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There is, so often, a phantom book lurking behind a published novel. I know mine are haunted in this way. And so sometimes, when people ask how long it took to write Family of Origin, I wonder: Should I count the two years I spent writing the phantom novel that came before? I think the answer might be yes.

What happened was that I tried to write a postapocalyptic novel. I wrote almost 200 pages and extensively researched both Shakespeare’s comedies and robots (don’t ask) to do it. Novels have died later, and more tragically, than this one...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.

It’s hard not to appreciate Colson Whitehead’s work. Whitehead’s sentence-by-sentence attention to craft and the empathetic stretch of his imagination demand careful reading, while the propulsive nature of his plotting masks the skill it takes to marry entertainment and truth-telling. In his recent works, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, Whitehead draws on the histories of slavery and racism to correct misleading narratives about America’s past and focus our attention on the many ways racial inequity structures 21st-century life. There are times when you’ll want to throw these books down in a fit of rage over how ugly America can be, but then you’d have to be willing to say goodbye to courageous, thought-provoking characters like Cora, Turner, and Elwood, and miss how their stories end... a Herculean feat of literary self-harm that we’d never advise...

Since I have started answering interview questions about my novel Supper Club, I have been asked the question a few times: “Why did you decide to include recipes in the novel, and what do they represent?” And while I do have a number of sections dedicated to the methodical process of cooking or baking a particular food — kimchi, sourdough, spaghetti puttanesca, caramelized onions — I don’t necessarily think of them as recipes, but more the embodied experience of following a recipe, or thoughts on a recipe.

The first passage I wrote in this mode was a section that quite meticulously details the various methods for caramelizing onions...

Forty years ago, I began studying Buddhism and practicing various forms of meditation. Based on my studies and encounters, I have a deep appreciation, gratitude, and respect for the Buddhist tradition. The meteoric rise of the “mindfulness revolution,” however, took me by surprise. I was baffled by how mindfulness, which for several millennia has been an integral part of the Buddhist spiritual path, suddenly morphed into a domesticated self-help technique and widely touted panacea for assuaging virtually any middle-class desire — from mindful sex to making a killing on Wall Street. How did Buddhist meditation — once embraced by Beat writers, Bohemian artists, and hippies, and which was a countercultural, anti-establishment, anti-materialist movement — become a $1 billion industry that has been warmly received by corporate moguls at the World Economic Forum?...

I.
A paleobotanist, an archaeologist, a religion scholar, and a therapist walked into a bar.

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The first movie I ever saw in a theater by myself was Waking Life. It was 2001 and I was in college and I was yet again on uneasy terms with my playwright boyfriend. I went to the film angrily, as a way of making myself seem like a scarce resource. I haven’t watched the entire movie since that lonely, defiant night. I don’t remember much about it. But even now, when I’m observing an expert talk about something they care about, I perceive the speaker with the ever-wavering animated lines that characterized Waking Life.

III.
Writing a book is a ferociously solitary endeavor...

A new book from MacArthur Genius and award-winning author Colson Whitehead guarantees three things: a beautiful, snappy, and surprising prose style; a full-hearted commitment to the author’s subject, whether that be poker, the Deep South, or teen angst; and a reading experience cocooned in Whitehead’s seemingly limitless imagination and intelligence. The Nickel Boys, Whitehead’s new novel about a boys' reform school in Jim Crow Florida, offers all this and a heartbreaking, galvanizing reckoning with the consequences and reverberations of slavery. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly writes, “Inspired by horrific events that transpired at the real-life Dozier School for Boys, Whitehead’s brilliant examination of America’s history of violence is a stunning novel of impeccable language and startling insight.” We couldn’t agree more, and were thrilled by the opportunity to speak with Whitehead about his approach...

Books about Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, and other anomalous hominoids said to lurk in remote wilderness regions occupy a special category in cult literature. Since the appearance in 1955 of Bernard Heuvelmans’s cryptozoological classic On the Track of Unknown Animals, a growing congregation of amateur sleuths, scholars, and journalists, drawn to reports of manlike monsters, have penned tomes arguing that unclassified ape-men do indeed exist.

I first came upon these books at my local public library growing up as a kid in Toronto the late 1970s and early 1980s. Sandwiched between works on UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle — in what was clearly the “unexplained” section — stood a dozen or so books about the Yeti and Bigfoot. I devoured each one of these works in succession and was soon re-reading them for lack of new material emerging at the time...

When people ask how I was able to get so intimate with the subjects of Three Women — a book about desire reported over eight years — I talk about the different methods I used. I posed the same question, for example, dozens of times and from a variety of angles. It was a book, after all, about desire, and not about bird-watching. And a real story about desire needed to explore the caverns of the soul. I drove across the country six times in total, posting signs and talking to everyone I met along the way, looking for the right people who’d be amenable to letting me into their lives in so close a way. I knew it had to go deep and that the subjects needed to be eminently relatable to as many people as possible.

When I met Lina, the housewife in Indiana, I knew right away she was it...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Hungry by Jeff Gordinier.

It would take a generous reader to follow Jeff Gordinier’s extraordinary years-long journey through the marketplaces and Michelin-starred kitchens of Mexico, Australia, and Scandinavia with Noma chef René Redzepi and not exclaim at some point, That lucky bastard! The life splashed across the pages of Gordinier’s compelling travelogue/biography boasts the same glamor, sexy grit, and inaccessibility of The Selby or one of those Bon Appétit dinner party spreads featuring real couples: So many beautiful people having wild, beautiful experiences; one wonders enviously where they come from, how they fund it all, and if all of their friends and family are so attractive, or if the ugly ones have been told the party’s on a different day...

Every November I’m dumbfounded by the international phenomenon of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, as it’s commonly called. I’m not a novelist, but even if I could actually write a novel, I’m definitely not capable of writing an entire novel in a single month, much less in the short, holiday-interrupted month of November.

Nevertheless, I perked up in 2014 when my friend Susannah Felts — novelist and cofounder of Nashville’s nonprofit literary center, The Porch Writers’ Collective — put out an open call on Facebook for a NaNoWriMo accountability group. Unlike the real NaNoWriMo, Susannah’s version of accountability involved no word-count targets. The rules were simple: We would each do our own writing by whatever rules we set out for ourselves...