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

Powell's Picks Spotlight

Powell's Picks Spotlight: Emma Seckel's 'The Wild Hunt'

by Kelsey Ford, August 3, 2022 8:41 AM
Powell's Picks Spotlight: Emma Seckel's 'The Wild Hunt'

This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month The Wild Hunt by Emma Seckel.

Every summer, my extended family and I rent houses in a small town along the Oregon coast. For a week, we take long walks along the beach, spend afternoons cooking elaborate meals, play Fascination in the arcade one town over, and stay up late, talking about nothing and everything over a dwindling bonfire.

It’s great, but it’s also a lot (is a family vacation ever really a vacation?). This year, when I needed a moment of quiet, I took my copy of The Wild Hunt by Emma Seckel out to an Adirondack chair...
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Playlists

“The Book You Wrote Is Equal to the Songs You Heard”: Rodrigo Fresán's Playlist for 'The Remembered Part'

by Rodrigo Fresán, August 2, 2022 9:06 AM
The Book You Wrote Is Sort of Equal to the Songs You Heard

All of my books — all three Parts among them — are filled with music. But in The Remembered Part, the songs and melodies go one step beyond and become, more than ever, a decisive factor in the story. Here are some (a very few) of those songs. The rest of the playlist waits for you in the novel.

Tune in...
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Original Essays

Finding the Essential Truth in Your Story

by Catherine Burns, Jenifer Hixson, Kate Tellers, Meg Bowles, and Sarah Austin Jenness, July 29, 2022 8:40 AM
Finding the Essential Truth in Your Story

At the end of every episode of The Moth Radio Hour, we say, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.” But memory is imperfect, and sometimes the way we remember events is different from how they actually unfolded. Think of Moth stories — both the ones you’ve already heard, and the ones we hope you tell one day — as an artistic time capsule of one person’s emotional experience of events...

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Powell's Picks Spotlight

Powell's Picks Spotlight: Jordan Crane's 'Keeping Two'

by Keith Mosman, July 28, 2022 8:53 AM
Powell's Picks Spotlight: Jordan Crane's 'Keeping Two'

This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Keeping Two by Jordan Crane.

My partner once collapsed in my arms. An ambulance was called and he spent several days in the ICU. Happily, no major medical interventions were required, he recovered quickly, and remains in good health.

But the memory of that instant, and the following days, has haunted me ever since. In part because I have long fought a habit of imagining worst-case scenarios and summoning forth those hypothetical emotional states, and the events of that day spawned dozens of new terrible possibilities to fixate on. Maybe this is an attempt at a sort of emotional inoculation, but if so, it’s one that couldn’t possibly succeed; one of...
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Lists

New Literature in Translation: July 2022

by Powell's Staff, July 26, 2022 8:06 AM
'New Literature in Translation: July 2022' by Powell's Staff
If you (like me) aren’t a huge fan of the heat, then July is the perfect month to hunker down, turn on the fan for some good, cool air and white noise, and pull out your next great read. Below, we’ve rounded up some of the books in translation released this past month that we’re the most excited about. In this month’s selection, you’ll find a generational story about sisters that spans decades; a "a fiercely anti-sentimental meditation on the unsettling paradoxes of motherhood;" meditations on cigars and cars; a bleak, necropastoral landscape; an “anti-voyeuristic portrait of a people visited by tragedy;” a writing fellowship and a mysterious talk show; stories about coming of age and abuses of power; and a new book from "a kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller."

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Five Book Friday

Five Book Friday: Sad Girl Summer

by Charlotte S., July 22, 2022 8:53 AM
'Five Book Friday: Sad Girl Summer

Sad girls, weird girls, bitchy girls — they make for unreliable narrators while being painfully relatable ones. They articulate those dark, strange, emotions and thoughts that live within you; they know the shame, disgust, rage, hopelessness, sorrow, and fear that perhaps you’ve always known but never realized belonged to anyone but you. Sometimes they embrace those feelings; sometimes they rebel against them; regardless, their actions (and inaction) are often morally ambiguous. The women in these books are polarizing and often scorned for being so unkempt, for being petty, for not caring enough, or for caring too much. Why do these women provoke such strong reactions? How do we as a culture view and treat women that we see as flawed?

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Original Essays

Words, Words, Words

by Gabrielle Zevin, July 21, 2022 8:45 AM
Lost in the Never Woods

I love words. English words and ones in foreign languages as well. My great regret in life is that I did not learn German and, maybe someday, I will. I study foreign languages, not to achieve fluency, but because I like thinking about the ways in which the language one speaks alters and defines one’s experience of the world. How will you experience cats if you speak a language where they are always accompanied by a masculine article? What does it mean that the Chinese character for woman is partially made up of the character for horse? When you begin learning Japanese, the first things you’ll be taught are several ways to apologize followed by several somewhat untranslatable terms of courtesy...

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Q&As

Powell’s Q&A: Molly Mendoza, author of ‘Skip'

by Molly Mendoza, July 19, 2022 8:53 AM
Powell’s Q&A: Molly Mendoza, author of ‘Skip'

Describe your latest book.
I’m stoked to say that my newest book Stray was published in May by Bulgilhan Press. It’s a 52-page, full-color comic about a chaotic romantic named Jack who is seeking the comfort of others but can’t help but spiral back into their own destructive tendencies. My vision for Stray was to tell a story about bad habits, toxic nostalgia, and the idea of memory as vice. Stray is a cathartic story for me and hopefully it will bring something bittersweet to my readers as well...

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Lists

On a Scale of 1 to Sunshine: 9 Happy Books to Read This Summer

by Powell's Staff, July 15, 2022 10:02 AM
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If you’ve ever asked a bookseller for a “happy” or “joyful” recommendation, then you’ll know what pure terror looks like. Books are so many things (thought-provoking, challenging, strange, unnerving, devastating, eye-opening, mind-shredding), but rarely are they happy, and even when they are happy, that happiness often comes with qualifications (death, disease, famine, war).

But in a world as bad-feeling as our world is right now, it feels worthwhile to find some good-feeling to put on our shelves, so I asked our booksellers for their go-to “happy” recommendations, and boy did they come through...

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Q&As

Powell’s Q&A: Morgan Talty, author of ‘Night of the Living Rez’

by Morgan Talty, July 13, 2022 9:14 AM
'Night of the Living Rez' by Morgan Talty
The 12 interconnected stories in Morgan Talty’s remarkable debut story collection, Night of the Living Rez, are set on a Penobscot reservation in Maine and told through the eyes of David, a young boy living on the reservation. The stories are both vast and intimate in their scope, covering so much ground: from intergenerational trauma to community bonds to porcupine runs, from tribal museums to methadone clinics to a jar filled with a curse, all told with language that manages to be searing, funny, and tender...
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