The world is in turmoil. From India to Turkey and from Poland to the United States, authoritarian populists have seized power. As a result, Yascha Mounk shows, democracy itself may now be at risk.Two core components of liberal democracy―individual rights and the popular will―are increasingly at war with each other. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of "rights without democracy" took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create something just as bad: a system of "democracy without rights."The consequence, Mounk shows in The People vs. Democracy, is that trust in politics is dwindling. Citizens are falling out of love with their political system. Democracy is wilting away. Drawing on vivid stories and original research, Mounk identifies three key drivers of voters' discontent: stagnating living standards, fears of multiethnic democracy, and the rise of social media. To reverse the trend, politicians need to enact radical reforms that benefit the many, not the few.The People vs. Democracy is the first book to go beyond a mere description of the rise of populism. In plain language, it describes both how we got here and where we need to go. For those unwilling to give up on either individual rights or the popular will, Mounk shows, there is little time to waste: this may be our last chance to save democracy.Yascha Mounk is a Lecturer on Government at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America.

Before she became the first transgender person to speak at a national political convention in 2016 at the age of twenty-six, Sarah McBride struggled with the decision to come out—not just to her family but to the students of American University, where she was serving as student body president. She'd known she was a girl from her earliest memories, but it wasn't until the Facebook post announcing her truth went viral that she realized just how much impact her story could have on the country.Four years later, McBride was one of the nation's most prominent transgender activists, walking the halls of the White House, advocating the passing of laws, and addressing the country in the midst of a heated presidential election. And, she'd found her first love and future husband, Andy, a trans man and fellow activist, who complemented her in every way... until cancer tragically intervened.Informative, heartbreaking, and empowering, Tomorrow Will Be Different is McBride's story of love and loss, a powerful entry point into the LGBTQ community's battle for equal rights and what it means to be openly transgender. From issues like bathroom access to health care, McBride weaves the important political and cultural milestones into a personal journey that will open hearts and change minds.The fight for equality and freedom has only just begun. Sarah McBride is the national press secretary at the Human Rights Campaign, working tirelessly to advocate for LGBTQ equality. She has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Vogue, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker, and she speaks regularly at national LGBTQ and political events. This event is supported by The Seattle Public Library Foundation, author series sponsor Gary Kunis, and media sponsor The Seattle Times and presented in partnership with University Book Store will be available for purchase and signing. Parking in the Central Library garage will be available for $6 after 5pm.

Most people say they would like to die quietly at home. But overly aggressive medical advice, coupled with an unrealistic sense of invincibility or overconfidence in our health-care system, results in the majority of elderly patients misguidedly dying in institutions. Many undergo painful procedures instead of having the better and more peaceful death they deserve."At Peace" outlines specific active and passive steps that older patients and their health-care proxies can take to ensure loved ones live their last days comfortably at home and/or in hospice when further aggressive care is inappropriate. Through Dr. Samuel Harrington's own experience with the aging and deaths of his parents and of working with patients, he describes the terminal patterns of the six most common chronic diseases; how to recognize a terminal diagnosis even when the doctor is not clear about it; how to have the hard conversation about end-of-life wishes; how to minimize painful treatments; when to seek hospice care; and how to deal with dementia and other special issues.Informed by more than thirty years of clinical practice, Dr. Harrington came to understand that the American health-care system wasn't designed to treat the aging population with care and compassion. His work as a hospice trustee and later as a hospital trustee drove his passion for helping patients make appropriate end-of-life decisions.Samuel Harrington, MD, an honors graduate of Harvard College and the University of Wisconsin Medical School, concentrated his clinical practice at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, DC. There he served as a medical staff leader, a trustee, and as Sibley's representative to the Johns Hopkins Quality and Safety Board Committee. This work and his service on the board of trustees of a nonprofit hospice brought Dr. Harrington into the discussion of end-of-life medical care.Mary Ann Gwinn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes about books and authors for The Seattle Times, Booklist, Newsday and other publications. She was one of three jurors for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. She serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

