Lists
by Emily B., January 19, 2021 4:40 PM

We are still in the middle of a pandemic. We've had four long years of broken norms and endless, horrifying, exhausting outrages. 2020 brought a long-overdue and ongoing reckoning with racism. We have spent January watching armed domestic terrorists attempt to stage an insurrection at the behest of political leaders. It feels like a strange time to be a policy wonk, but once it was the job of politicians to do that "boring" work and it was the job of an informed citizenry to learn about, advocate for, and criticize that work.
We can't put things back the way they were before and, in many ways, we shouldn't want to, but we can take time this inauguration day to reset, refocus, and think about the concrete policy changes we want to see made. As a small step towards that lofty goal, we have put together a reading list based on President-elect Biden's publicized policy goals for his first 100 days in office. From pandemic response and criminal justice to immigration and the economy, these books are a starting point for understanding the social issues that underlie the policy priorities of the incoming administration. May the next four years bring more time spent on policy and less time spent on Twitter...
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Interviews
by Rhianna Walton, January 19, 2021 9:27 AM
Upon first read, award-winning author Chang-rae Lee’s latest novel, My Year Abroad, is a surreal picaresque that revels in Lee’s facility for humor and pyrotechnic prose. Pulling its young hero, Tiller, from the comic banality of suburban America into an intoxicating, if terrifying, journey through the casinos, brothels, karaoke clubs, and luxury mansions of Asia, the novel’s indelible cast of characters and increasingly outlandish scenes made us laugh out loud. But beneath its rowdy exterior, My Year Abroad is a tender work, keenly interested in what it means — and what it takes — to be fully present for oneself and others. It was a joy to speak with Lee about his riotous and reverent new novel, and is a pleasure to present it as Volume 90 of Indiespensable.
Rhianna Walton: Something I was thinking about while reading is that My Year Abroad is very much a picaresque in the way it pops gleefully from one outlandish episode to the other with its plucky hero, except Tiller's not typical of the genre...
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Lists
by Jeremy Garber, January 18, 2021 9:35 AM
While it may be hard to look at our fledgling new year and see what 2021 has in store for us, we’re already confident that it will be another banner year for literature in translation. Authors, editors, and translators have been working tirelessly on your behalf, lovingly preparing that new novel or story collection bound to be the one you rave tirelessly about to friends, family, and complete strangers (c’mon?, they looked bookish!I). Each month, we’ll post a roundup of new and forthcoming fiction written by authors from around the globe.
Perhaps your New Year’s resolution is to broaden your reading habits. Maybe you’ve committed to reading at least one book from a different country or culture each season. Perchance you want to fill your literary passport until you can resume filling your real one. It’s possible you just want to be a better global citizen. Whatever your reasons, we’re certain you’ll find enough new books each month to sate even the most voracious literary appetite...
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Original Essays
by Janice P. Nimura, January 15, 2021 10:14 AM
I’ve always loved historic house museums, loved peering beyond the velvet rope into a Victorian bedroom or a colonial kitchen and imagining the ghosts that wore those dresses, or worked the handle of that butter churn, or laid the fire in that grate. If the rooms still exist, with their ornaments and implements intact, surely the people must also be hovering nearby? The veil between past and present feels transparent.
I’ve spent the last five years getting to know Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, pioneering women doctors and prolific writers who gave me plenty to do in the archives. But some of the best discoveries happened when I left the library and started following them around out in the world. When you’re trying to tell a story about people born two centuries ago, it helps to stand where they stood, wherever that is still possible...
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Lists
by Eden Dawn, January 5, 2021 9:08 AM
The fun side effect of writing a book full of over 100 date suggestions specially tailored for my fellow Oregonians is that everyone who finds out will ask you what they should do for [insert birthday/anniversary/any random Saturday afternoon] which I genuinely love to oblige. The ask comes through to my brain like I imagine a quarter goes into a fortune-telling machine and the gears begin to grind and clank until a little slip of paper spits out of my mouth with the idea printed upon it, to hopefully delight and entertain the recipient. But add in the complications of our fair city in her, how shall we say, more challenging winter months (not to mention a global pandemic) and the gears in my fortune-telling brain machine go into overdrive to accommodate. Though the idea of dates might seem superfluous as we creep towards Year Two of This Thing, I’d contend they’re more important than ever as working from home on top of each other, lack of vacations, fiscal worries, and general mind-numbing stress can make even the best of us forget to appreciate the ones getting us through this...
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Lists
by Powell's Staff, January 1, 2021 8:03 AM
We generally write a company-wide list of New Year’s reading resolutions, but if getting through the political, economic, healthcare, and literal fires of 2020 didn’t absolve us of whatever small literary sins we carry, nothing will and we’re moving on unrepentant. And, as booksellers, moving on means turning the page in its least metaphorical sense. For some of us, 2021 will involve the first chapter of a novel in translation, or a history of empire, or a report on the Anthropocene. For others, a mythology-inspired fantasy or an 80-year-old thriller. In a way, the books themselves are less important than the act of faith they will require of us: to move forward into the unexpected, mind open and unafraid.
The Hole
by Hiroko Oyamada and David Boyd
The author's previous book, The Factory, was so strange and interesting, plus it's another slim volume that's so easy to carry around...
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Lists
by Powell's Staff, December 30, 2020 2:08 PM
It feels like a wild understatement to talk about how this has been a difficult year on every level — global, national, local, and personal. 2020 has become shorthand for overlapping and ongoing crises, for disaster on top of disaster, for navigating a shared sense of awfulness. The usually cheerful look-back-at-the-year roundups have taken on a new tone of survival, and every book we recommend comes with a stated or implied "how it might help you handle everything."
In that spirit: These are the books that saw us through this cursed year. They’re titles that gave us an escape hatch into sunnier times, or the necessary background (informational or emotional) to better understand our present...
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Original Essays
by Powell's Books, December 24, 2020 9:01 AM
‘Twas the Blursday before Christmas
(Or was it… July?)
The days were all shorter
We didn’t know why
See, we’d hung up our lights
Several seasons ago
To cheer ourselves up
In a year full of woe
Exhausted by Zooming
And with no sense of time
Alarmed by the increase
In Amazon Prime...
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Lists
by Gigi Little, December 14, 2020 8:31 AM
Picture this. You're a writer. You've been working on your book for a long time: doing research, writing, editing. You've put in all the often-frustrating hours (weeks? months? years?) of submitting the book, getting rejections, finally hooking an agent and/or a publisher, and then the day arrives: you're putting out your very first book! And... (sigh) it's 2020.
But even as bookstores closed and in-store launch events evaporated, the books endured. One of the things that has sustained me in this very different year has been discovering new voices telling their stories. In honor of that, I've put together a list of some of my, and my fellow booksellers', favorite debuts of 2020. We hope you'll discover someone new...
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Lists
by Rhianna Walton, December 10, 2020 8:20 AM
In my experience, Hanukkah books are schmaltzy. Like the holiday, they can try too hard to fit in, coopting mainstream Christmas traditions like elves and reindeer. Or else they overflow with American Yiddish stereotypes, fretting bubbes and Moishes on every corner. It’s a shame, because traditional Yiddish literature is a sly treat, simultaneously bitingly funny and mournful — grieving the near-constant loss of the people and conventions it’s satirizing. That’s a tall order for a kids’ book celebrating Hanukkah, but when I look for books to share with my interfaith children, I seek just a thread of that poignancy, a point of access to the tension between stubborn joy and angst that defines Jewish literature across time and cultures...
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