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Anyone interested in recent Latinx fiction should add Joseph Cassara’s glittery, gritty debut novel, The House of Impossible Beauties, to their to-be-read pile. A finalist for both the International Latino Book Award for Inspirational Fiction and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, The House is a novelistic expansion of the 1990 cult film Paris Is Burning, about Harlem drag ball culture. In particular, Cassara takes a close look at the Latinx House of Xtravaganza, the first Latinx-specific house in the Harlem ball scene.

The House of Impossible Beauties is set in 1980s New York City, and follows the lives of the House’s founders, the lightly fictionalized Angel and Hector Xtravaganza, and Angel’s retinue of LGBTQ+ youth, also based on real individuals...

Shortly after my mother died, the kids and I established the routine of taking long beach walks about an hour before sundown. We lived on Staten Island then, the long beautiful stretch of Great Kills beach was only seven minutes away by car. My husband and I had separated just a few months before my mother’s death, and all three of us were still reeling from these two blows. David was almost 18 then, Stephanie had just turned 15; I would look at our shadows and see that they were about the same lengths. We looked like three orphaned siblings rather than a mother and her kids...

It has long been rumored that Spanish author Javier Marías is a perennial presence on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and reading through his many novels, it’s easy to see why this elegant and reflective prose stylist would remain top of mind.

The prolific Marías began writing short stories in childhood, publishing his first novel, Los dominios del lobo, while in his teens. A polymath, Marías is also highly regarded as an English-to-Spanish translator, translating notoriously difficult material like Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which won him Spain’s National Prize for the Best Translation. For the last 34 years, Marías’s protagonists have been likewise preoccupied with translation, interpretation, and the keeping or cracking of secrets...

It’s not a surprise when celebrity musicians write beautifully crafted memoirs (especially talented lyricists like Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen), but it certainly elevates the already heady fan experience of being invited into their private thoughts and memories. Really good rock memoirs like Born to Run or Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl transform what could be a predictable biographical narrative (think of any biopic, ever) into a psychologically astute portrait of a budding artist and the world they’ve grown up in; when the writing is deft and thoughtful, fans and casual listeners alike walk away with a deeper appreciation for the unique impetus and skill behind a person’s music. Indie pop musicians Tegan and Sara Quin do just this in their dual memoir, High School, which thoughtfully articulates their coming-of-age, a process both ordinary — love, identity, experimentation — and extraordinary due to the sisters’ early musical success and unusual perspective as identical twins...

My husband, Bill, and I had a disagreement over the word broken. Was the faucet broken when it leaked?

I thought, yes.

He thought, no. If you turned the lever to just the right position, it no longer leaked. “See?” he said. “Not broken.”

This disagreement took a while. Tense voices.

“It is too.” I turned it to the off position. “See? Broken.” I held my finger under the steady drip, drip, drip.

“It is not.” He pulled it back to the not-leaking position. “See?” He opened his hand, like he made magic. No drip...

Alia Trabucco Zerán is a Chilean novelist, and holds a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Studies from the University College London. Her debut novel, The Remainder, is shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize; the original Spanish-language version, La Resta, was selected by El País as one of its Top Ten Debuts of 2015, and in 2014, won the prize for Best Unpublished Literary Work by the Chilean Council for the Arts.

The Remainder (trans. Sophie Hughes) is about three young Chileans trying to come to terms with their parents’ violent past under the Pinochet dictatorship. Taking up the themes of intergenerational trauma and the subjectivity of language and interpretation, the novel follows Iquela, a translator, her friend Felipe, and a German friend, Paloma...

“Books don’t matter to us. What matters is that our children don’t get enough to eat and get sick and die.”

I don’t remember exactly when Flor de Margarita Pérez Pérez said this to me, but I remember how it made me feel: that, as an anthropologist and writer, I had little to offer her and her community.

I arrived at Margarita’s house in Chenalhó, Chiapas, Mexico, in February 1987. Though I love to read, I had only brought a few books with me. While studying Tsotsil, my host family’s language, I would look up from my dictionary to the corn crib in the room and compare it to my bookshelf at home...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is not the first modern novelist to use the supernatural as a metaphorical device for exploring the American slave trade. Colson Whitehead’s eponymously titled novel about the Underground Railroad is the most recent to do so, but writers like Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and Octavia Butler utilize magical tropes to tremendous effect in masterful books like Beloved, Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Kindred. As Constance Grady notes in her Vox review of The Water Dancer, integrating the supernatural — hauntings, superpowers, time travel — into otherwise realistic historical fiction demonstrates that “slavery is such a monstrous evil that in order to understand it fully we need the supernatural to explain it to us.”...

Empathy
Playing and watching other people play indie games has taught me so much about empathy. SO many indie games tackle tough issues that I may have never been able to see a firsthand account of if I hadn’t played games designed by people who have been through such things. For example, the game The Cat Lady put me in the shoes of Susan, a woman who suffers from depression, suicide, and self-harm. Spoiler alert: There’s a happy ending. In playing this game, I got to see a sliver of what it’s like to live with these struggles. Games like this establish empathy in players as they walk in the main characters' shoes for a while, and in my opinion, a more empathetic person is a better person...

Last year we reached out to some of our favorite authors for candid responses about how it felt to have their books banned. This year we’ve reached into our archives to reexamine the words of the many banned authors who have graced the Powell’s blog. Diverse, eloquent, observant, compassionate, hilarious, challenging, and wise, the denizens of the Powell’s “writers’ room” remind us of why we support banned authors and their work:

Their musical tastes are as one-of-a-kind as their books.
Listen to Stephen King’s “grizzly” Powell's playlist