PowellsBooks.Blog

If you've ever wanted to see what your Powells.com order goes through before it's shipped to you, wonder no longer!

To observe Powell's 15th anniversary online, local station KOIN sent a crew from their morning show to interview Megan Zabel, our champion Marketing Coordinator, who led them around the warehouse. Then the grand poobah, Michael Powell himself, sat for an in-studio chat.

It all happens right here:

A new era is beginning in America. I call it the post-cool period, to distinguish it from the last half of the 20th century, when coolness was in ascendancy. As I show in my new book The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, the dominance of stylishness and hipness — pervasive in American life since the 1950s — is coming to an end. Instead, we are encountering a new cultural tone and new ways of interacting with the world around us, marked by a more down-to-earth, back-to-basics approach to life.

You find the new post-cool attitude everywhere you look, from the White House to Main Street. You see a new earnestness, a rejection of glitziness, an embrace of the natural and authentic. Rolling Stone recently did an article on the new naturalism in comedy — literally a change in what people think is funny. Almost the same day, the New York Times Book Review wrote about a more natural and unaffected approach coming to the fore in recent novels. There is new ...

Buying Into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World (Pitt Comp Literacy Culture) by Catherine Prendergast

Reviewed by Ange Mlinko
The Nation

In Metropole, the 1970 novel by Ferenc Karinthy, a linguist named Budai traveling to a conference in Helsinki boards the wrong plane and finds himself in a country whose language, despite all his training, he can't begin to parse. Budai tries out a variety of common languages on hotel staff, with no success; he starts posting signs in different alphabets, only to see them ripped down. He spies what looks to be a phone directory, swipes it, and does the rational thing: he sets about writing down "all the different characters he could find" and calms himself with the thought that once he has a restricted range of data, he can start deciphering their writing system and find his way back home to his wife and young son. But "he soon realized that he had noted over one hundred characters and that he was still discovering ...

I don't believe in evil. It's a word I use, certainly, because words are shortcuts and we all take the short way round from time to time, but that's all it is, a word to describe something we cannot or will not understand or articulate in any other way. If there were such a thing then I would have a much harder time condemning acts that I find selfish, cruel, or otherwise indefensible, because to say that evil exists is to provide an excuse for what I find to be obvious: that humans are animals, and as such often act in ways that other animals can never fully understand.

The first thing I thought when Powell's offered me a soapbox was, Don't come off like a pretentious jackass, be sincere, talk about something you love, like hiking or Vincent Price or Jack Vance or Umberto Eco, and next thing I know I'm using a Milton quote for the title and waxing on about philosophical uncertainties. I'm going somewhere less bombastic, really! Evil as human weakness versus evil with a capital E as a means of segueing into why I've ...

Just Review It: In the New York Times, Janet Maslin rules that tennis superstar Andre Agassi double-faulted in his memoir, Open: An Autobiography.

The ease with which Mr. Moehringer slips into telling someone else's story is both consummate and spooky. As for Mr. Agassi, he uses his writing partner in the same way he uses his tennis support staff: as talented individuals in a universe where he, Mr. Agassi, is the one and only sun.

[...] Welcome to Mr. Agassi's world. As described in "Open" it is lively but narrow, since Mr. Agassi's curiosity does not extend far beyond tennis, more tennis, the misery of tennis, the way sportswriters misunderstand tennis and the irritating celebrity that tennis stardom confers.

I just hope Maslin doesn't write anything like the above for books by John McEnroe or Serena Williams. She's liable to get a tennis ball jammed somewhere really uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, USA Today interviews Agassi about his book, tennis, and his other favorite subject (according to Maslin): himself.

...

In my new book, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, I look at the strange and surprising process by which cool became uncool. Yes, you heard me correctly: it may sound like a paradox, but cool isn't hip any more.

