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

We are in the thick of winter here in the Pacific Northwest, which means it's dark, damp, and chilly. Rather than escaping to stories with warmer, brighter climates, I personally want nothing more than to dive deep into gothic and uncanny fiction as the wind rattles my windows at night. It's all about the atmosphere and the ambience, perfect for devouring a spooky graphic novel in one sitting. Here is a selection of comics to send chills down the spine or make chests ache with melancholy...

It may be a new year, this may be a list of new books, but our love for literature in translation hasn’t changed at all, and we are so pleased to be enthusiastically recommending these recent releases.

On this list, you’ll find a Spanish novel where controversy swirls around a Coca-Cola billboard; a Brazilian debut that’s “an intimate portrait of a man's love, shame, and grief”; an examination of “deep history and the navigation of its seeming contradictions” from a French writer, playwright, and literary critic; a time-looping, quirky, fun novel ...

Our blog feature, "From the Stacks," features our booksellers’ favorite older books: those fortuitous used finds, underrated masterpieces, and lesser known treasures. Basically: the books that we’re the most passionate about handselling. This week, we’re featuring Kelsey F.’s pick, Submergence by J. M. Ledgard.

Like most good things in my life, Submergence by J. M. Ledgard came into my orbit because of Moby-Dick. A friend knew how much I loved Melville’s epic — its discursiveness, beautiful language, surprising sensuality...

This coming Sunday is the Lunar New Year (timed to match with the second full moon after the winter solstice), when the Year of the Tiger will become the Year of the Rabbit. According to the Chinese zodiac, those born in the Year of the Rabbit are earnest and forthright, generous and cautious, rash and loyal, tender and easily irritated. To celebrate, I thought I’d pull together a list of “rabbit” books with similar, often-contradictory characteristics...

If you, like me, already feel like 2023 is coming in a little too hot, maybe you, like me, could use a little hope — which is where this list comes in. I wanted to find the books that Powell’s booksellers consider hopeful, whatever hope might mean to them. But while putting this list together, I realized that hope is a strange vector to triangulate: a book doesn’t have to be happy to be hopeful, but it should offer a path forward for its readers — some ray of light amidst a world that, admittedly...

Hats are pretty amazing. They can keep you warm, make a fashion statement, or even help transform you into someone else entirely! It follows that picture books are just FULL of these terrific toppers. So, when I realized that some of my all-time favorites were hat-centric, I knew I had to share this list with you. Without further ado, here are 5 picture books featuring particularly good hats...

While pulling together our first Book Preview of 2023, I started to notice a number of commonalities — themes that seemed to echo throughout the list. I love these synchronicities and the idea of a collective stew that we're all pulling out of — a stew filled with our shared anxieties and obsessions, intersecting vibes and interests. It’s endlessly fascinating to see the seed of something similar sprout into multiple complementary but wildly divergent projects. So I thought I'd pull a few together, for your perusing pleasure...

New year; new you; new us; but most importantly: new books. 2023 is starting off with such an amazing wealth of new releases and the booksellers at Powell’s are so excited to get these into your hands. Last year, we published our book previews every four months, but this year we've had to move to a quarterly system; our excitement got so out of hand that we actually hit our blog's word limit! Ah well, I guess that's what happens when we're just too effusive about all the great new releases headed our way this year...