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

How would you describe your job to someone you just met?
The Large Buy Department's job is to purchase large amounts of books in bulk from stores and personal collections all around the country. Then we dig through boxes and boxes of books and pull out the ones we can sell and get them into stores.

Last book you loved:
I just finished the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Cixin Liu and it's some of the best sci-fi I've ever read. I was blown away by his ideas about the implications of humanity heading into space, and how reasonable his extrapolations about the future felt.

Where are you originally from?
I'm originally from San Antonio, Texas...

Thirty-three-year-old Carmen Maria Machado is a bit of a wunderkind, prestigious enough to warrant a Wikipedia page, but too young for it to be much more than a list of her accomplishments. Shortlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for her debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, Machado has also received a National Book Critics Circle Award and Lambda Literary Award, and been a finalist for the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize, Nebula Award, and Shirley Jackson Award, among others.

Though race rarely figures directly into Machado’s work...

I turned eight the year Stevie Wonder’s album Hotter Than July was released. My favorite song from that album was “Master Blaster.” Like most people, I imagine, I called it “Jammin,’” from its refrain, “Nobody ever told you that you / would be jammin’ until the break of dawn.” A reggae-influenced jubilant song, it makes you want to dance and laugh. And I was listening to it, nostalgically, the day before I heard that the former and first Zimbabwean prime minister, Robert Mugabe, had died.

I cried. Not over Mugabe’s death, but over his loss. Before he was a despot, he was a freedom fighter. In “Master Blaster," Wonder sings, “Peace has come to Zimbabwe / Third World's right on the one / Now's the time for celebration / 'Cause we've only just begun.” It's a party song, and a revolutionary one...

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...