PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham.

A reading goal of mine for 2024 (call it a resolution, if you must) is to read more genre fiction. My reading tends to fall into four buckets: literary fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, and poetry. But genre is so interesting and popular these days, and I am a bookseller, so I aim to have a more well-rounded sense of what books are selling. A reading goal of mine for 2024...

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”...

This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, Roaming by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki.

I think most of us have had a trip that was felt like a milestone of adultness, a demonstration (to ourselves, if no one else) that you’re now someone who can afford and handle the logistics of becoming a tourist. Like the characters in Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki’s Roaming, my personal first adult trip was also to New York City, though I was a few years ahead of them. The highlight of my trip was seeing the all-too-short Broadway run of Lisa Kron’s Well...

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...

This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, A Little Luck by Claudia Piñeiro.

They say that comedy is tragedy plus time, but even I — a poor student of mathematics — can see the flaw in that algebra. Time may allow some tragedies to become grist of comedic mills — I am old enough to understand references to Johnny Carson asking a groaning audience “too soon?” or the truism that “no one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” — but most tragedies’ reverberations never change in a way that makes them susceptible to attempts at humor, even when it isn’t still too soon...

This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa.

The summer after I graduated from college, I spent a month sleeping between the stacks of Shakespeare & Co in Paris. It had been a dream of mine ever since I found out about their tumbleweed program — started by the store’s founder, the legendary George Whitman, in 1951, it offered free housing to “tumbleweeds,” in exchange for a couple hours of work and a promise to read...

This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore.

Since my mom’s passing, I’ve had two recurring dreams: in the first, all of the teeth on the right side of my mouth disintegrate; they fall out like enamel crumbs, leaving my cheek a caved-in wreck (Google tells me that the meaning of this dream is that I must be going through some kind of monumental loss, which — ha, ha). In the second, I’m in a crowded room...

This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, Open Throat by Henry Hoke.

My favorite (favourite?) book of 2022 was Shelia Heti’s Pure Colour. It is an extremely weird book about family, reality, and perception. I think my favorite thing about that book was that it was so self-assured in its weirdness that I never questioned it or felt nervous on its behalf. To love a book, I need it to both understand its project and then to convince me that it has achieved...

This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month The Guest by Emma Cline.

I read most of The Guest while on a much-delayed train ride between Portland and Seattle. The tracks lead passengers past incredible vistas of the Columbia River as well as right next to houses with residents who must be inured to the sensation of trains rattling their windows throughout the day and night. There is something about staring out from the window of a train that makes one feel anonymous, both distant and like one is trespassing ...

This week, we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month, Juno Loves Legs by Karl Geary.

There’s a moment in Juno Loves Legs, the new coming-of-age novel from Karl Geary, where our angry, irascible, neglected, twelve-year-old Juno grabs her new friend — Sean, whom she’s nicknamed Legs — and asks him: “Would you like to see where I’m buried?”

Juno and Legs are both young and new to this friendship, but already they sense a kindred spirit: a fellow outsider...