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This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer.

Sequels are hard. I know that every time I finish one of these Spotlights, everyone wonders: “how can he top this?” And yet, somehow, I do. But it’s always a struggle to face the sky-high expectations.

This is just one more way in which I can look to Andrew Sean Greer’s Arthur Less for guidance. When I first read Less, it was as an advanced reader copy for what promised to be a light comedy with a clever premise. It was that, and more. I found the ending to be so emotionally satisfying; it was a book that I hadn’t known...

This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Bliss Montage by Ling Ma.

I don’t remember a lot from the early days of COVID, but I do remember how many tweets I saw about the uncanniness of Ling Ma’s Severance to the times: the emptying streets, how foreboding and freeing that emptiness could feel; the dread that built up the more silent everything else became; the growing distance between communications; the compounding absences. Which was why I avoided Severance for so long. I avoided Severance for years! Until a few months ago...

This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Stories from The Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana.

I was a theatre major, and like most theatre majors, I: 1. Insist on spelling “theatre” with an “re” and 2. Don’t actually make theatre any more (and even seeing any plays in performance during the last few years has been a challenge for well-documented, world-historical reasons). Yet still, my training has had lifelong implications, including my general aversion to film...

This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month The Wild Hunt by Emma Seckel.

Every summer, my extended family and I rent houses in a small town along the Oregon coast. For a week, we take long walks along the beach, spend afternoons cooking elaborate meals, play Fascination in the arcade one town over, and stay up late, talking about nothing and everything over a dwindling bonfire.

It’s great, but it’s also a lot (is a family vacation ever really a vacation?). This year, when I needed a moment of quiet, I took my copy of The Wild Hunt by Emma Seckel out to an Adirondack chair...

This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Keeping Two by Jordan Crane.

My partner once collapsed in my arms. An ambulance was called and he spent several days in the ICU. Happily, no major medical interventions were required, he recovered quickly, and remains in good health.

But the memory of that instant, and the following days, has haunted me ever since. In part because I have long fought a habit of imagining worst-case scenarios and summoning forth those hypothetical emotional states, and the events of that day spawned dozens of new terrible possibilities to fixate on. Maybe this is an attempt at a sort of emotional inoculation, but if so, it’s one that couldn’t possibly succeed; one of...

This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.

I’ve had some memorable conversations with my book club (which has been running for six years now!), but the most memorable evening I’ve spent with them, we spent arguing over Sayaka Murata’s novel, Earthlings. We were out at a restaurant, a near-empty carafe of wine and bucket of fries on the table between us, debating whether the ending was deranged in a good way or a bad way...

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

I used to be a purist with my books. I never dog-eared the pages, never wrote in the margins, never cracked the spine. Lately, though, I’ve become a bit looser with that. I’ve found that it makes a book more meaningful when you can see the record of having read and interacted with it — it makes the text that much more alive.

And boy, is there a record of me having read Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch. My copy is heavy with notations. I dog-eared pages, drew stars next to passages I didn’t want to forget, underlined sentences worth remembering. It is so good. So beautifully written. So intricate...

This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine.

My grandmother was the family genealogist. The bulk of her research centered our most prominent ancestors, who were members of the ill-fated Donner Party. The horrors that my great-great-great-grandmother endured while emigrating to California are well-documented, and together my grandmother and I hunted for accounts in used bookstores all across the West. But then there’s a gap: I know nothing about the following generation; my knowledge of the family history picks up with my great-grandfather in Minnesota in the early twentieth century. How the family line got from point A to point C is a mystery to me, and Grandma isn’t around to ask any ...

This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Either/Or by Elif Batuman.

One of my very favorite memories from my first semester at college was the afternoon my freshman poetry workshop met up with another poetry workshop to “celebrate” the work we’d done by reading our (very bad) poems out loud for each other. We went around in a circle; I read a poem I had (predictably) written about books; and then we got to the two standouts: a young woman and a young man, recent exes, who cleared their throats and, while their eyes watered (a detail I swear to), they read their poems out loud...

This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month The World Belonged to Us by Jacqueline Woodson and Leo Espinosa.

I’m a nostalgia skeptic. I say that as someone in the final days of his thirties, an age when all the normal human inclinations — pushed along by Big Culture — are driving many of us elder millennials to remember just how good things — especially products — used to be. (Exhibit A: The Garbage Pail Kids Tarot Deck, coming in August!)