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

My entire childhood library was overflowing with stories about little kids whose parents had died or were assholes. Anne of Green Gables, Matilda, Pippi Longstocking, even Harriet the Spy had absent dickhole parents. At the time, I LOVED THIS. As someone who raised herself, loved loved loved words, and deeply needed to feel seen amidst the competing backdrops of perfect families I couldn’t relate to, it was unbelievably healing to find solace in those books. 

As I’ve gotten older though, I’ve started to find the genre kind of objectively bizarre...

The Line Hotel in Austin is new. It’s in previews. The restaurant is operated by my favorite winner of Top Chef. The entire city is drinking bottled water. I used bottled water to brush my teeth this morning. I have a craving for a Slurpee. I haven’t had a Slurpee in like seven hundred years. The streets are lousy with Bird scooters and Lime scooters and another kind I don’t remember. I’m texting with Tommy about meeting up on Halloween. I’m texting with Anastacia about meeting up tonight for karaoke. My dad has been meditating. He sends me an email with his fondest memory of us. It’s us camping. Us “camping” was putting a mattress in the front yard and eating candy and looking at the stars...

How would you describe your job to someone you just met?
I take the pallets of new books that we get each week from various publishers and distributors, and I scan each book to make sure it’s not damaged, confirm that what we’ve gotten is what we ordered, and mark it into inventory. Then, at the end of each day, my coworkers and I put all of the received books onto carts and send them to the stores for purchase.

Last book you loved:
The Hunger by Alma Katsu. It is an incredibly engaging, character-focused, historical fiction and horror novel that I couldn’t put down. 

What did you want to be when you grew up?
From a very early age my face was either in a book, or my head was in the clouds...

The confluence of political events over the past few years, from the international to the municipal, is eating away not just at the fabric of our society, but at our humanity and emotional wellness. That is to say, the current political climate has been good for the therapy business, though I don’t know a single therapist who is happy about this. I mean, there’s so much normal human tragedy to address that the need for therapeutic support isn’t going away any time soon. 

My clients are hurting. I’m hurting. We’re all trying to figure out what “better” looks like when we have so little control over world events. This means that when clients come to me, expressing fear and vulnerability, I have to be brave enough to match their fear and vulnerability with my own while providing safety and comfort...

It is a cliché among the thoughtful class — the English majors, the publishing house interns, the baristas who write nonfiction essays with law school applications in their desk drawers like a depressing emergency eject button — to say that we found our True Home in a bookstore. It was there, we say, where we understood the world was immensely vaster than the confines of our childhood homes, by which we usually mean the discovery of other kinds of lives, far more interesting than our own; and also sex. But today, I rise in opposition: Get out of the bookstore. Go outside. Go for a run. 

When I was a young man, bookstores were more important to me than toy stores, even more than libraries, because anything I saw in a bookstore could be mine, forever...

It’s finally October, that brief time of year when everyone is trying to get scared. My friends are all watching The Haunting of Hill House and I’m keeping myself up too late reading stories on r/NoSleep, which you can tell is scary because of its ominous black background. The forum has over 12 million subscribers and it features thousands of terrifying stories; it's a natural first stop if you want to freak yourself out.

I didn’t expect to talk about the Internet so much, before I started this column: I am still very dedicated to analog literature, bookshops, and IRL book clubs. As it turns out, though, it’s been difficult to write about books without writing about the Internet. I might still buy paperbacks, but the way I read — and what I read — has absolutely been shaped online. This is especially true for horror, where I’ve pretty much given up on reading published books...

"A London fog is as nothing compared with the dense cloud of smoke that envelopes us and makes existence almost unendurable,” wrote an August correspondent from the Idaho Panhandle. “No rain is due in this latitude for six weeks or more, so we have to suffer a while longer with red eyes, depressed spirits, etc.” 

Any present-day resident of any western state can understand all too well the summer reality of red eyes and depressed spirits. But these words were written in 1889 by prospector and plant buff John Leiberg, a Swedish immigrant who arrived in the U.S. alone at age 15. The adventurous Leiberg traveled west on a job with the Northern Pacific Railroad, and was in his mid-30s before he homesteaded on the shore of north Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille...

Even though I was told in my early twenties that I had the astrological chart of a writer, I’m not sure if I’ll ever quite get used to people thinking of me as one. Of course, I had heard the words “find your voice” but I hadn’t a clue as to: One, what that meant; two, if it was something I really needed to know much, if anything, about; and three, if I did, how would I go about finding it? 

My earliest attempts at writing were high school English papers. I went to a very small school (there were 24 students in my graduating class) and each year we had the same English teacher. Almost all of the papers I wrote were returned with a mark of B- and the comment, “Needs more development.”...

How would you describe your job to someone you just met?
I’m an Inventory Specialist. Basically, I help oversee all the aspects of what happens to a book once it reaches the store: data entry, shelving, pricing, inventory maintenance, transferring books back to publishers, etc. It’s almost always a busy day in the Inventory Department.

Last book you loved:
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer and Red Clocks by Leni Zumas.

Where are you originally from?
I’m originally from a small village in Germany, near where most of the Brothers Grimm stories were collected (I was born about 10 minutes from the town of Hameln, where the Pied Piper comes from). Then I moved to Montana as a child, and made my way to Portland as an adult...

Describe your latest book.
A Mind Unraveled is a book unlike any I’ve written. My first three were each about corporate fraud. My fourth was about the global fight against international terrorism. For the first time, I have turned away from reporting about the actions of others and turned the microscope onto myself. 

My new book is a memoir of sorts, about my decades spent dealing with intractable epilepsy. My decision to write the book — which required me revisiting many extremely horrible experiences — evolved over time. In 2010, officials from a number of epilepsy organizations met and decided that people with epilepsy needed to step forward, to discuss having the condition, so as to take it out of the shadows. As someone who was told essentially that my life was over at the time of my diagnosis...