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This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison.

Leslie Jamison’s writing wins frequent comparisons to Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and Rebecca Solnit, arguably three of the finest nonfiction prose writers of the last 70 years. What Jamison shares with this elite crowd is an uncommon knack for drawing on disparate narrative threads and concepts to elaborate on a grand idea, be it loneliness, art, politics, illness, or an unexpected fusion of several themes. These writers also stretch the popular maxim that the personal is political; with Jamison, especially, one gets the sense that the personal is cultural...

It was during the Clinton years when I finally left Spanish Harlem. I moved to the Upper Westside of New York City, where I drank rivers of coffee at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on 111th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. I’d sit there wondering, Where does my neighborhood of El Barrio fit into this Anglo world of literature?

I was refilling my cup on a spring day with a Magritte sky and air so crisp it made you wanna cross the street to Saint John the Divine, made you wanna believe in a god who counts your birthdays, when I met a girl named E-. She was sitting outside, her legs were crossed, one shoe dangling, an open book on the table next to an ashtray of dead Camels she polished off like seconds...

Growing up in Minneapolis, my older sister and I had lots of pets (small and not-so-small) and therefore presided over many tear-soaked backyard funerals. Having a ritual during which we could say goodbye to our beloved Something Wonderful that was now Something Dead ended up being an important part of our grieving process because it helped us to heal our sad little hearts and move on. We never stopped missing any of the pets we had to bury, but we were able to make room in our hearts for those who came next.

My debut picture book, The End of Something Wonderful: A Practical Guide to a Backyard Funeral, is a gently humorous, empathetic, and lyrical how-to that guides children (and their adults) through the process of having a backyard funeral of their own...

From its first beautiful sentence — “She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones” — Maaza Mengiste’s magisterial The Shadow King drew me into the stark, dusty sweep of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Drenched in the blazing light of near-equatorial Africa, a light that feels almost omniscient as it slants through the narrative, the novel focuses most closely on a female servant named Hirut who becomes a hero of the Ethiopian resistance. Hirut’s evolution from servant to soldier is partly influenced by her masters, Kidane and Aster, both fierce patriots, but also by her anger at her position in Ethiopian society. As a young orphan from a non-aristocratic home, she is subject to servitude and rape; she is, as Aster tells her, born to fit into a world made by others...

When I was just out of college, I went to work for a German expat in Venezuela. He used the word “chaos” to describe, well, everything.

Venezuela was chaos. Traffic was chaos. The volunteers at his organization were chaos.

In his German accent, it sounded a lot like “cows” — “The line at the gas station was cows!” — and I’ve spent the years since mentally substituting the word “cows” for “chaos” every time I hear it...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib.

Darkly funny but steeped in grief, Hanif Abdurraqib’s stunning poetry collection, A Fortune for Your Disaster, reckons with the violence of the world and the violence that fills the hollows grief has carved inside the poems’ speaker. For the speaker, who is by turns grateful for emptiness and filled with desire, love, death, memory, and forgetting are both curses and choices: it is possible to take action toward forgetting, but the ghost of lost love haunts that act; as Abdurraqib’s poems make clear, heartbreak is what motivates forgetting and it’s what‘s waiting when the distraction ends. The choice is not to mourn or move on; it is to move on within the corpse embrace of loss...

How would I behave in hard times? How would you? And I mean really hard times: when doing the right thing could harm me or my family, could cast me out of society, could make me a pariah or even cost me my life. I suspect that almost everyone teases themselves with this question from time to time.

In 1911, Rudolf Ditzen and his friend Hanns Dietrich von Necker went into the woods near their homes to kill themselves. They were eighteen. They planned a sort of duel in reverse. They would count down and shoot one another. Rudolf Ditzen’s shot killed his friend, but Necker’s shot missed. Rudolf then shot himself in the chest. But instead of dying, he was arrested, tried, and convicted of murder...

Lately, I’ve been thinking a great deal about refuge. Perhaps you can imagine why. Perhaps, dear reader, the subject has been on your mind as well.

As a writer, I’ve long held the following three words from the late, utterly peerless Toni Morrison as a beacon: novels are inquiries. Novels arise from burning questions. They are born from an urgent need to explore what we want to know, and, if not to ever fully understand, at least to swim outward, beyond ourselves, for there is no other artistic genre more uniquely suited to transport us into the skin and consciousness of our fellow human beings, and this is one of the reasons novels have saved me, so many times, not only as a writer, but as a reader...

Describe your latest book.
My new novel, Overthrow, starts when a melancholy grad student in his early thirties, a specialist in modern English literature, falls in love with a man in his twenties who skateboards and writes poetry. The poet introduces the grad student to a circle of friends who like to visit the Occupy encampment across the river and are experimenting with trying to read one another's minds. Some in the group suspect that it's easier to know what other people are feeling than it's usually polite to admit. An encounter with the police leaves the group wondering if they're under surveillance, and a few members, seeking to level the playing field, try to break into a computer being used by a contractor for the city. This sets off an avalanche of legal trouble and journalistic attention — what German pundits now refer to as ein shitstorm — as well as a John Henry–like showdown between humanist and Internet-mediated modes of connection...

Step 1. Get Rid of Your Cell Phone
The carbon footprint of a cell phone is enormous, from production — which requires the mining of rare earth materials — to shipping them around the world, to the data servers that store our data. It doesn’t help that you get a new one every two years. According to one study, the carbon footprint of the entire Information and Communication Industry (ICT) — PCs, laptops, monitors, smartphones, servers — will be 14 percent of the world’s carbon footprint by 2040. That’s half as large as the entire transportation industry. Not to mention that the phone was most likely built in sweatshop conditions, where the hours are long, the pay is minuscule, and toxic conditions abound.

Step 2. Get Rid of Your Car
That’s an easy one, right? How is the filthy, inefficient combustion engine still a thing?! Oh right, oil and gas lobbyists...