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

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Fault Lines by Emily Itami.

I am sometimes haunted by foreclosed possibilities.

I try not to dwell on literary theories that break down all stories into a small number of basic archetypes. I fear it would make my fiction reading seem claustrophobic, and I try to let myself subconsciously attach to whatever facet of a novel most strikes me as uniquely successful, whether that be the quality of the writing, psychological insight, or (ideally) something I can’t identify until after I’ve finished...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney.

I read Beautiful World, Where Are You in two sittings on my 29th birthday, chasing the shade around my backyard and contemplating the inevitability of climate crisis and societal collapse amidst record-breaking high temperatures here in the Pacific Northwest.

A lot. I know.

Alice and Eileen, the novel’s 29-year-old protagonists, are grappling with similar anxieties...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow.

Having spent years as a nonfiction buyer, I’ve read a multitude of books by journalists across a vast range of topics. I imagine it must be a challenge to take the skills one uses to write a newspaper article, a radio story, a magazine feature, or (increasingly) a subscription newsletter under a tight deadline and recalibrate them to the differing needs of a cohesive, years-in-the-making book.

I’ve come to recognize and appreciate, and sometimes lament, how tricks of the journalism trade can be utilized in a book. So, hardened and word-weary reader that I am, I was delighted to find myself astonished at how completely Kat Chow had me committed to the project of reading her book from the first page...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette.

I used to walk past a blue convent on my way to the Nature’s on Division, hoping to glimpse an urban sister on the lawn. Nuns are so rare in the modern American every-day that sighting them is thrilling and improbable, like finding a bald eagle. A black flap of the habit isn’t unlike the rush of wings; its possessor is unknowable, a container for the feelings of the viewer.

Claire Luchette’s winning novel, Agatha of Little Neon, brings the reader beyond voyeurism into the mind of 29-year-old Agatha, who, with her three sisters, finds herself working in Little Neon, a Mountain Dew-colored halfway house in Woonsocket, Rhode Island...

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...