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This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin.

N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became is texting a little heart emoji wrapped around an extended middle finger to H. P. Lovecraft’s iPhone in the afterlife. This imaginative and ferocious fantasy novel about the birth of New York City makes wily use of Lovecraftian tropes — tentacled creatures, sentient architecture, gaping holes into hellish dimensions — as well as Lovecraft’s well-known xenophobia and bigotry, to subvert the notion that New York is a white city, or that it can be saved by whiteness in any literal or metaphorical iteration. It’s a stunning coup that manages to place The City We Became firmly in the urban fantasy and sci-fi canon while demonstrating the radical potential of the genre, in the hands of a brilliant writer like Jemisin, to expand the boundaries of old tropes and forms to make room for self-awareness, critique, and social justice...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The Imaginaries by Emily Winfield Martin.

Our favorite picture books are often the ones that speak to children and adults alike. Authors like Mac Barnett and Mo Willems never fail to make our families laugh out loud with the absurd situations their characters find themselves in (a duck and mouse living the high life in a wolf’s stomach? An elephant who can balance three animals and a piano on his trunk?), while more serious books like Dreamers and The Stuff of Stars soothe, educate, and astound with their artistry and inclusivity.

Other beloved picture books edge more toward adult sensibilities while still igniting young imaginations, and Emily Winfield Martin’s The Imaginaries: Little Scraps of Larger Stories fits squarely into this category...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Verge by Lidia Yuknavitch.

Lidia Yuknavitch is a one of the Powell's staff's favorite writers. It’s not just that she's lovely to work with, or that her writing is emotionally gripping; she is adored because her narrative flights into the dark, vulnerable corners of consciousness are powered by a wingspan broad enough to sweep the most marginalized voices into the centers of her stories. In Verge, as in all her work, Yuknavitch focuses her attention on adults and children whose bodies and labor have been coopted and corrupted by capitalism, patriarchy, and complacency. Her governing argument is loud and demanding: We bear the responsibility for the ugliness she articulates...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer.

Increasingly, reading Jeff VanderMeer is like tripping balls with a version of Richard Feynman who’s been bioengineered with the brains of Rachel Carson and Hieronymus Bosch. From the Annihilation Trilogy to Borne to Dead Astronauts, VanderMeer has been edging away from an anthropocentric perspective that naturally gives the reader some purchase in his text toward a collective narrative that is at once expansive and limited. Each book produces more compelling, nonhuman personalities (aquatic beings with human faces; a flying bear; the plant-not-a-plant Borne; a messianic blue fox; a duck with a razor wing; a giant, tortured fish; a gender-fluid being made of moss; and on) that push on the reader’s understanding of what being in the world can look and behave like...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener.

Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley left us with mixed emotions. On the one hand, it’s an astutely observed, clever work that relays Wiener’s experiences in Silicon Valley with candor and self-awareness. Wiener is an excellent writer with a keen eye for detail (describing, for example, a chat between tech executives as “like watching two ATMs in conversation”), ably transforming the San Francisco and Silicon Valley of news reports and popular imagination into a vivid, confusing place where the urban devastation of thoughtless gentrification rubs against the appealing wholesomeness of juice bars and men in climbing gear. On the other hand, for all her thoughtfulness, Uncanny Valley doesn’t do much with Wiener’s observations...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The Magical Language of Others by E. J. Koh.

Toward the end of this remarkable memoir and translation project by poet E. J. Koh, she recounts how a fellow resident at a writer’s retreat — “the old man” — chases her out of a reading to vent about her parents’ behavior. Although the man’s questions aggravate Koh, he gives voice to the reader’s concerns and frustrations. Neither Koh nor her mother, through Koh’s careful translations of her letters, offer a rational justification for why Koh's parents abandoned her as a young teen when there was no pressing financial or humanitarian reason to do so. Koh’s candid descriptions of the psychological and physical toll of abandonment are sometimes hard to reconcile with the aloofness of her prose, and her mother’s guilt is difficult to swallow, often embedded in childlike descriptions of “play.” For 200 pages Koh lays bare the heart of her family, but is careful to guard what makes its tick. The result is like exploring a house through its windows...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll.

The important thing to remember while reading Something Deeply Hidden is that quantum physics is supposed to make your head explode. Even its premise — that electrons behave differently when observed (in other words: what we see isn’t necessarily what is) — is completely baffling. How do we know what electrons do when we’re not observing them if we’re not observing them? Does this mean that electrons have consciousness? If an electron is a wave function, as Carroll argues, and an unobserved electron is in a superposition of every possible location (being a wave and not a zippy little dot), is all unobserved matter — including our observer — also a wave and also in a superposition? Meaning that there are potentially limitless probable positions for observer and observed; limitless universes in which the observer and the observed occupy slightly different positions and therefore slightly different realities?...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado.

For a long time, memoirs were predominantly like the lifetime achievement awards of the book world. Once a famous and accomplished person had reached the pinnacle of success, or skied past the pinnacle into their twilight career, they would write a kind of retrospective bildungsroman. From beloved Hollywood tell-alls like Tallulah to new bestsellers like Elton John’s Me, memoirs have long been a way for celebrities to open up to their fans while controlling their origin stories.

But if you’re a memoir reader — or a regular reader of our blog — you’ll have noticed that the genre is trending younger, and more diverse in both authorship and structure. Journalists and activists like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Patrisse Khan-Cullors, assault survivors like Chanel Miller and Jeannie Vanasco, and authors from other marginalized communities like Terese Marie Mailhot and Sybil Lamb are experimenting with form and the suspect enterprise of memoir itself to explore what it means to be at the precipice of adulthood or middle age, sifting — as Ben Lerner recently put it — through the river of inherited language and trauma, and personal experience, to determine who they’ve become, why, and how...

The lingering impression of Jeannie Vanasco’s remarkable memoir, Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl, is the vertiginous experience of lingering itself. Throughout the course of Vanasco’s book, which is structured as though she’s processing her decisions in real time, alongside the reader, Vanasco reveals the lie behind fully resolving trauma. Instead, it becomes plain that trauma settles into the body like a smell settles into a room; you may stop noticing it until you leave and reenter, but it’s seeped into the walls.

Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl revolves around a series of conversations Vanasco conducted with her rapist, who was also a close childhood friend...

It’s a little preposterous to say that the most affecting section of this tremendously affecting memoir is Jones’s prelude, but the prose poem “Elegy With Grown Folks’ Music” is a remarkable précis of the book’s central themes: Saeed’s relationship with his mother; her early death; the volatile unknowable-ness of other people’s desires; the sweet-bitter tug of one’s own wants; and what it means to be a queer Black boy and man within one’s family and country. “Some songs take women places men cannot follow,” Jones writes; lucky for us, Jones’s skill as a memoirist brings the reader into cultural, emotional, and sexual territories that, though vital, would be unnavigable without such a sure-footed and generous guide.

Writing about Jones’s debut poetry collection, Prelude to a Bruise, critic Amal El-Mohtar noted...