation, earthquakes, plagues, gang violence and alas more starvation.She investigates a serial killing and takes down the sinister emerging power structure while learning to use a pizza box solar oven, bond with her chickens and blast tin cans from the perimeter fence with a Ruger 9MM.

In order to accomplish all this she must find a way to love her mother, accept her daughter’s adulthood and reignite her moribund marriage.

Anne Mendel grew up in Arkansas and actually attended Miss Ashleigh’s Charm school. She learned nothing about dealing with disasters, (unless breaking a high heel is a disaster).

Before she began writing full time she was a community organizing advocate for women and girls.

Bonnie Jo Campbell talks about her new book Once Upon a River, an odyssey of a novel about a girl's search for love and identity.

(Photo © Bradley S. Pines)

Bonnie Jo Campbell grew up on a small Michigan farm with her mother and four siblings in a house her grandfather Herlihy built in the shape of an H. She learned to castrate small pigs, milk Jersey cows, and, when she was snowed in with chocolate, butter, and vanilla, to make remarkable chocolate candy. When she left home for the University of Chicago to study philosophy, her mother rented out her room. She has since hitchhiked across the U.S. and Canada, scaled the Swiss alps on her bicycle, and traveled with the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus selling snow cones. As president of Goulash Tours Inc., she has organized and led adventure tours in Russia and the Baltics, and all the way south to Romania and Bulgaria.

Her collection details the lives of extraordinary females in rural and small town Michigan, and it won the AWP prize for short fiction; her story "The Smallest Man in the World" has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her novel Q Road investigates the lives of a rural community where development pressures are bringing unwelcome change in the character of the land. Her critically-acclaimed short fiction collection American Salvage, which consists of fourteen lush and rowdy stories of folks who are struggling to make sense of the twenty-first century, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Fiction.

Host Jennifer Kemp speaks with local author Ruth Tenzer Feldman about her book "Blue Thread." It's 1912. Sixteen-year-old Miriam Josefsohn is groomed for the life of a socialite, but dreams of working in the family print shop. When her father refuses to train her as his replacement, Miriam decides to take control of her life and devotes herself to women's suffrage at the height of the Oregon campaign. In the process, she meets the mysterious Serakh, who inquires about a special shawl with a single blue thread. Miriam discovers that this family heirloom, her great-grandmother's prayer shawl, is capable of transporting her thousands of years into the past, where she is introduced to the daughters of Zelophehad and their ancient struggle for women's rights. With Serakh as her guide, Miriam embarks on a journey to alter the past, but will she have the courage to fight for her own future?

Portland writer Ruth Tenzer Feldman is an award-winning author of books and articles, mainly for children and young adults. She has been an attorney, editor, research analyst, ticket seller, and keypunch operator. Her 10 nonfiction books focus on history and biography, while her articles range from leeches to Einstein’s refrigerator.

Jim Schumock hosts a "Best Books Special," featuring reviews of some of the best fiction and nonfiction books of the last year with guests Will Peters of Anni Bloom's Books and Sally McPherson of Broadway Books. There will be many literary thank you gifts for listeners who become KBOO members during the show, including a signed first edition of "Fight Club," by Chuck Palahniuk.