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Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

Describe your latest book.
Mistress of the Ritz is, once again for me, about a real woman whose story was untold until now. It’s set in World War II, an era I think every historical novelist explores at some point; it’s the defining event of the 20th century and so many stories are still waiting to be told. Especially women’s stories. Blanche Auzello, my heroine, was an American flapper who traveled to Paris in the 1920s to pursue a film career; instead, she fell in love with a very dapper Frenchman, Claude Auzello, whose dream was to manage the iconic Hotel Ritz. They married and Claude realized his dream; their turbulent marriage plays out against an unbelievably glamorous setting, witnessed by royalty and celebrities...

Pok Pok Noodles: Recipes From Thailand and Beyond is the final book in a trilogy of works that started off with Pok Pok: Food and Stories From the Streets, Homes, and Roadside Restaurants of Thailand and followed by Pok Pok: The Drinking Food of Thailand. Each book was roughly based on a restaurant, Pok Pok, Whiskey Soda Lounge, and Sen Yai, respectively. Sadly, Sen Yai (the restaurant this book was supposed to be based on) no longer exists, but my love for the dishes we chose for the noodle book remains unabated. Noodles have always been a huge part of my diet whether traveling or at home in Thailand or Portland. I can’t get enough! 

Quick to dish up, easy to stage from a small cart on the street or simple shophouse, inexpensive for locals, delicious and filling, noodles are part of the fabric of life in Thailand, and all over Southeast Asia for that matter...

In the opening story of Karen Russell’s new collection, Orange World and Other Stories, two “prospectors” (read: Depression-era party girls with light fingers) crash a party at a mountain lodge populated by the dead. The premise is pure Russell, as is the story’s spooky, intoxicating execution, powered by the author’s sly, evocative prose: "I had a sharp memory of standing at a bay window, in Florida, and feeling the night sky change direction on me — no longer lapping at the horizon but rolling inland. Something was pouring toward me now, a nothingness exhaled by the floury membrane of the boy." One of the pleasures of reading Russell’s short fiction is being pulled into this kind of barely unlikely scenario, where the recognizable turns suddenly porous, allowing the eerie to seep in...

Eighteen years ago, when I started writing The Obsoletes — my new novel set in the early ’90s about two teenage basketball-playing brothers who happen to be robots — the book had no robots. It also had zero brothers. It was just a story about a 15-year-old kid who loved basketball and was too nervous to talk to a girl he liked. 

I was just out of college, living in Prospect Heights, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with two friends. I had a draining day job as an architect’s assistant, but evenings and weekends I hung out at the Brooklyn Public Library to find inspiration for my fiction. Back then I considered myself a strictly “literary” writer. I fashioned my narrative after Harold Brodkey’s “First Love and Other Sorrows.” My finished book was just over 100 pages...

Someone once told me that before a child acquires language for the first time, their world is connected. Prior to that, there is no difference between a mother’s face and her hair, the grass and the dirt, or their own wiggling fingers and the air they wave them through. But once they learn the word for, say, apple, each and every apple is then cut out of the fabric of the universe and can never be put it back into the murk. 

I feel this way about about three words in particular: Chuck E. Cheese's. 

Like many children of immigrants, I grew up watching a lot of television. After elementary school, where my cousin Derek and I spent half a day not understanding a single word the teacher said, we’d rush home together to turn on the TV...

How would you describe your job to someone you just met?
This is my favorite job I’ve ever had. As the Kids Level III, I would describe my job as “creating a more literate future.”

Last book you loved:
The Pisces by Melissa Broder and I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson.

Where are you originally from?
I grew up on Long Island, New York. I no longer have a thick LI accent, but I do miss real bagels.

What did you want to be when you grew up?
A writer and a pop star.

What did you do before you came to Powell’s?
I was a bookseller for Barnes & Noble, and before that I edited reports for a company that...

What was the genesis of your current project?
Eat Like a Fish started out as a cookbook with some personal stories sprinkled throughout — a way to get people to explore the largely unknown Western culinary tradition of seaweed and how to make it a center-of-the-plate ingredient. As I worked with the publisher, the book expanded to include more of my story and about the work of GreenWave, our nonprofit that trains new ocean farmers in the restorative 3D farming model. Now there are five parts to the book. The first is my evolution from a kid who dropped out of high school to take up commercial fishing to an ocean farmer pioneering 3D farming. This took some major recalibration — I spent my life hunting and killing things for a living, now I’m basically like an arugula farmer...

As a child, my grandparents and great-aunts would periodically bend down and look me in the eye, pull me close, and ask, “Do you know where your parents keep your passport and the emergency money for tickets?” 

I did, of course. “How will I know when it’s time to run?” I asked every time we had this conversation, squirming to get away from the smell of herring and onions that was always on their breath.

“You’ll know.”

How? The question still haunts me. They fled Russia for America because of pogroms and anti-Semitism, and I grew up on their fear and hatred of that country. It’s no accident that when I sat down to write A Bend in the Stars, set in 1914 Russia, my characters struggled with the same question: How do we know when it’s time to run? ...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Cinderella Liberator by Rebecca Solnit.

We’re avid fans of Rebecca Solnit’s challenging, reference-rich essay collections, so it's exciting to find that same intelligence and empathy brought to bear in her retelling of the Cinderella story. In Cinderella Liberator, it is not just Cinderella who needs help: her stepsisters, who have been told that beauty equals happiness (and there is not enough for all), languish upstairs; Prince Nevermind, who, it turns out, is rather charming, would prefer to be a farmer; and even the mice, rats, and lizards swept up in the fairy godmother’s magic desire to take new form and have novel experiences. Under the fairy godmother’s tutelage, the story’s characters learn that it’s important to ask for help when you need it, give help where it’s needed, and live in a way that guarantees not just your own freedom, but that of the people and creatures around you. There are still spells and ball gowns and glass slippers in Cinderella Liberator, but true magic, the story instructs, is embedded in the acts of kindness and love between neighbors...

Kristen Arnett is many things — one of Book Twitter's funniest writers; a librarian in Orlando, Florida; a columnist for LitHub; a short story author; and a 7-Eleven scholar™ (according to her Twitter bio). Now she can add "novelist" to the list. Mostly Dead Things is the utterly original story of Jessa-Lynn Morton and her family, taxidermy shop owners struggling after the shocking suicide of Jessa's father. Jessa, her brother, Milo, and her mother deal with their grief in very different ways — in her mother's case, by making sexually explicit art with taxidermied animals. Jessa and Milo are also grieving the loss of her lover and his wife, Brynn, and trying to raise the children she left behind. Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, writes, "Mostly Dead Things is one of the strangest and funniest and most surprising first novels I’ve ever read."...