Lists
by Kelsey Ford, January 12, 2024 9:37 AM
I’m not a huge believer in new year’s resolutions — they always feel like set ups for failure and disappointment instead of the well-meaning self-bettering they’re intended to be. However, I do believe in the fresh promise of a new year and taking the opportunity to deliberately (and gently) think about your routines and what you might be missing.
I also believe in balance, and that for every good, new routine, you deserve to add in a little bad, too. Toward that end...
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Powell's Picks Spotlight
by Kelsey Ford, January 3, 2024 8:47 AM
This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, Nonfiction by Julie Myerson.
I’ve spent a lot of this last year thinking about family and the stories we tell about family. It’s been a difficult year for my family, which means that we’ve done a lot of reminiscing and storytelling as we process our loss and grief. Inevitably, this storytelling becomes something closer to a bargaining session: “that’s not what happened” versus “no, this is what I remember”...
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Lists
by Kelsey Ford, December 13, 2023 8:46 AM
2023 wasn't just a great year for books: it was also a great year for movies — we had movies that were grandiose and intimate, movies that made us yearn and movies that made us cringe (complimentary). For the second year in a row, we wanted to bring you a list of books to pair with your favorite movie from 2023. No matter what flavor you prefer — whether it be stories...
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Lists
by Kelsey Ford, December 6, 2023 8:53 AM
While putting this post together, I realized that the original song this is based on, “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” needs very little amending to become horrific: why is someone gifting their lover so many different kinds of birds? That can’t be safe? But we love notching the horror up whenever we can, so in our version of the song — a list of holiday-themed horror novels — we’re exchanging drummers for zombies, leaping lords for mutilated bodies, and milking maids for debaucherous yule lords...
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Best Books
by Kelsey Ford, November 10, 2023 8:48 AM
In a world as scary as ours is, sometimes you need to sink into a terrifying story to distract yourself. Which is where our list comes in: the best horror of 2023, as determined by Powell’s booksellers, experts in all things macabre and eerie and unnerving. On this list, you’ll find books about vampires and vaqueros, monsters and slashers, curses and carnivorous houses, mermaids and jellyfish and even Tom Cruise.
Get your late-night-reading-oil ready, because you won’t want to put any of these books down. Without further ado: the Best Horror of 2023....
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Lists
by Kelsey Ford, October 20, 2023 8:48 AM
Today, we bring you ghosts and ghouls. Books that will make you feel like you just slept over in a haunted house and woke up in another dimension; books that will make the hair on your neck stand up, sure that someone’s watching you; books that will make you shiver, make your heart leap into your throat, and riddle your skin with goosebumps. Enjoy this selection of eerie...
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Q&As
by Kelsey Ford, October 3, 2023 9:39 AM
The release of Elizabeth Hand’s newest novel, A Haunting on the Hill, marks the first official sequel to Shirley Jackson’s iconic The Haunting of Hill House, officially authorized by the Shirley Jackson estate. A Haunting on the Hill returns us to that malignant house, alongside a group of writers, actors, and singers who think it will be the perfect place to finesse their production of a very witchy play. They probably should’ve paid attention to the warnings about the house, but if they had...
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Five Book Friday
by Kelsey Ford, September 8, 2023 9:43 AM
Wolves and hens and bears and owls and koalas — oh my! One of my favorite categories of books is nonfiction that combines the history and cutural foot(paw?)prints of a species alongside memoir, literary criticism, science, sociopolitical analysis, travelogue, ecological research.... really, any combination of the above. There are so many books that fall under this wide umbrella, but I wanted to bring five together as a starting point, in case you, like me, can’t get enough of these books about the animals...
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Powell's Picks Spotlight
by Kelsey Ford, August 2, 2023 8:36 AM
This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, The Museum of Human History by Rebekah Bergman.
On a small isthmus, a crowd gathers to celebrate (or, maybe, to mourn) the twenty-fifth year of Maeve’s sleep — an eight-year-old who’s hasn’t aged a day in the nearly two decades since she fell into a coma following a near-drowning incident. But she’s not the only anomaly on this island.
Rebekah Bergman’s astounding debut, The Museum of Human History, breaks open questions of what you’re willing to accept in order to preserve what you might, eventually, lose; how to live in the face of dying and how to die in the face of living; what it...
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Lists
by Kelsey Ford, July 27, 2023 9:10 AM
I love horror movies and I love books, so I am an absolute sucker for any book that gets meta with its horror, whether the story takes place on the set of a cursed remake or a reality TV shoot. Since it’s the summertime, a season that’s especially perfect for pulpy reads, I thought I’d pull together a list of some recent favorites. This is a list filled with homages to film noir and slashers, occultism and curses, TV shows about ghost hunters and an enigmatic man named Mister Magic, podcasters...
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