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includes:
great deals
city for kids
interview: greil marcus
win free books
bibliolatry
pulitzer party
city center
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author! author!
fup. city cat.
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PLAY BINGO SOME OTHER TIME
YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE CITY OF BOOKS
– roadside sign along Truman Capote Boulevard

REALLY GOOD BOOKS
Save up to 70% on any of four books by Barbara Kingsolver, the latest collection from Barry Lopez, Georgie's favorite novel about mutant dogs, and one of my favorite novels of last year. These and twenty more hand-picked selections.

CITY FOR KIDS
Imagine a city filled with books for kids... if all of life were swing sets, sandboxes, board books and adventure stories, playgrounds for the body and mind. Visit our new neighborhood; bring your wide-eyed sense of wonder.

The city is alive with the sound of readers.

POWELLS.COM INTERVIEWS: GREIL MARCUS
"Greil Marcus," Nick Hornby has written, "is simply peerless. Not only as a rock writer but as a cultural historian." Wondering how Bob Dylan resurrected his career in the nineties or what Elvis Presley and Bill Clinton have in common? Curious which novel's unabridged audio cassettes Marcus calls 2000's Album of the Year or what made Lester Bangs one of rock music's most eloquent critics? Marcus recently spent an afternoon at Powell's, browsing the shelves for hard-to-find titles and answering as many questions as I could squeeze into an hour.

WIN FREE BOOKS
Find the ping-pong ball under a coconut shell and you'll be entered to win $250 worth of books. Step right up to the folding table.

BIBLIOLATRY
Since her debut in 1963, Joyce Carol Oates has written forty-one novels, twenty-six story collections, eight poetry collections, five drama collections, nine essay collections, a children's book, and an opera libretto. That's ninety-one works in less than forty years, roughly two and a half per year. Meanwhile, her former colleague at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Alistair MacLeod, has managed one novel and sixteen stories – not collections, mind you, but sixteen stories. He's been called "one of the great undiscovered writers of our time." Carlisle considers their divergent careers.

PULITZER PARTY
Congratulations to a Powell's favorite, Michael Chabon, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Chabon visited the City of Books shortly after The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was published. Find out what all the fuss was about when we called the novel "a generous addition to the literature of twentieth century America." Read the exclusive Powells.com interview.

CROSSWALK
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CITY CENTER
Virginia Woolf will kill us for telling you, but often when she sneaks out of heaven she hangs out in our City Center. She says it reminds her of Mayfair. What's there? Timely recommendations from sixteen City hosts, a featured staff pick of the day, a books discussion group, even a brick wall and a full can of spray paint. Really. "Blow past the suburban sprawl of the Home page," Woody Allen often advises houseguests, "head straight to the heart of the City."

e
Anna Quindlen's Short Guide to a Happy Life leads off our list of new titles for the Gemstar eBook. Following right behind is Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues ("Often wrenching, frequently riotous," The Los Angeles Times says).

AUTHOR! AUTHOR!
Nicholson Baker returns to the City on April 23rd to discuss his latest, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. "If there's justice in the world," David Gates wrote in this Sunday's New York Times, Double Fold "will rattle some cages." Also visiting the City in the coming weeks, Life magazine Architect of the Year Sarah Susanka (Creating the Not So Big House), Michael Dibdin, Karen Karbo, The Favorite Poem Project, and lots more. Check the calendar for dates and times.

FUP. STORE CAT.
Wiggums stares up at the office tower, straining so hard to see its top floors that he loses his balance and falls over backwards on the sidewalk.

"Watch out!" a young girl shouts, and the cyclist slams on his brakes just in time to avert disaster.

Righting himself, nonplussed by the near-collision, Wiggums tells Fup, "Sometimes in the barn we'll climb up to the loft on the bales of hay in back. Friends come over and we jump down from the railing, it must be fifteen feet to the ground. And once when I was younger I went up on the roof of the house to see if the robins had built a nest up there."

Fup explains to her country cousin that what appear to be stripes are actually "floors." In fact, she tells him, the famous downtown towers are no longer giant safehouses for the City's bird population. After years of beak-breaking labor, thousands and thousands of birds pitching together to construct these inverted nests of iron and glass, before a single bird took residence wouldn't you know it that people intruded and converted the aviaries to office buildings and apartments. The birds could only hover in the air and watch the fruits of an incomprehensibly determined effort go to waste.

Fup loves entertaining guests from the country. She really does.

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Comments, suggestions, first impressions of the new City, let us know.

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by Dave