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

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli.

Historical texts are by definition retrospective. They invite authors and readers to shuffle through the past until they land on a particular event or person that provokes their curiosity, and then to imagine backward. As Valeria Luiselli alludes to in her remarkable Lost Children Archive, archival work and writing are much more about pulling from the past what we need in the present than they are about recapturing the truth of a lost day to day. In that way, archives are safe spaces. We can pull from them to remember, to mourn, to fantasize, to inspire, but we don’t have to live those moments...

This week we're taking a closer look at new staff favorite Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first book in Marlon James's The Dark Star Trilogy.

From the first paragraph, reading Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf is like being drop-kicked into the splash page of the trippiest superhero comic you can imagine. Picture Ovid meets Black Panther meets Tolkien meets Octavia E. Butler and you will begin to understand James’s labyrinthine world building, which manifests as a tangle of African and Western literary tropes, aesthetics, and pop cultural references, blending, colliding, and shifting around each other to create a brutal, magical place where the truth belongs to the most captivating speaker...