Lists
by Sarah Reif, April 19, 2021 8:34 AM
A few months ago, I received a text from my dad out of the blue.
A request: “Hey, I need a good line from that dragon poetry book.”
A question: “Also, what was the name of that dragon poetry book?”
This was, as they say, my moment. Jack Prelutsky’s The Dragons Are Singing Tonight has lived in my head rent-free ever since it entered the storytime rotation for my brother and me sometime in the mid-90s. I’m honestly surprised my dad didn’t remember the title himself — it was certainly one of my young self’s top requests. I spent hours poring over Peter Sís’s detailed illustrations and can still recite many of those poems from memory 20-odd years later...
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Original Essays
by Karen Cushman, April 15, 2021 10:41 AM
For 50 years, I’ve been listening to my husband’s stories about growing up on San Diego’s Mission Bay when it was more of a small fishing village than the popular resort it is now. The warm bay water lapped at the sand when the tide was in. There was swimming and surfing. Phil went without shoes from June until September, and his feet grew calloused and summer-wide.
He’d row his small boat out where the reeds and grass grew tall and read comic books until his nose was sunburned and his empty stomach growled. He watched seals tumble in the water and fished for perch and small halibut. When the tide was out, the beach was mud, pocked with pickleweed and eelgrass. Shoals and small islands, home to colonies of mussels and sand dollars that stood on end in soldier-like rows, were revealed...
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Lists
by Keith Mosman, April 9, 2021 10:32 AM
Perhaps, dear reader, you share my ambivalence about how to regard the existence of 2020. I mean, it definitely happened, but one of the year’s chief characteristics was the suspension of so many things for so long that many measures of the year are just a series of blank pages — for example, the day planner that I diligently used for exactly two-and-a-half months.
During that time of pre-Covid day planning, I was busy reading and buying the 2020 Spring frontlist of new titles for the bookstore...
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Interviews
by Rhianna Walton, April 8, 2021 11:02 AM
Sanjena Sathian’s novel Gold Diggers marks the arrival of a gifted and imaginative writer. Set primarily in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, in the early aughts, Gold Diggers is narrated by Neil Narayan, a well-intentioned teenager struggling to balance the expectations of his Indian immigrant family and community with his own desires for success, belonging, and love. A deft coming-of-age novel suffused with magical realism, alchemy, history, romance, and a knowing humor that pokes at the realities of second-generation immigrant experiences in 21st-century America, Gold Diggers is a whip-smart and surprising debut.
Rhianna Walton: When did you first become interested in alchemy, and what inspired you to incorporate it — and magic more generally — into the novel?
Sanjena Sathian: Well, I should say the whole thing started pre-magic. Gold is such a big part of the Indian culture, Indian American culture. Then it, obviously, has all these parallels in American culture too.
I started out by being interested in this spate of gold thefts that had happened in Atlanta when I was growing up here...
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Q&As
by Willy Vlautin, April 6, 2021 8:50 AM
Describe your latest book.
I was thinking of a quote by our last president: "The point is you can’t be too greedy." He was talking about business, but I do feel this idea has long leaked into American politics and into society itself. That led me to thinking about Portland. I used to drive downtown and stop and count cranes. Cranes meaning new buildings going up and there were often 10-15 of them at the same time. An explosion of growth. Portland as a boomtown. I’ve rented an office in St. Johns for 13 years. In the last five years, four large apartment buildings have been built within two blocks of my office. Housing prices in the area have gone through the roof, as have rental prices. Old, beat-up houses are going for $300,000-$400,000. At the same time tent encampments are appearing. People living permanently in tents. I can see them from my office too...
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Lists
by Powell's Books, April 5, 2021 9:51 AM
If the last poem you read was on a greeting card or from the office haiku contest, it’s time to address your poetry deficit; and who better to turn to for advice on what to read than professional poets? We asked 11 of our favorite poets to share their favorite poets and poetry collections. The resulting collection is generous, rich, and diverse — it will have you luxuriating in verse well beyond Poetry Month.
The Rest of Love
by Carl Philips
It’s hard enough to write a book of love poems, so Carl Phillips’s 2004 collection is especially stunning. Which is to say this is love poetry pulling triple-duty as spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle. As in: “it ends always / at desire — without which//would there have been/imagination, would there be folly, // one spreading itself / like a bay tree, the other / a green olive tree in the house//of God?” Isn’t that something? Uncanny, refined, desperate, and reverent toward unlocking precision and passion...
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Original Essays
by Powell's Staff, April 2, 2021 10:22 AM
We love many old-fashioned children’s books, but what makes Beverly Cleary’s books extra special is that 80 years after the publication of the first Henry Huggins novel, they don’t feel anachronistic. Sure, Ramona and her peers have a little more freedom to wander than today’s children do, but the basic aspects of their lives — elementary school teachers, friendships, sibling rivalries, chaos, loving parents — haven’t changed. As a child, it’s easy to find yourself in dependable Beezus, lively Ramona, enterprising Henry, and their friends; as parents, our hearts leap in recognition every time a weary Mrs. Quimby comes home to start dinner, only to find a Ramona-inspired disaster. Baked doll, bluing-tinted skin, toothpaste mountains, crown of burs — no one beats Cleary’s capacity for imagining trouble...
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Lists
by Rhianna Walton, March 31, 2021 8:29 AM
International Transgender Day of Visibility is an international observance celebrating the accomplishments of transgender and gender nonconforming people. It is also a time to raise the public’s awareness of the discrimination and harm many transgender and gender nonconforming people experience.
Here at Powell’s, it’s also an excellent excuse to share some of our favorite recent books and authors who explore themes of gender, identity, pride, and safety in creative, mind-expanding, and scintillating ways.
Fairest
by Meredith Talusan
Talusan’s memoir examines her journey from an albino child star in the Philippines to a Harvard student exploring gender and sexuality to a trans woman. Talusan is an accomplished journalist, and her unusual life story is aided by a keen eye for detail and an even keener ability to impart the complex interrelationships between perceived whiteness and power, perceived gender and safety, and the challenge of corralling all the aspects of oneself into a cohesive identity...
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Ask Aunt Paige
by Aunt Paige, March 22, 2021 8:12 AM
Sweethearts, I've been in this industry for a long time and nothing makes me blush. When it comes to embarrassing book-related questions — Where do you keep the guides on do-it-yourself colonics? Do you sell Meatloaf's discography? I'm looking for Pokémon books... for my kid? — I've heard them all and lived to see another day. (And so have my erstwhile interlocutors.) Here are my favorite recent inquiries.
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Dear Aunt Paige,
Should I be offended that my friends keep giving me self-help books?
Sincerely,
Dubious Donna
Dear Dubious,
Yes. Either they're bad friends or you're just a total hot mess...
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Q&As
by Powell's Books, March 19, 2021 9:39 AM
This week we check in with Nanci McCloskey of Tin House Books.
What excites you about working for a small press?
I’d have to say the opportunity to get excited about each and every single book we publish. I know it’s an incredibly unique (and favorable position) to work on a scale that allows me to throw myself full-heart into the books that we publish, it never feels like a job to support these titles.
How did you get drawn into the world of small press publishing?
I was working as a literary agent in New York and had just sold a book to Tin House, and in the process got to know some folks here. My long-term boyfriend had just accepted a job in Portland and I took the chance...
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