Chinese soul food is classic comfort food you can't resist, and in this cookbook you'll find 80 recipes for favorites you can easily make any night of the week. Chinese food is more popular than any other cuisine and yet it often intimidates North American home cooks. Chinese Soul Food draws cooks into the kitchen with recipes that include sizzling potstickers, stir-fries that are unbelievably easy to make, saucy braises, and soups that bring comfort with a sip. These are dishes that feed the belly and speak the universal language of "mmm!" You'll find approachable recipes and plenty of tips for favorite homestyle Chinese dishes, such as red-braised pork belly, dry-fried green beans, braised-beef noodle soup, green onion pancakes, garlic eggplant, and the author's famous potstickers, which consistently sell out her cooking classes in Seattle. You will also find helpful tips and techniques, such as caring for and using a wok and how to cook rice properly, as well as a basic Chinese pantry list that also includes acceptable substitutions, making it even simpler for the busiest among us to cook their favorite Chinese dishes at home. Recipes are streamlined to minimize the fear factor of unfamiliar ingredients and techniques, and home cooks are gently guided toward becoming comfortable cooking satisfying Chinese meals. Hsiao-Ching Chou is an award-winning food journalist, a cooking instructor, and communications consultant. She is a member of the James Beard Foundation cookbook committee and Les Dames d'Escoffier. Chou has been a guest on local and national shows, including Public Radio's The Splendid Table, the PBS documentary The Meaning of Food, and the Travel Channel's Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. In her spare time, she teaches popular everyday Chinese home cooking classes at the Hot Stove Society. She lives with her family in Seattle.Praise for Chinese Soul Food"Hsiao-Ching Chou delves into the heart of Chinese cooking, understanding its power to provide sustenance and comfort. This unique collection of recipes will inspire lovers of Chinese cuisine to fire up their woks. Chou expertly teaches popular classics such as Soup Dumplings and Mu Shu Pork, as well as less familiar dishes, like Beef with Pickled Chinese Mustard Greens and Spicy Clams with Chinese Sausage, showcasing the remarkable range of Chinese home cooking."—Grace Young, James Beard Award-winning author of Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge"I love this book. It's a warm invitation to home cooks to get comfortable with Chinese home cooking through stir-frying, braising, and steaming--and with easily available Chinese ingredients. The fried egg recipe alone (a wok is by far the best place to fry an egg) makes this an essential book, but there are many more, including Dry-Fried Green Beans, Hot and Sour Soup, Red-Braised Pork Belly, a selection of dim sum dumplings, and that guilty restaurant pleasure, General Tso's Chicken. They're all here. No restaurant needed!"—Naomi Duguid, author of Taste of Persia: A Cook's Travels Through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Kurdistan and Burma: Rivers of Flavor

Currently in Seattle, a growing number of projects are exploring intersections among public histories, inquiry and community activism. This is no doubt in reaction to the immense scale and rate of displacement, disruption, and reconfiguration of both built and social environments through ongoing processes of urban development and transformation. The aim of the People's Geography of Seattle Project is to help forge connections between these different projects, bring them into conversation with each other to identify emergent common interests and questions, and facilitate cooperative support for ongoing development of these projects according to their priorities.This event will bring together artists, scholars and activists looking at the changing geographies and histories of the Seattle region. Many of these projects are combining a critical understanding of culture, politics, and ecology with forms of mapping and visual representation. This event will highlight public histories, documentary film and photography, and community driven environmental justice. These projects engage questions of change, narrative, rights, justice, health, and equity, both in the built environment and within communities.

