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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...

If you know anything about the booksellers at Powell's Books, you know we love books and you know we love getting excited about books. Our quarterly book preview is one of our favorite things to put together for the blog, because we get to be loud and enthusiastic about all of the great releases coming out over the next few months, and there are some really great releases...

For the fourth year running, we asked Powell’s booksellers to recommend the book that helped them the most through this past year — 2023 was another rough year in a long line of them, so it should be no surprise that the books that came in were escapist and heartfelt, redemptive and generous, wise and filled with the healing power of love. The books on this list nourished us...

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...

Every December, when the Portland sun disappears, my mental health depends on a steady stream of sugary-sweet holiday rom-coms. While I love the low-budget movies (unlicensed new pop songs with auto-tuned jingle bells! Every scene obviously filmed in the same McMansion, even the ones that take place at "work"! Chemistry between romantic leads that lands anywhere between "wooden strangers" and "sizzling Christmas miracle"!), and while I love the high-budget movies (better music and settings, but chemistry can still be a struggle!), there's no replacing a holiday romance book. Nothing warms my heart more...

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...

Here we are, with our final literature in translation round-up of 2023! And what a year it’s been, full of great books from around the world, all enthusiastically recommended by Powell’s booksellers. We’ll be back with a new post in January 2024, but until then, we hope you enjoy these eight new titles, released in November. On this list, you’ll find a tender novel about friendship from Mexico; “a sordid tale of a man on the run” from a Brazilian legend; a Lebanese-French author’s wild tale...

Every year, we like to celebrate Native American Heritage Month by featuring a list of recently published books by Native authors. This year, we’re featuring new titles that are filled with hauntings and curses, creatures and body horror, witches and missing children, Vikings and dragons, tradition and historical dispossession, apocalypses and landscapes corroded by grief. These stories are filled with questions about belonging, community, identity, intergenerational trauma, Indigenous identity...

In our third and final blog feature for this Halloween season, we’re featuring books that are filled with creatures and cryptids. In these books, you’ll find curses and family trauma, monsters of the deep and monsters of the mind, Bigfoot and deadly deer, anthropomorphic animals and Frankensteined children, mermaids and vampires. Happy Halloween, you lovely readers...

As I write this, the weather outside has gone from sunny to gloomy and rainy: perfect reading weather. To celebrate, we’ve pulled together a list of our favorite works in translation published this last month. On this list, you’ll find a tender and melancholy novella from Japan; a satirical novel about undocumented workers in Paris from an Ivorian author; an award-winning author co-translates herself from Italian, in a myriad of stories about Rome; an acutely, beautifully written story collection...