PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

Let's face it: The world is in a weird place right now. This country is in a weird place right now. And the book industry is pretty much always in a weird place. With so much weirdness to contend with, thank goodness there are books — books that explain politics and relationships (or let us escape them entirely), books that explore art and science, books that dive into our history and others that imagine our future. The following are the best of the books we’ve read since January 1, 2019: We hope you read them too, and that they help to replace a little bit of that weird with a great deal more wonder.

I was sitting across from Ahmad and Wassim in a shared apartment in the Kreuzberg neighborhood in Berlin. Ahmad was Somali, Wassim was Pakistani, both were migrants seeking asylum in Germany. Wassim had made mango lassi for us, frothy, creamy, sweet, and he watched as I took a sip, waiting for my verdict.

“Excellent,” I said. It was really good.

“This is so good,” Ahmad echoed and Wassim smiled, pleased. Wassim wanted to be a chef if his asylum application got accepted; at the moment he washed dishes in a Vietnamese restaurant somewhere on Wilmersdorfer. Ahmad had no job as yet, he was waiting for a work permit; his asylum application had just been accepted and he had been granted a stay of five years...

People travel in different ways. Travel itself can be a respite, a vacation, a hot day on the beach swimming and staring at the horizon, or a quiet night at home reflecting on one’s past, which sometimes entails — for better or worse — pondering one’s life choices and family history. We live in a country that’s obsessed with family trees, but family trees don’t always tell us the emotional trajectory of a human life. If our past travels with us, then how do our life experiences manifest in our interpersonal relationships? How does trauma move from one generation to the next, and how do individuals heal or come out on the other side of traumatic experience? How much joy can a soul stand before it becomes distracted and goes in search of a new fix, the next bout of joy or sorrow? These questions sent me on a quest that became The Travelers...

Describe your book.
My first novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, follows Paul Polydoris, a 23-year-old queer shapeshifter and sometime college student, living in Iowa City in 1993. Through the course of the novel Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco. I sometimes describe the novel as thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, but of course I am not literally a shapeshifter.

What was your favorite book as a child?
I was (and still am) obsessed with D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths; I loved the illustrations especially — I traced them and copied them and stared at them for hours...

How would you describe your job to someone you just met?
I work with our inventory team to fulfill book orders that our customers place online, and to get books onto their designated shelves. My tasks vary from day to day and I get the pleasure of working with quite a few of the teams in our company to make sure customers get the right books into their hands.

Last book you loved:
We Were Witches by Ariel Gore might just be my new favorite book. I don't say that lightly. It's unlike anything else I've come across — it melds genre, the prose is unexpected and gorgeous. Chapter to chapter the story shape-shifts with fluidity, brimming with poetry, fairy tales, spells, college essays. Reading it was a wholly magical experience...

“You ever been shot at?” the man with the gun asks me.

“Not so far,” I tell him with a small laugh.

He nods. “Do you want to be?”

It takes me a few moments before I realize the man holding the assault rifle is not joking.

He pushes a fresh 20-round magazine into the bottom of the Colt AR-15 and chambers a round. “Go up there,” he says, nodding in the direction of a tall hillside at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains.

I squint up at the dry grass and dirt and then grin. “Absolutely.”

Jerry Baker is that peculiar Southern California mix of hyperkinetic energy and laid-back attitude all at the same time...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong.

About a third of the way through poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the narrator observes the protagonist watching his mother through the kitchen window: “Evening had turned the glass into a mirror and you couldn’t see him there, only the lines scored across your cheeks and brow, a face somehow ravaged by stillness. The boy, he watches his mother watch nothing, his entire self inside the phantom oval of her face, invisible.” The moment encapsulates the painful paradox of all mother-child relationships: Your child is of you and for you, indistinguishable from you; and then they are not — they grow up, and the distance that self-actualization brings is irrecoverable. Isolated, these two sentences allow for a sentimental reading, but by now the reader knows that the boy’s Vietnamese mother suffers from war-induced PTSD and is violently abusive. The narrator’s — and when the narrative shifts into first person, the boy’s — willingness to imaginatively close the distance between mother and son is a radical act of love...

I remember being the boy who pushed his radio into the corner of his childhood bedroom so he could have a chance of hearing Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” play on the nearby college radio station, and for that year, that was the one place I could hear it, on that station. In that corner of my room.

Yes. I was, I knew, the small-town boy in the song.

I was 12 the first time I looked up the word "homosexuality" in a library card catalog, and I couldn’t have told you what I was hoping for other than a larger world than the one I knew. I found two entries in my small-town Maine library, and I stared at them like they were the tiny doors to the rest of my life...

For the last 15 years, I’ve been obsessed with three questions: How do people connect with each other, what do those connections do for us, and can we learn to connect better? This has driven me deep into the science of empathy — people’s responses to each other’s emotions. I’ve probed empathy using everything from brain scans to surveys, in psychiatric hospitals, schools, theaters, and police departments. I’ve squirted oxytocin up people’s noses to see if it would help them understand others, and forced people to wander Stanford’s campus without their phones to see if they’d connect better with strangers. It’s been an adventure.

One of the fun, and vexing, things about studying empathy is that everyone wants to talk about it. According to Google ...

When we meet someone new, my husband likes to introduce me as, “My wife, Pam, Professional Witch.” He does this from a place of pride certainly, but also because he’s a rascal who gets a kick out of surprising people. He’s a priest’s kid — or “P.K.” as I’ve learned they’re called — and so the idea that he ended up married to someone like me still gives him a frisson of rebelliousness. (His father and I adore each other, for the record, and have both politely avoided discussing that whole “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” bit in the Bible.)

Besides, he is technically correct: though I’ve been a writer and curator who has focused on magic and witches for most of my life...