Original Essays
by Janice P. Nimura, January 15, 2021 10:14 AM
I’ve always loved historic house museums, loved peering beyond the velvet rope into a Victorian bedroom or a colonial kitchen and imagining the ghosts that wore those dresses, or worked the handle of that butter churn, or laid the fire in that grate. If the rooms still exist, with their ornaments and implements intact, surely the people must also be hovering nearby? The veil between past and present feels transparent.
I’ve spent the last five years getting to know Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, pioneering women doctors and prolific writers who gave me plenty to do in the archives. But some of the best discoveries happened when I left the library and started following them around out in the world. When you’re trying to tell a story about people born two centuries ago, it helps to stand where they stood, wherever that is still possible...
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Lists
by Eden Dawn, January 5, 2021 9:08 AM
The fun side effect of writing a book full of over 100 date suggestions specially tailored for my fellow Oregonians is that everyone who finds out will ask you what they should do for [insert birthday/anniversary/any random Saturday afternoon] which I genuinely love to oblige. The ask comes through to my brain like I imagine a quarter goes into a fortune-telling machine and the gears begin to grind and clank until a little slip of paper spits out of my mouth with the idea printed upon it, to hopefully delight and entertain the recipient. But add in the complications of our fair city in her, how shall we say, more challenging winter months (not to mention a global pandemic) and the gears in my fortune-telling brain machine go into overdrive to accommodate. Though the idea of dates might seem superfluous as we creep towards Year Two of This Thing, I’d contend they’re more important than ever as working from home on top of each other, lack of vacations, fiscal worries, and general mind-numbing stress can make even the best of us forget to appreciate the ones getting us through this...
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Lists
by Powell's Staff, January 1, 2021 8:03 AM
We generally write a company-wide list of New Year’s reading resolutions, but if getting through the political, economic, healthcare, and literal fires of 2020 didn’t absolve us of whatever small literary sins we carry, nothing will and we’re moving on unrepentant. And, as booksellers, moving on means turning the page in its least metaphorical sense. For some of us, 2021 will involve the first chapter of a novel in translation, or a history of empire, or a report on the Anthropocene. For others, a mythology-inspired fantasy or an 80-year-old thriller. In a way, the books themselves are less important than the act of faith they will require of us: to move forward into the unexpected, mind open and unafraid.
The Hole
by Hiroko Oyamada and David Boyd
The author's previous book, The Factory, was so strange and interesting, plus it's another slim volume that's so easy to carry around...
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Lists
by Powell's Staff, December 30, 2020 2:08 PM
It feels like a wild understatement to talk about how this has been a difficult year on every level — global, national, local, and personal. 2020 has become shorthand for overlapping and ongoing crises, for disaster on top of disaster, for navigating a shared sense of awfulness. The usually cheerful look-back-at-the-year roundups have taken on a new tone of survival, and every book we recommend comes with a stated or implied "how it might help you handle everything."
In that spirit: These are the books that saw us through this cursed year. They’re titles that gave us an escape hatch into sunnier times, or the necessary background (informational or emotional) to better understand our present...
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Original Essays
by Powell's Books, December 24, 2020 9:01 AM
‘Twas the Blursday before Christmas
(Or was it… July?)
The days were all shorter
We didn’t know why
See, we’d hung up our lights
Several seasons ago
To cheer ourselves up
In a year full of woe
Exhausted by Zooming
And with no sense of time
Alarmed by the increase
In Amazon Prime...
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Lists
by Gigi Little, December 14, 2020 8:31 AM
Picture this. You're a writer. You've been working on your book for a long time: doing research, writing, editing. You've put in all the often-frustrating hours (weeks? months? years?) of submitting the book, getting rejections, finally hooking an agent and/or a publisher, and then the day arrives: you're putting out your very first book! And... (sigh) it's 2020.
But even as bookstores closed and in-store launch events evaporated, the books endured. One of the things that has sustained me in this very different year has been discovering new voices telling their stories. In honor of that, I've put together a list of some of my, and my fellow booksellers', favorite debuts of 2020. We hope you'll discover someone new...
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Lists
by Rhianna Walton, December 10, 2020 8:20 AM
In my experience, Hanukkah books are schmaltzy. Like the holiday, they can try too hard to fit in, coopting mainstream Christmas traditions like elves and reindeer. Or else they overflow with American Yiddish stereotypes, fretting bubbes and Moishes on every corner. It’s a shame, because traditional Yiddish literature is a sly treat, simultaneously bitingly funny and mournful — grieving the near-constant loss of the people and conventions it’s satirizing. That’s a tall order for a kids’ book celebrating Hanukkah, but when I look for books to share with my interfaith children, I seek just a thread of that poignancy, a point of access to the tension between stubborn joy and angst that defines Jewish literature across time and cultures...
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Lists
by Rachel Bloom, December 8, 2020 9:20 AM
At first glance, the topic of red carpets might not seem important to you. Who cares what the celebrities are wearing? Who cares about that precocious Fiji Water Bottle girl stealing focus? Excuse me, I’m an important literary book reader perusing a book website for literary things and I don’t have time for such pish-posh frickel frackel!
As dumb as they are, though (and they are pretty dumb), red carpets have a huge effect on the way women and girls perceive themselves because magazines aimed toward “women” use red carpet looks as an achievable gold standard of beauty. As an eighth grader reading Seventeen, I personally felt so overwhelmed by all of the complicated red carpet-inspired hair and makeup tips that I took copious notes of every one I found for fear that I would forget all of the steps. Whenever I tried to execute one of those tips, I would get halfway through a smoky eye, fuck it up, scream, then give up on eye makeup altogether and just hope that my personality was enough. And off to prom I go...
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Lists
by Rhianna Walton, December 4, 2020 10:02 AM
Most of us are attracted to a certain idea of the holidays. Cold weather, twinkle lights, hot drinks, fireside evenings, and the well-being that comes from rich meals and long hours of nothing to do but enjoy oneself. Because such a sanguine holiday isn’t always in the cards, we’ve put together a list of cozy romances and murder mysteries that summon all of the excesses and contentment of a fantasy winter holiday. Whether you fancy love over latkes or a killer eggnog, the 10 books below will sweep you off your feet — and under the rug — with the kind of sweetness only found at The Cookie Jar...
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Original Essays
by Zeyn Joukhadar, December 3, 2020 11:25 AM
Photo credit: Neha Gautam
When I lived in Pennsylvania, the hikes gave structure to my days. I was drafting a novel, but I wouldn’t understand the story until after I left the Susquehanna River valley behind. Each hike was four miles, a long stretch of gravel road and dirt path. On either side lay the half-visible hunters in their neon orange camouflage. Deer couldn’t see orange, somebody said, but humans could. More than once, on a certain stretch of trail, they would stray out of the hunting preserve. The pop of gunshots would echo through the stands of silver birch and Osage orange, and we would throw ourselves down behind the low ridge that lay between the trail and the forest. We, too, wore neon orange during hunting season...
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