The signs of this are everywhere, and start with the word itself. I am not sure when the deliberate misspelling of cool as "kewl" started, but a quick search for the phrase “is not kewl” on Google comes back with 50,000 hits. Oddly enough, there is even a competitor to Google, a new search engine called Cuil, which is itself a deliberate misspelling of the word.

Everywhere you look, cool is being mocked. And not just on the web. On TV, nerds are in the ascendancy, as demonstrated by shows such as Beauty and the Geek, Ugly Betty, The Big Bang Theory, and Chuck. And a whole series of books are reinforcing the point. Browse through this web site, and check out ...

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan Poetry) by Barbara Guest

Reviewed by Tyrone Williams
Rain Taxi

The relativity of the term "obscure" is always implicit in the regular journalistic and academic jeremiads against contemporary American poetry. Billy Collins's insistence that poetry should be "transparent" echoes an entire history of critical celebrations of serenity, simplicity, and clarity -- for language. Not that controversies revolving around the relationship of "serious" music (classical and jazz) and the plastic arts to the public don't exist; it's just that they rarely make it beyond, for example, the Arts section of The New York Times. Poetry's irrelevance -- however celebrated (Auden's "Poetry makes nothing happen"), regretted (Spicer's "Nobody listens to poetry"), or condemned (Williams's "Critically Eliot returned us to the classroom . . .") -- is causally linked to either its academic inaccessibility or facile popularization. For poets like Collins, working in traditional narrative and lyric modes, the perceived excesses of neo-modernist Language Poetry and spoken word/performance/slam poetry are more or less equally abhorrent. So what to make of a poet like ...

Till We Can Keep an Animal by Megan Voysey-Braig

Reviewed by Gaiutra Bahadur
Ms. Magazine

Near the end of this debut novel, the daughter of a rape victim sits in a circle of gangsters smoking crystal meth in the Cape Flats, a place freighted with the injustices of South African history. In real life, its slums, sequestered between city and sea on the outskirts of Cape Town, rose up to house many of the 60,000 people kicked out of District Six when the apartheid regime claimed their central-city neighborhood exclusively for whites in 1966. The daughter, Imogen, received in the housing projects as a "white woman with a clipboard," is there for research, and sitting next to her on a folding chair, cleaning a gun, is her mother's rapist and murderer. She doesn't know this. The narrator, who does, says: "What if he drew that gun he was cleaning and put it to her head, holding it like some American gangsta rap star? Not even our gangs can be original." Her observation could serve as a commentary on the novel ...

When I took over the small press section at Powell's about eight years ago, I was immediately won over by a colorful little paperback book by local writer Mykle Hansen. Eyeheart Everything was the kind of book that had a strong word-of-mouth following due to its over-the-top humor and biting sarcasm.

Mykle spent the next few years doing the usual Portland things: making zines, getting and losing jobs, breeding, playing weird music, and writing for the local alt-weekly. And then last year he reemerged with a new book, the ridiculous black comedy Help! a Bear Is Eating Me! &mdash which he also podcasted in its entirety. He toured around, doing readings at places where he dressed up in a bear costume and mauled potential readers. Recently, a book containing three of his novellas, mysteriously titled Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere, came out to the ...

Meditations (Modern Library Classics) by Aurelius Marcus

Reviewed by Doug Brown
Powells.com

Meditations was not Marcus Aurelius's title; he never gave this collection of musings a name. When first posthumously published, it was given the title To Himself, perhaps a more fitting description. Meditations is a collection of self-probings, thoughts, and reminders similar to those found in journals kept by folks the world over. It is arranged into twelve books, thought to possibly correspond to scrolls; as he filled one up, he'd get another. The first book has a theme of acknowledgements and lessons learned from people in his life and other influences, but most of the other books are largely random thoughts. As translations of classics usually do, Hays's begins with an introduction. Unlike many such introductions, this is actually quite readable, informative, and refreshingly brief. Hays sets down the history and political context that Marcus was writing in, concentrating particularly on the philosophies that influenced him. The scene thus set, Hays takes us right into the book without any of the lengthy ...