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

How would you describe your job to someone you just met?
I'm a Used Book Buyer. I get to sort through books and pick out the best ones for our shelves. I also get to work in the Art, Literature, and Social Science sections.

Last book you loved:
Omar Cáceres’s Defense of the Idol (translated by Mónica de la Torre) debuted in English this year from Ugly Duckling Press. Cáceres was a Chilean poet with an unbelievable biography who tried to destroy every copy of his only book because of errors in typography. Fortunately for us two copies survived, and we now have this weird and wonderful little book. 

Where are you originally from:
Petersburg, Alaska.

What did you do before you came to Powell's:
I've been a commercial...

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...

"The Wild One" by Suzi Quatro
This is the song I would say describes how I really feel inside and who I want to be. If I could have written any song in the whole wide world, this would be the one. That riff and the way she is just not having it, the way she is announcing she is the hottest thing ever, well, I am a believer, and I am sick of feeling bad.

"Any Party" by Feist
I only recently got into Feist, really around the same time I got into liking LA, and this record is very much like that city. The love is so vulnerable and touching and unlike anything I put out. I would not have, previously, ever, in a million years, left any party for any guy...

You want to stick it to the patriarchy this Valentine’s Day? Read a romance novel!

We know what you’re thinking: A delicate (yet heaving) bosom falling into the muscular embrace of a rugged (yet gentle) rascal is hardly progressive. What’s the pursuit of true love and hot sex in light of our country’s driving need for the advocacy, safety, and equality of all minorities?

Well.

1.  Have you met any congressmen who feel the need to sacrifice love and sex for basic rights?

2.  When was the last time you read a book that centered on women’s desires, where those desires were explored and celebrated and ultimately rewarded with a stable, loving relationship? What about for people in the LGBTQ community? For people with disabilities?...

Describe your latest book.
Mother Winter is a hybrid that is billed as a memoir. I began the book after my second child was born and I was brought low, corporeally, spiritually, and creatively, by the tugs and pulls on my body, time, and brain. I decided that I would get militant about my writing, as militant as I had always wished to be about my feminism, à la Silvia Federici. It had been sitting in me as a lyrical, autofiction novel in the French tradition, and eventually all the disparate parts of the characters and dialogue I was hearing in my head started to find solid ground. I write about a missing mother, one I barely knew, and had left behind in the crumbling Soviet Union of 1989. The collapse of my country and the collapse of my alcoholic mother and my exile all lined up as a chasm for a chorus of new mothers...

I’ve been an avid gardener for more than a decade, but doing the research for Growing Berries and Fruit Trees in the Pacific Northwest turned me into a bona fide berry pusher. I’m now the one giving blueberry bushes as housewarming gifts to friends who have recently bought homes, convincing parents of young children to invest in a few Alpine strawberry plants (trust me, you’ll be glad you did), or extolling the many benefits of kiwi berry vines. 

There are dozens of reasons to grow a bit of food in your backyard or on a balcony (yes, there are varieties that will do well in containers). When it comes to berries, however, here are some excellent and perhaps not so obvious ones...

Where are you from originally?
Ellis: Mt. Kisco, NY
Meloy: Helena, MT

Last book you loved:
Ellis: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh 
Meloy: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré 

Describe your first memorable reading experience.
Meloy: I remember being given the first of Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels, A Spell for Chameleon, by my cousin, who’d just finished reading it. I think I was 10 and my cousin was six years older than me — and the book seemed very grown up! The typeface was small and it was a mass market paperback, very different from the slim middle grade novels I’d been reading up to that point. I dove in and loved it...

It’s been years since I’ve cried over my son being transgender. Years since I’ve lost sleep over thoughts of his future. We’re the lucky ones. 

On November 22, 2018, I woke up, checked the news: “clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable”; and was snatched back to a place I hadn’t been in years. Essentially, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is planning to redefine “sex” in order to exclude transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people from federal nondiscrimination protections — erasing the legitimacy of gender variance and in doing so endangering the lives of all those who aren’t cisgender. We’re talking millions of people.

Let’s look at it this way: First, consider that the estimated adult trans population in American is about 1.4 million...

Describe your latest book.
I like to say that Sketchtasy is a novel that takes place in that late-night moment when everything comes together, and everything falls apart. This is Boston in 1995, a city defined by a rabid fear of difference — Alexa, an incisive 21-year-old queen, faces everyday brutality with determined nonchalance. Rejecting middle-class pretensions, she negotiates past and present traumas with a scathing critique of the world. Drawn to the ecstasy of drugged-out escapades, Alexa searches for nourishment in a gay culture bonded by clubs and conformity, willful apathy, and the specter of AIDS. Is there any hope for communal care?

There’s so much nostalgia in popular culture for the 1990s right now, and in writing Sketchtasy I wanted to work against that. Because I think nostalgia replaces all the nuance and messiness, the contradictions and possibilities, with a whitewashed product ready for mass consumption...

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...