Original Essays
by Alison Cochrun, November 1, 2022 9:17 AM
I’ve always been obsessed with happily ever afters.
It started when I was five, with Belle and the Beast singing to each other in the snow. Then it was the Nora Ephron VHSs I watched on constant rotation with my dad every other weekend. Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries dominated my eighth-grade daydreams, and soon, I was devouring every young-adult novel with a romance subplot I could get my hands on. (Yes, Twilight included.) I adored the meet-cutes and the misunderstandings and the magic...
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Original Essays
by Powell's Staff, September 26, 2022 10:22 AM
In response to the horrific attack on Salman Rushdie, and in honor of the 34th anniversary of the publication of The Satanic Verses in the UK, we pulled together some thoughts, reflections, and memories from Powell’s booksellers, as well as our very own Michael Powell.
Powell’s has a strong and proud history of standing beside Salman Rushdie. Back in 1989, when The Satanic Verse was published in the US, Powell’s was set to host a book launch with him. We received multiple threats ahead of the event. Add that to our firm commitment to free speech, and it felt more than important that we continue to use our voice to honor Rushdie and his contributions to the literary community...
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Original Essays
by Helene Atwan, September 19, 2022 9:32 AM
Gayl Jones, the highly acclaimed author who was first “discovered" and mentored by Toni Morrison, has twice disappeared from our sight. The first time was after a stellar launch as one of America’s most daring and distinctive literary lights, after two brilliant novels ( Corregidora and Eva’s Man) brought out by Morrison at Random House, and one slim but oh-so-astonishing story collection ( White Rat), when she went into a self-imposed exile in France, from the late 1970s until the late 1990s...
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Original Essays
by Catherine Burns, Jenifer Hixson, Kate Tellers, Meg Bowles, and Sarah Austin Jenness, July 29, 2022 8:40 AM
At the end of every episode of The Moth Radio Hour, we say, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.” But memory is imperfect, and sometimes the way we remember events is different from how they actually unfolded. Think of Moth stories — both the ones you’ve already heard, and the ones we hope you tell one day — as an artistic time capsule of one person’s emotional experience of events...
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Original Essays
by Gabrielle Zevin, July 21, 2022 8:45 AM
I love words. English words and ones in foreign languages as well. My great regret in life is that I did not learn German and, maybe someday, I will. I study foreign languages, not to achieve fluency, but because I like thinking about the ways in which the language one speaks alters and defines one’s experience of the world. How will you experience cats if you speak a language where they are always accompanied by a masculine article? What does it mean that the Chinese character for woman is partially made up of the character for horse? When you begin learning Japanese, the first things you’ll be taught are several ways to apologize followed by several somewhat untranslatable terms of courtesy...
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Original Essays
by Jules Ohman, July 11, 2022 9:37 AM
As a kid, I grew up wandering Powell’s endless stacks, picking out books to read. First at the downtown location, and then later at the Cedar Hills location, which opened when I was a teenager, just a few miles from where I grew up in Cedar Mill. The opportunity to read at Powell’s for the release of my debut novel, Body Grammar, in June was a childhood dream come true. It was also a culmination of all the moments in my life that have taken place there, five of which stick out the most.
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Original Essays
by Adam P., June 2, 2022 9:21 AM
In the late summer of 2002, which is somehow nearly twenty years ago, I moved west across the Mississippi River, from St. Paul, Minnesota to Minneapolis, into a studio apartment just off Nicollet Avenue. I’d spent the previous three years living with friends I’d made while attending a nearby Christian college. After graduating, I started working at a Borders bookstore in the neighborhood, and made just enough money to pay for rent, food, and the occasional rock concert. Work gave me access to more books and magazines than I could ever read, more music than I could ever listen to, and more movies than I could ever watch. I made a valiant, but unsuccessful, attempt to satiate my hunger for all three types of media. I read...
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Original Essays
by Ayun Halliday, May 10, 2022 8:51 AM
There was a used bookstore in my hometown my father liked to frequent, but its odor of furniture polish and musty cloth covers was a turn off. As a child, I was desperate to align myself with the Honeycomb Kids generation. The glossy best sellers and Playgirls at B. Dalton’s in the Glendale Mall seemed more sophisticated, and thus more my style.
It wasn’t ‘til I was a teenager, passing through Madison, Wisconsin on a family trip, that I realized the error of my ways. I was, by then, interested in theater and art and any taste of the counterculture I could truffle up amid the Preppy Handbook craze. Paul’s Bookstore on State Street seemed like the sort of place where that itch could be scratched...
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Original Essays
by Powell's Books, December 23, 2021 4:49 PM
Late lies the wintry sun a-bed
By stars, in silent night we read
A tale without a creature stirring
Save mice, and men
We dream...
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Original Essays
by Laura Moulton, October 1, 2021 9:54 AM
The kid in front of me was scuffed-up at the edges, young but weathered. The book he most wanted from the street library was a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, but he hesitated.
"I’m hopping a train tonight to get to the Rainbow Gathering in Washington,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t take this because I just don’t know when I’d be back through to return it."
"But you have to take it,” I told him. “Given everything you’ve just described, I’m pretty sure you’re the reader it’s been waiting for."
In ten years of running a bicycle-powered mobile library in Portland, I met thousands of readers like him. One of them was Ben "Hodge" Hodgson, the co-author of our book...
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