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

Like Indigenous and Native American storytelling, children’s books have the power to paint a picture for children, shared though reading aloud, the lives, values, stories, and cultures of different people. It’s important to remember the past, especially as we move further away from it, even when that history is painful.

Starting in the late 1800s and well into the 20th century, Indigenous and Native American children were taken from their homes and forced to attend residential schools. They were isolated from their culture, homes, dress, and language with the goal of assimilating them into western culture and to eradicate Indigenous culture and beliefs. Most who attended...

Bookshelf organization is deeply personal. Some prefer by genre, by content, others by aesthetic attributes like color and size. I like to put books together that I think would be friends, that would get along or at least wouldn’t mind being neighbors. Books with protagonists that could maybe commiserate while they begrudgingly appear in the back of my Zoom calls or TikToks. In my imagination, my bookshelf is a bar, and the characters are all having a drink, swapping stories, gossiping to and about...

For years, my late dog Rubin, a.k.a White Wolf, (a big fluffy Alaskan Malamute/German Shepherd), was terrified of stairs, bridges, and jumping on or off of just about anything elevated. I first found this out when he was just a few months old and we were on a road trip to Northern California.

At the base of some outdoor, pool-side motel stairs, Rubin started shaking and wouldn't budge. I scooped him up and carried him to the top. Again, no budging at the bottom of a different set of stairs later on the trip. I picked him up and carried him. Again, when I took him to the vet weeks later and he needed to hop up on the scale so they could weigh him...

This year, on the first day of Hispanic and Latine Heritage Month, we wanted to pull together a list of some of the exciting new ficition that's come out from Hispanic and Latine authors over the past year (although, of course, this list can only scratch the surface of all the amazing contributions to literature from such a vibrant community). On this list, you'll find gothic goodness and speculative thrillers, multi-generational epics and dystopic stories. These books look at the foster care system, intimacy...

Wolves and hens and bears and owls and koalas — oh my! One of my favorite categories of books is nonfiction that combines the history and cutural foot(paw?)prints of a species alongside memoir, literary criticism, science, sociopolitical analysis, travelogue, ecological research.... really, any combination of the above. There are so many books that fall under this wide umbrella, but I wanted to bring five together as a starting point, in case you, like me, can’t get enough of these books about the animals...

The days are getting shorter, the skies are getting cloudier, but our appetite for great works in translation never wanes. This month, we’re so excited to feature 9 new works in translation that our booksellers loved. On this list, you’ll find a multigenerational epic about a family living in Japan-occupied Korea, a Mexican novel about “the particular locus of life and death that is a woman's body,” a collection of surreal short stories from an Angolan writer, a deeply philosophical novel from Sweden...

It’s that part of the summer, when everything is still too warm, slightly too sunny (if it isn’t hazy out from nearby forest fires), and even if you’re not going back to school, you start to feel those back-to-school jitters. All of which has us craving a good read, so we pulled together some superlative recommendations for our favorite readers (you). Whether you’re looking for a book that’ll warm your cold heart or gut punch you during the coolest summer of the rest of your life — you’ll find it on this list...