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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."...

Some people are short story fanatics, and others avoid the form completely; in our experience, ambivalent readers are pretty rare. But even if it’s been decades since you last read a short story, chances are your eyes were dragged through at least one textbook of English class chestnuts like “Flowers for Algernon” and “To Build a Fire.” Afterwards, you were probably asked questions like: What is the climax? Who is the antagonist? Define third person omniscient. Maybe you enjoyed this; you probably didn’t. Either way, you know a thing or two about short stories. You could probably even rock a quiz about them.

In honor of Short Story Month, we invite you to test your memory (and multiple choice skills) with our Short Story Quiz. Below are quotes from 10 of the most famous short stories in modern literature...

Describe your latest book.
Twenty-one years ago I wrote my first book, A Way to Garden. All these years later, visitors to my Hudson Valley garden open days regularly bring their beat-up, outdated copies for me to sign. Shortly before what would have been its 20th anniversary, I decided to bring it back to life. I undertook a complete do-over, reflecting my expanded knowledge but also how much has changed in the technique and art of the way we garden today.  

This is a basic gardening book and then it is not so very basic, aiming to foster both practical knowledge and also connection to nature — both the science and the spirit of it. I have written that by becoming a gardener, I accidentally — blessedly — landed myself in a fusion of research lab and Buddhist retreat...

A generation after it was eradicated in the United States, measles is once again spreading across the country, where since the start of the year more than 550 cases have been confirmed in 20 states. An outbreak of the disease in New York City prompted Mayor Bill de Blasio to declare a public health emergency on April 9, and call for mandatory vaccinations in two neighborhoods of Brooklyn, where it has become clustered in the Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish communities. 

As I’ve followed the course of the outbreak, I keep finding parallels to the country’s often-forgotten fight against the most fearsome disease of them all: bubonic plague. What began as an isolated case in San Francisco soon turned into a national emergency that threatened millions of lives, forcing public health officials into making hard choices they could not easily undo...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month Furious Hours by Casey Cep.

In the space of eight years, the Reverend Willie Maxwell allegedly murdered two wives, a brother, a nephew, and a stepdaughter for life insurance money. His reign of terror, for which he was repeatedly arrested but never convicted, ended in 1977 at his step-daughter’s funeral, when the girl’s grief-stricken uncle shot the Reverend three times in the head. The uncle, too, was acquitted. Both men were defended by a dynamic, liberal white lawyer who was sure this was a story for the ages.

Harper Lee, the enigmatic author of To Kill a Mockingbird, agreed...