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This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo.

Over the last, distressing two weeks, it’s been an unexpected jolt of joy to remember that our current U.S. Poet Laureate is Joy Harjo. Even now, when so much bigotry is being sanctioned or tolerated or passively renounced by America’s leaders, the official poet of the United States is a Native woman (Muscogee Creek Nation) whose work is inspired by First Nation history and traditions, and rooted in social justice and feminism. If Washington is a swamp, Harjo’s appointment is like chancing upon a field of marsh marigold; it’s an encouraging reminder that not everything in our capital needs to be drained....

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino.

It’s not a spoiler to share that Tolentino ends her thoughtful, fraught collection with the admission, “I have always accommodated everything I wish I were opposed to.” This conflict between striving for a more just life for herself as a woman — in which beauty, consumerism, and submission are not the keys to social value — and half-knowingly giving in to those ideals in order to be happy forms the core of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. As Tolentino takes the reader through a rigorous exploration of Internet culture, reality TV, literary heroines, wedding culture, and more, she, and swiftly the reader too, are confronted with a difficult existential question: What are the traps that patriarchy and 21st-century feminism have created for women, and do women want to escape them?...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The Pigeon HAS to Go to School! by Mo Willems.

The Pigeon loves hot dogs (and cookies). The Pigeon loves buses (and staying up late). The Pigeon loves puppies (and walruses). But you know what this bird doesn’t love? School. It’s too math-y. Too read-y. And too scary for a little pigeon who hasn’t yet left the nest.

The Pigeon HAS to Go to School!, Mo Willems’s latest picture book in the Pigeon series, taps into children’s fears of change and the unknown in his characteristically hilarious and on-point style. When the book opens, Pigeon is slowly ramping up his argument (the unsympathetic might say “tantrum”) for why going to school is a terrible idea. He’s worried that it will be too easy or too hard, that the teacher won’t like him, or that his head will explode from knowledge overload. Willems’s deceptively simple line drawings catch the Pigeon in various stages of protest and melodramatic anguish that any parent of small children will recognize...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl.

In an essay titled “Not Always in the Sky,” Margaret Renkl writes about her neighbors’ delight over an eagle that’s decided to nest in one of the trees on their street: “The bird is clearly a red-tailed hawk, but I don’t say anything to my neighbors. People want to believe that something extraordinary has happened to them, that they have been singled out for grace, and who am I to rob them of the one sheen of enchantment still available in the first-ring suburbs?”

True to its author’s generosity, Late Migrations offers one “sheen of enchantment” after another...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.

It’s hard not to appreciate Colson Whitehead’s work. Whitehead’s sentence-by-sentence attention to craft and the empathetic stretch of his imagination demand careful reading, while the propulsive nature of his plotting masks the skill it takes to marry entertainment and truth-telling. In his recent works, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, Whitehead draws on the histories of slavery and racism to correct misleading narratives about America’s past and focus our attention on the many ways racial inequity structures 21st-century life. There are times when you’ll want to throw these books down in a fit of rage over how ugly America can be, but then you’d have to be willing to say goodbye to courageous, thought-provoking characters like Cora, Turner, and Elwood, and miss how their stories end... a Herculean feat of literary self-harm that we’d never advise...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Hungry by Jeff Gordinier.

It would take a generous reader to follow Jeff Gordinier’s extraordinary years-long journey through the marketplaces and Michelin-starred kitchens of Mexico, Australia, and Scandinavia with Noma chef René Redzepi and not exclaim at some point, That lucky bastard! The life splashed across the pages of Gordinier’s compelling travelogue/biography boasts the same glamor, sexy grit, and inaccessibility of The Selby or one of those Bon Appétit dinner party spreads featuring real couples: So many beautiful people having wild, beautiful experiences; one wonders enviously where they come from, how they fund it all, and if all of their friends and family are so attractive, or if the ugly ones have been told the party’s on a different day...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert.

It’s the classic American story that’s fueled everything from On the Town to Midnight Cowboy to SATC’s Carrie Bradshaw: a small-town kid heads to the Big City for sex, thrills, and fame. It’s an inherently exciting framework because it contains a lot of the elements we look for in escapist entertainment: a coming-of-age (and sometimes comeuppance) tale, a rags-to-riches plotline, and a vivid glimpse into the glam and grime of America’s most famous city; plus, Manhattan’s blend of seediness and glamor, and its diversity of bodies and personalities, positively radiates with sexual possibility. It might be a crowded, rat-infested island basically owned by foreign oligarchs, but New York’s literary appeal has remained essentially unchanged since Lily Bart graced its tea rooms...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong.

About a third of the way through poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the narrator observes the protagonist watching his mother through the kitchen window: “Evening had turned the glass into a mirror and you couldn’t see him there, only the lines scored across your cheeks and brow, a face somehow ravaged by stillness. The boy, he watches his mother watch nothing, his entire self inside the phantom oval of her face, invisible.” The moment encapsulates the painful paradox of all mother-child relationships: Your child is of you and for you, indistinguishable from you; and then they are not — they grow up, and the distance that self-actualization brings is irrecoverable. Isolated, these two sentences allow for a sentimental reading, but by now the reader knows that the boy’s Vietnamese mother suffers from war-induced PTSD and is violently abusive. The narrator’s — and when the narrative shifts into first person, the boy’s — willingness to imaginatively close the distance between mother and son is a radical act of love...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett.

Florida has long been the land of the weird, a place where humidity thickens the blood, strip clubs offer free flu shots, and an alarming number of zoo animals make the news. So it's the perfect setting for Kristen Arnett’s raucous debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, which follows a taxidermist in her late thirties as she tackles the messes left behind by her runaway lover — also her brother’s wife — and her father’s suicide.

Faced with a struggling family business, a grieving mom with a penchant for BDSM art, a pseudo-murderous nephew, and a diet of cheap, flat beer, Jessa-Lynn tries to be her family’s source of stability and reason, only to come up time and again against her own emotional demons and the jointly comforting and disturbing eccentricities of her family and home state...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Pok Pok Noodles by Andy Ricker and JJ Goode.

Do you love Thai noodles? Like, really, really love Thai noodles? And do you love to cook — we mean, really, really love to cook? And while we’re at it, do you love knowing exactly what goes into your favorite Thai noodle dishes, or are you more of a “what I don’t know is delicious!” kind of person?

Just checking. Because lifting the cover of Andy Ricker and JJ Goode’s comprehensive Pok Pok Noodles will deliver you to a land of meticulous instruction, extensive kitchen prep, and the occasional tablespoon of coagulated pig’s blood. With lengthy ingredient lists and beautifully staged photographs that highlight the many components of each recipe...