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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
pascarelli has commented on (7) products
Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken A Vish Puri Mystery
by
Tarquin Hall
pascarelli
, September 02, 2012
I've been to India only once but this book was a great way to reconnect with the sights, smells, sounds of chaos of Delhi through the lens of an affable cast of characters. It also gave me a better understanding of the dark legacy of Partition. I like the way he weaves issues of land rights at different levels (partition and homeland, the Jin farmer hillbillys who have bought next door to Puri's house--and Puri's mixed feelings about the slippery social divide in the "new" India). Author Tarquin Hall has a wonderful way of making the world seem kinder than it is, but at the same time refuses to whitewash the events of partition, the role of women, and the tricky moral dilemmas that were played out at the household level. I read Hall's previous installment and will look forward to future Puri escapades. **Check out Granta Summer 2009 for a great essay on contemporary India, the different generations relationship to wealth and class. >>>"Capital Gains", by Rana Dasgupta
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Dance With Snakes
by
Horacio Castellanos Moya
pascarelli
, August 16, 2012
Disclaimer: I am a HUGE fan of this Salvadoran author and have read just about everything New Directions has published by him (Lives & Loves of a She-Devil, Senselessness, etc).I love how he dresses down his (always) gristly subjects in a crazy, raucous style. His characters are deluded and unapologietic in their paranoia, the natural by-product of living under years of dictatorships, coups and counterinsurgencies. To wit: an unemployed liberal-arts graduate stabs a homeless man living in a beat-up Chevy and assumes his identity and things take off from there.
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Simply from Scratch (Large Print) (Thorndike Core)
by
Alicia Bessette
pascarelli
, August 16, 2012
This book is about a young widow's re-entry into the world following the death of her husband. While the themes of love, home, loss and redemption are frankly well worn territory, I have to admit this book felt different. It is a very well-crafted story, which sort of quietly pulls you in, fresh and full of humour. I like how she writes about home and how the people around you help you to be true to your values no matter what. The community does not let Zell go even though she has cut herself off almost entirely.
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Molly Fox's Birthday
by
Deirdre Madden
pascarelli
, December 05, 2010
This is the first book I have read by this author and I can't say I would run out in search of another one of her titles. I had a hard time staying with this novel and while there was some beautiful domestic imagery around gardens and cutlery, it was fairly heavy sledding most of the way. Told through a single POV, the plot reminded me of a sinewy series of interior ruminations of an mid-40s Irish playwright who has made her name in London and vacationing at her friend's country house in Dublin (ie, Molly Fox). There isn't really a "plot" (nothing really happens-a single day), but the narrative just builds through a series of accretions or images (the jug on the counter, a memory of her friend/former lover/celebrity art critic in the John Berger-esqe mold-who appears at the end of her afternoon to reveal a memory of his own). A meditation on relationships she forms while at Trinity and how each individual stands in relation to their "Irish-ness" (the art critic from Belfast who re-fashions himself as a proper London critic, the narrator's tenuous relationship to her large country Catholic family, etc). Kind of a dissapointment.
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Taroko Gorge
by
Jacob Ritari
pascarelli
, December 01, 2010
I read this in one sitting while waiting at LAX over Thanksgiving: this book MOVES and I highly recommend. The author cleverly subverts definitions of what it means to be an "insider" and an "outsider" in Taiwan (ie., Japanese schoolteacher in charge of a class trip that goes awry has as much difficulty navigating Taiwanese culture as does the NGO/war swaggering journalist and his surfer-dude American photographer. As the Taiwanese detective assigned to this case wryly observes: "OK, the Taiwanese aren't perfect but they're the best I know...American's aren't too bright-they dont have to be because their ancestors were- and they won't bother lying to 'simple' Asians' like us. The Japanese are as spoiled and devious as ever and I dont trust them, but if I had to I would risk my own life for one of them." The tensions between Japanese and their "colony" Japan, the "ugly" American and the place of spirituality and "belief" in a post-9/11 world form an interesting backdrop to this who-done-it set in the limbo space of a federal park. Ultimately a slam at skeptics and unbelievers. Dig it.
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Await Your Reply
by
Dan Chaon
pascarelli
, December 22, 2009
Any story that starts with a speeding ride to the hospital with the passenger's severed hand packed in a styrofoam ice cooler you know is going to be good. in fact, this book gives us three interesting narratives from the start: a kid, a runaway and a twin. You're never really sure which end is up in this book but that is what is so wonderful about it. Certainly the author is in no hurry to connect the dots but it comes together slowly like a delicious syrup. The title is taken from a spam message used to lure those who open it into a financial fraud scheme in West Africa but this case the person who opens it is worse than the sender. -LP
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Fault Lines
by
Nancy Huston
pascarelli
, December 17, 2009
It is alway a risk to tell a story backwards. By that I mean because after the reader has pieced the pieces together the payoff isn't always there. Thankfully this is not the case in Fault Lines. Huston's choice of 1st person narrative was a little weird however and too often the children sounded like adults. It was hard for me to believe that each child has such a degree of control over language. Overall this is a very unsettling and powerful read-- and a healthy antidote to all the child as innocent books out there; six-year old Sol is downright demented. In their preoccupation with all things holocaust (oi) I can see why this was such a bestseller in Europe (rememnber how CRAZY the French went for Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones?. But feeding the nazi war machine is only the ostensinble subject matter of this book. Those looking for a more rigorous read should check out Tranquility by Hugarian writer Attila Bartis. It's his first book to appear in English and I hope they put a fire under the publisher's a#!^ to get more of his writings out in print here in the States(Archipelago). -LP
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