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

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...

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...

2023 was such a great year for fiction! We had the hardest time narrowing down our list of the best fiction books of the year, but after much debate, we settled on these 23 (an appropriate number for 2023, we decided). The books on this list take place in Hawaii, Argentina, the Hamptons, a Palace in the desert, and a land of milk and honey. We’ve got campus novels and high-concept museums, fictional biographies and black holes, ugly publishing truths and gladiatorial dystopias...

If there’s one thing you know you can rely on, it’s the good taste of Powell’s booksellers, which is soundly reflected in this year’s collection of nonfiction books that we thought were the best from this past year. On this list, you’ll find bookstores and hot dogs, doppelgangers and wolves, celebrities and shitty crafts. These books explore questions of identity, belonging, community, resistance, capitalism, colonialism, to name just a few of their topics; they’re tender and hilarious and heartfelt and insightful...

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...

Happy Friday the 13th, dear readers! And in October, no less, a month when sinking into our newest horror obsessions isn’t only recommended — it’s encouraged. Today, we’re kicking off a few weeks of horror-themed lists on the blog with one that focuses on all things fleshy, bloody, and meaty. In the weeks to come, we’ll be recommending more fright-season-appropriate books about creatures and ghouls and ghosts and cryptids for your reading pleasure. But for now, please enjoy this list of books...

In celebration of this year’s Hispanic and Latine Heritage Month, we’re excited to recommend nine (relatively) new nonfiction releases that we’re sure you’ll love. This list is filled with vital, polyphonic stories about love and community, colonialism and migration, ancestral history and Latine identity, land and movement, memory and loss. Looking for more?...