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

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The Best Coast: A Road Trip Atlas by Chandler O'Leary.

We’re enthralled by artist Chandler O’Leary’s road trip guide to the West Coast, The Best Coast: A Road Trip Atlas. It’s not just that Portland gets its own mini-chapter featuring Powell’s (although we’re not immune to flattery). It’s that The Best Coast may be the quirkiest, prettiest, and most enthusiastic guide/love letter to the coast we call home to ever land on our desks.

O’Leary is a veteran road tripper, having logged over 100,000 road trip miles across the lower 48 states. This makes her not just an authoritative guide to sightseeing highlights throughout the U.S., but an expert in what to pack and prepare for. The early sections of The Best Coast are devoted to trip planning and safety, covering what to wear (the geographical and climatic diversity of our coast being vast), how to secure your belongings, how to maximize your budget, and how to take care of your vehicle, plus delightful, unexpected tips...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Women Talking by Miriam Toews.

Women Talking, Miriam Toews's stunning new novel, should be boring. It’s a book-length conversation between a contentious group of women who rarely complete a thought, and whose discourse is being captured by a hopelessly lovelorn and socially isolated young man. The women burst into song, argue philosophy, and talk in circles; August Epp, their scribe, goes on metaphorical tangents that confuse characters and reader alike. In lesser hands, Women Talking risks being the book equivalent of an Ethan Hawke film. In Toews’s hands, it is cutting and brilliant.

One of the startling reminders of Women Talking is that women talking — being allowed to think aloud and faultily, being heard, questioning their purpose in a way that leads to real change — is still a revolutionary act. The fact that Toews’s characters are Mennonite women contending with a long series of brutal rapes by their kinsmen heightens the radicalism inherent in female conversation...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Real Queer America by Samantha Allen.

Samantha Allen heard the clarion call of red-state exodus after the 2016 election — and she told it to shut the heck up. Frustrated with the cost of living and lackluster LGBTQ activism she observed in coastal cities, and equally irritated by progressive dismissal of “flyover country,” Allen turned to the vast American interior to examine how queer people and communities fight and thrive in deeply conservative states.

Originally from the west coast, Allen attended Utah’s BYU and has since spent a considerable amount of time living and working in the South and Midwest. Her story is an interesting one...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The Night Swimmers by Peter Rock.

A strange and sonorous book, Peter Rock’s The Night Swimmers captures the eeriness of deep water — its competing currents and sudden shifts between warm and cold, the swimmer’s combined sense of inconsequentiality and escape from the strictures of time. Early on, the novel’s unnamed narrator recalls: "I imagined all the lost drowned bodies, worn down by currents, nibbled by fish caught in the weather of that deep water, of that zone between top and bottom. That is where they often reside, the dead, sliding through the currents."

Constant but unknowable, the black waves of The Night Swimmers are not scenic...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi.

If gingerbread is the exotic made homely, Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread is its opposite: the familiar strangeness of the fairy tale form remixed, rolled, and baked into something utterly new. Between the covers of this novel you’ll find animated, half-vegetal dolls, a maniacal Jack-in-the-Box, life-sustaining gingerbread, and a country that may or may not exist. You’ll also find a cogent, sly critique of capitalism and the gap between those who toil and those who reap the benefits of their labor.

Once upon a time in Druhástrana, a mother and her daughter escape tiresome lives of tenant farming and factory work and build a new one together in England. There the daughter becomes a teacher, has a daughter of her own, and this new daughter — quiet, but not so odd — finds a way back to Druhástrana...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Survival Math by Mitchell S. Jackson.

Award-winning novelist Mitchell S. Jackson’s new work, Survival Math, is bookended by epistolary addresses to his original Oregon forebear, an 18th-century African sailor named Markus, murdered his first day on shore, and to his teenage daughter, Justice. In between these remarkable letters, which lay out, respectively, a brief history of Portland’s Black community and Jackson’s Oregon roots and his feelings and failings as an estranged father is an astonishing body of essays and short poems...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Magical Negro by Morgan Parker.

Riveting, demanding, and rich in pop culture, politics, and historical references, Magical Negro is the kind of blazing poetry collection that’s tempting to read in one sitting. Don’t do that. Or do; only, once you have, go back to the beginning, open your laptop, and get googling. Because Parker’s handle on pop culture, her deft enfolding of headlines into history, and her ability to parse the Black female experience so that the past, present, and future of Black womanhood link in one exasperating loop are remarkable, and remarkably difficult...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The White Book by Han Kang, author of The Vegetarian.

“Spare, observant, beautiful. The White Book is a profound meditation on the presence in our lives that an acutely felt absence can hold.” — Keith M.

Han Kang’s The White Book has the delicacy of bone china and the fullness of a sail at sea. A seductive but discomfiting blend of autobiography, speculation, and musings on things that are white — sugar cubes, snow, paint, empty laughter — The White Book seems pulled from a wintry ground that freezes the narrator in a Celanesque fugue while gesturing to the expansive possibility of the blank white page...

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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...