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

Lists

Books to Fill the TV-Shaped Hole in Your Heart

by Powell's Staff, June 2, 2023 10:04 AM
Books to Fill the TV-Shaped Hole in Your Heart

This last week, we had to say goodbye to TV shows about a complicated, rich family; a murdery, wannabe actor; an enthusiastically kind football coach and his team; and a would-be stand-up comedian in 1950s New York. We already miss them (and the energetic discourse around each new episode), so we pulled together some books that we hope fills the TV-shaped hole that each of these shows has left in our hearts...

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Author Bookshelf

Impolite Influences: Theodore McCombs’s Bookshelf for ‘Uranians’

by Theodore McCombs, May 30, 2023 8:29 AM
Uranians

Reality, even at its worst, is too polite to say everything that needs saying. The permission of speculative fiction is to reach above the merely plausible for those high shelves of meaning. That’s also the promise of queer fiction: we’re not bound to repeat the common wisdoms, we can offer an outside perspective. My debut collection Uranians tries to make good on both those potentials, and while writing it, I turned often to these books to reinspire me toward that goal....

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Author Bookshelf

My Novel’s Clique: Jenny Fran Davis’s Bookshelf for 'Dykette'

by Jenny Fran Davis, May 26, 2023 10:09 AM
Dykette

I read a wide range of literature, from “chick lit” to heady nonfiction, and when I love a book, I begin to think of it as a friend. It also inspires me in one way or another: its tone, its sensibility, its cadence, its structure, or its voice. The following books are spiritually entwined with Dykette and belong on the same shelf because I think of each one as a friend to my novel — not necessarily aligned in every way, or identical in style, but with a shared sense of humor, a social ease, an ability to gossip about the same people, shared references, an affinity for the same types of restaurants....

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Powell's Picks Spotlight

Powell's Picks Spotlight: Emma Cline's 'The Guest'

by Keith Mosman, May 25, 2023 10:51 AM
Powell's Picks Spotlight: Emma Cline's 'The Guest'

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

I read most of The Guest while on a much-delayed train ride between Portland and Seattle. The tracks lead passengers past incredible vistas of the Columbia River as well as right next to houses with residents who must be inured to the sensation of trains rattling their windows throughout the day and night. There is something about staring out from the window of a train that makes one feel anonymous, both distant and like one is trespassing ...
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Q&As

Powell’s Q&A: Jamie Loftus, author of 'Raw Dog'

by Jamie Loftus, May 23, 2023 12:09 PM
Raw Dog
Photo credit: Andrew Max Levy

Describe your latest book.
My book is called Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs. It’s a book about hot dogs, via a road trip I took across the country with my ex-boyfriend and pets during the summer of 2021. I hope you’ll think it’s funny and learn about hot dogs and become a socialist (me vibes) or a vegan (not me vibes) or both after reading it. It’s about the hot dog’s history, dating back to the primordial sausage, through the industrial labor and animal right’s nightmare that is the meatpacking industry past and present, and via the small businesses and people I encounter on our journey. Highlights include a thorough detour into one of my favorite topics of all time, women’s professional hot dog eating rivalries, and whether people are fucking on the Oscar Meyer wienermobile or not (they are). It’s also a reflection on a relationship and an eating disorder that objectively were not working, across a country that was aggressively ignoring the plague. I can’t believe they let me write it and I hope you enjoy it....

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Q&As

Powell’s Q&A: Jane Wong, author of 'Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City'

by Jane Wong, May 19, 2023 11:27 AM
Meet Me in Atlantic City

Describe your latest book.
My debut memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House) is a love song for working class immigrant families. It’s a book centered around my upbringing in a Chinese American restaurant, the expansive (and hilarious!) wisdom of my mother, and my journey through poetry as a means of agency. It’s a rally cry for radical Asian Americans and dives into the depths of loss, toxic relationships, and the beauty of community. Along with my memoir, I am working on poems and handmade paper inspired by my mother’s Chinese-English translation dictionary, which is full of her notes. I’m intrigued by the narratives hidden in these unexpected archives....
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Q&As

Powell's Q&A: Margaret Owen, author of 'Painted Devils'

by Madeline Shier, May 16, 2023 9:48 AM
Powell's Q&A: Margaret Owen, author of 'Painted Devils'
You live in Seattle now, but you grew up in the Portland area, right?
I did grow up here, in one of the “historic” parts of West Linn—and among the shelves at Powell's, too! My dad had a tradition: every year, one of my birthday presents was the pledge of $10 a month to spend at Powell's. I stretched that out over so many used paperbacks, I think I had the biggest Nancy Drew collection at my grade school. I remember spending hours in the kids' section with my deeply hideous coke-bottle glasses, crouched on one of those round metal stepstools...

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Rare Books

Rare Book Room Dispatch: Come Fly with Me

by Kirsten Berg, May 15, 2023 9:10 AM
Rare Book Room Dispatch: Come Fly with Me

Note: the Rose City Book and Paper Fair is happening June 16–17 at the Red Lion in NE Portland. There’s a $5 entry fee. Approximately 60 dealers who are part of the Cascade Booksellers Association will attend. Powell’s will be exhibiting at booth #32. It’s a book-and-paper love fest! See you there.

Legendary* bookman Peter Howard named his Berkeley area bookstore ‘Serendipity,’ which means the occurrence and development of events by chance, in a happy or benevolent way. I’ve been thinking a lot about Mr. Howard and his store...

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Five Book Friday

Five Book Friday: Literary Nonfiction

by Annabel J., May 12, 2023 9:26 AM
Five Book Friday: Literary Nonfiction

Literary — or alternatively: creative; narrative — nonfiction is more or less what it says on the tin. That is, a self-excavatory, narrativized nonfiction practice enriched by reportage and scaffolded by the trappings of literary fiction (in terms of plot, pace, structure, imagery, tone, and style), emanating from a developed, palpable "I."

The grain of a ubiquitous, felt human subjectivity does more to distinguish literary nonfiction than a penchant for unconventional modes of storytelling and (long and hotly contested) separation of "fact" and "truth" (the latter being more expansive...

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Lists

10 Uncanny Short Story Collections for Short Story Month

by Kelsey Ford, May 10, 2023 9:15 AM
INSERT ALT TEXT

This year for Short Story Month, I wanted to pull together a selection of some of my favorite story collections that teeter on the precipice of the uncanny — books that play with the rules and boundaries of our world and use genre to explore the very-real horrors we face every day. These collections are so fun, so peculiar, and brimming with the strange: a woman who turns into a deer at night, mourning via cannibalistic hot pots, cults and a home haunted by ex-boyfriends, naked grandparents and vanished children, goddesses and umbilical cords. This May, give yourself the gift of otherworldly stories...

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