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

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The Night Swimmers by Peter Rock.

A strange and sonorous book, Peter Rock’s The Night Swimmers captures the eeriness of deep water — its competing currents and sudden shifts between warm and cold, the swimmer’s combined sense of inconsequentiality and escape from the strictures of time. Early on, the novel’s unnamed narrator recalls: "I imagined all the lost drowned bodies, worn down by currents, nibbled by fish caught in the weather of that deep water, of that zone between top and bottom. That is where they often reside, the dead, sliding through the currents."

Constant but unknowable, the black waves of The Night Swimmers are not scenic...

Funny thing about loading up your table edge to edge with boards of cheese and an armful of random bottles in a crowded restaurant: it tends to draw some attention.

Many were the nights in the distant past (2014) when such a scene would greet diners as they crossed the threshold into Cheese Bar and found us dwarfed by an evening’s repast of what was surely far too much dairy and alcohol for two mortal humans to consume in a single sitting. Eyes lingered on the spread, curious, hungry, then longing. Inevitably, a brave soul would approach our two-top altar to excess and make reasonable inquiries as to our intentions, at which point we’d welcome the acolyte into the fold for a sample of whatever marvel we’d most recently pieced together...

We asked... and we answered. Powell’s booksellers share the writers, characters, and books that most inspire us.
What female author has had the biggest impact on your life?

Jane Austen: her dry and sly gentle sense of irony is such a constant joy. No one can emulate her. – Sheila N.

I read Virginia Woolf for the first time with a shock of recognition. YES! Here was life — the small beauties and horrors and sense of connection in the world I had felt but never articulated, put into words cut and polished and shining. The feeling of being seen was formative. – Patrick D....

How would you describe your job to someone you just met?
Tireless navigator of the restrooms, the exits, the tills, spirited book recommendation maker, and overall ambassador of where to find the best vegan-friendly nightlife spots in Portland.

Last book you loved:
Mary Wants to Be a Superwoman by erica lewis. 

Where are you originally from?
Little Mountain, South Carolina, a charming town of 300.

What is the best part of your job?
Getting to interact with our passionate customers and my incredibly talented and kind coworkers.

What is the most interesting part of your job?
You know, I love a good off-the-floor Mylar session for my railway books. I’ve also had some incredibly interesting experiences when working events with our publicity team...

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March is Women's History Month and Small Press Month, making it one of our favorite months of the year. This year we're keeping it local by highlighting some of our favorite Oregon-based, women-led small presses. The presses below boast diverse staffs and catalogs, but share the distinction of having women in prominent positions as founders, publishers, or editors.

When my husband and I moved to Oregon eight years ago, I couldn’t get over the fact that the grass stays green in winter. To me it’s striking, but he grew up in the Pacific Northwest so he never thought about it until I pointed it out. It’s a small thing, but I always think of it when anyone remarks on the distinctive sense of place in my debut novel, If, Then, which is set in Oregon, because it’s emblematic of how I took advantage of an outsider’s perspective when I wrote the book. 

Familiarity can dull our experience. We’ve all felt this when we visit someplace new and our senses come alive in a way they don’t when we’re home, living our routine lives...

Describe your latest book.
The Back Channel is both a memoir and an argument. 

The memoir covers my three and a half decades as an American diplomat. I try to use my experiences to bring to life for readers the profession of diplomacy, at a moment when the United States is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block — when we can’t get everything we want on our own, or by force alone, when diplomacy really does matter more than ever to safeguard American interests and values. 

I’ve learned over the years that it can be a little hard to explain diplomacy, let alone enliven it. Diplomacy may be one of the world’s oldest professions, but it’s also one of the most misunderstood...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi.

If gingerbread is the exotic made homely, Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread is its opposite: the familiar strangeness of the fairy tale form remixed, rolled, and baked into something utterly new. Between the covers of this novel you’ll find animated, half-vegetal dolls, a maniacal Jack-in-the-Box, life-sustaining gingerbread, and a country that may or may not exist. You’ll also find a cogent, sly critique of capitalism and the gap between those who toil and those who reap the benefits of their labor.

Once upon a time in Druhástrana, a mother and her daughter escape tiresome lives of tenant farming and factory work and build a new one together in England. There the daughter becomes a teacher, has a daughter of her own, and this new daughter — quiet, but not so odd — finds a way back to Druhástrana...

Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentinian librarian, liked to quote Arthur Schopenhauer, who said that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book: “to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream.”

The distinction between dreams and reality must have been especially blurred for Borges, who was blind for most of his career. He relied on disembodied readers’ voices and was forced to compose his letters, poems, and short stories inside his head, memorizing them and then waiting for a willing amanuensis.

He was “a keen dreamer, and enjoyed telling his dreams,” recalls the writer Alberto Manguel, who was one of many young friends who read to Borges...

The first year I lived in Portland, I had four part-time jobs — two at any given time. I registered voters for the midterm election. I sold ballet tickets and subscriptions over the phone. I canvassed to raise money to implement a ranked-choice system in local elections. And I hawked ad space in the gay and lesbian yellow pages. I had just moved across the country from New York, where I’d worked as a waiter and a temp, so I was pretty used to getting shit on. Besides, I didn’t think I was too good for any job — at least, that was my philosophical standpoint. I was a writer.

In the service industry, it’s not unusual to encounter a little rudeness. But the people I dealt with in New York relied upon me to bring their drinks, return their coats from the coat check, hand over the conference lanyards...