PowellsBooks.Blog
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My absolute favorite scene from a horror movie is from American Werewolf in London. We see limbs stretching, hair sprouting, and our protagonist howling with pain, all to “Blue Moon,” and transforming into a wild, feral creature. With Halloween and peak horror movie watching season approaching, I wanted to highlight werewolves and eerie, and at times painful, transformations...

In celebration of this year’s Hispanic and Latine Heritage Month, we’re excited to recommend nine (relatively) new nonfiction releases that we’re sure you’ll love. This list is filled with vital, polyphonic stories about love and community, colonialism and migration, ancestral history and Latine identity, land and movement, memory and loss. Looking for more?...

Banned Books Week (in 2023, the week spans from October 1–7) is an important time here at Powell’s. We believe in everyone’s freedom to read and to seek out and express ideas. When a book is threatened, our community is threatened.

This year, we are donating 20% of the sales on Powells.com of the 20 titles listed below, all of which are frequently banned or challenged books, to American Booksellers for Free Expression. ABFE's programming and advocacy work ensures...

For our final Book Preview of 2024, we thought we’d look at our list by the numbers (since math is such a bookseller forte). On this list, you’ll find 53 books, including 3 memoirs, 4 debut novels, 2 anthologies, 7 follow-ups to debuts that we’ve been rabidly anticipating, 5 new entries into beloved series, and 4 cookbooks. In their blurbs, Powell’s booksellers say words like love (22), funny (6), can’t wait (8), feral (2), spellbinding (1), legendary (2), change (4), hope (3), joy (3), horror/horrifying...

This month, we have nine new works in translation that we are so excited to recommend to you. On this list, you’ll find the story of “seemingly close, lifelong friendship” from France; a tender, heartbreaking novel from a late Brazilian author; a French treatise on creativity in crisis; two Japanese horror collections, one filled with a "creeping sense of wrongness,” and the other “haunting and surreal;” bruising autofiction from a queer, Russian poet; a French novel about the resilience and strength found among...

Land of Milk and Honey is about the search for pleasure at the end of the world. A smog has descended and killed all food crops when an American chef is lured to a secret colony of the wealthy at the border of Italy. It’s the story of how one woman comes alive again to food, to her body, to her own source of pleasure in a world that seems to be dying; and it’s also the story...

The nights are colder, the days shorter, pumpkin spiced coffee is ubiquitous: it’s witching time.

Saducismus Triumphatus: or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions, 1681, by Joseph Glanvil (or Glanvill, if you prefer). A small octavo, rebound in plain modern buckram, this title is one of the prize pieces showcased in the Rare Book Room right now.

Weaving Puritan theology with 17th century philosophy, Glanvil (1636–1680) conjured a theory of the supernatural born from his conviction that the world was unknowable through the method of pure reason and that the supernatural deserved a closer look...

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...