This celebration of poetry will include readings from anthology contributors Anastacia Renee, Duane Niatum, Georgia McDade, Phillip Red Eagle, Quenton Baker, Rachel Kessler, Dawn Pichon Barron, Bill Carty, and Shankar Narayan. We’ll also celebrate the incoming State Poet Laureate, Claudia Castro Luna.WA129 is an anthology of poems gathered from the people of Washington State, collected and curated by State Poet Laureate Tod Marshall. The anthology includes work from experienced poets and newcomers to the art, young students and lifetime learners. There are 129 poems in the published book--one for every year of statehood up to 2018, the end of Marshall's term as State Poet Laureate. Over 2,000 poems were submitted. Many that were not included in the book will be published in online anthology in an e-book format.WA129 is a project of the Washington State Poet Laureate Program, funded by Humanities Washington and the Washington State Arts Commission. The anthology is designed and published by Sage Hill Press, Spokane. A copy of the anthology will be given to libraries across Washington State. It is available for purchase online at Amazon. Proceeds from the sale of the book will help fund the State Poet Laureate program.View the complete list of contributors.Tod Marshall was appointed Washington State Poet Laureate in February 2016 by Governor Jay Inslee, succeeding Elizabeth Austen, State Poet Laureate from 2014–2016. Other past Poets Laureate include Kathleen Flenniken (2012–2014) and Sam Green (2007–2009). Marshall is the author of three poetry collections: Dare Say (2002), The Tangled Line (2009), and Bugle (2014), the latter of which won the Washington State Book Award in 2015. He lives in Spokane, Washington, and teaches at Gonzaga University where he is the Robert K. and Ann J. Powers Professor Chair of the Humanities.Claudia Castro Luna is the incoming Washington State Poet Laureate. Castro Luna fled war-torn El Salvador for the United States at the age of 14 with her family. She went on to earn an MFA in poetry and an MA in urban planning. After working as a K-12 teacher, she became Seattle’s first Civic Poet, a position appointed by the mayor. In that position, Castro Luna won acclaim for her Seattle Poetic Grid, an online interactive map of showcasing poems about different locations around the city. The grid even landed her an interview on PBS NewsHour. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook This City and the collection Killing Marías.

Join Seattle arts leader John Boylan and his collaborators in an interactive conversation about art and performance in a time of rapid technological change and a surge of available data. Created in homage to "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering," an iconic exhibition 50 years ago in New York that sparked a new era of collaboration between artists, scientists, and engineers, 9e2 culls from the Seattle scene in a 21st-century update. 9e2 embraces experimentation and collaboration much like its forebearers, with an ongoing series of installations, performances, and other events exploring the intersection of art, science, and technology.

A writing residency is a retreat experience where you have time away from your regular life to focus on your work. There are a variety of residency offerings in Washington and Oregon, and this panel of representatives from Mineral School, ArtSmith, Hedgebrook and other residencies will share information on what they offer writers as well as tips for the application process. Bring your questions and don't let go of that dream of finding uninterrupted time to write.

This is how a family keeps a secret…and how that secret ends up keeping them. This is how a family lives happily ever after…until happily ever after becomes complicated. This is how children change…and then change the world. This is Claude. He’s five years old, the youngest of five brothers, and loves peanut butter sandwiches. He also loves wearing a dress, and dreams of being a princess. When he grows up, Claude says, he wants to be a girl. Rosie and Penn want Claude to be whoever Claude wants to be. They’re just not sure they’re ready to share that with the world. Soon the entire family is keeping Claude’s secret. Until one day it explodes. Laurie Frankel's "This Is How It Always Is" is a novel about revelations, transformations, fairy tales, and family. And it’s about the ways this is how it always is: Change is always hard and miraculous and hard again, parenting is always a leap into the unknown with crossed fingers and full hearts, children grow but not always according to plan. And families with secrets don’t get to keep them forever.Liane Moriarity says about "This Is How It Always Is," “It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me think.” Laurie Frankel is the author of the novels "This Is How It Always Is," The Atlas of Love, and Goodbye for Now. She lives in Seattle with her family.

In "Her Body and Other Parties," Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In her provocative debut, a wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck; a salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. And in the bravura novella "Especially Heinous." Machado reimagines every episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, "Her Body and Other Parties" swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.