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The soundtrack perfectly suited to facing your own mortality. ("My Way," "Wind beneath My Wings," and other popular funeral songs need not apply.) 1. "Dead Man's Party" by Oingo Boingo The first time I heard this song, I couldn't believe how good it was. It imagines death as a raucous adventure. "Who could ask for [...]

In January of this year, eight months before its release date, the buzz was already starting to build for Bill Clegg's Did You Ever Have a Family. Bookseller colleagues were passing around the few advanced reader copies we could get a hold of and telling each other, "You have to read this!" Four major review [...]

I was crying or almost crying for most of Fun Home: The Musical — I already loved Alison Bechdel's graphic novel, and I've always been a sucker for the way musicals make melodrama catchy. The song that got me most was "Ring of Keys," a song about a primal moment of identification: Sydney Lucas, playing [...]

Note: Join us this Thursday, August 27, at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing for an author event with Christopher Moore. Describe your latest book. Secondhand Souls is the sequel to my bestselling novel A Dirty Job, which was about a single dad in San Francisco who gets the job of being Death and runs [...]

Note: Join us at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing on Wednesday, September 16, for an author event with Cara Nicoletti. As a kid, I read for two reasons: the first, and most common, was to escape from my everyday life by imagining a different one — to read about people and places that I [...]

The most frequent question readers ask about An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is "Why hasn't this book been written before?" I'm flattered by that question, because it's the one I ask about texts that deeply move me; at the same time the information, argument, or story is new to me, it seems [...]

The word "idiom" originates in the Greek word ídios ("one's own") and means "special feature" or "special phrasing." Idioms are peculiar because, by definition, something that is one's own is impossible to translate or share. Idioms point to ideologies inherently foreign and strange. Taken word for word, they are often ridiculous and hilarious. But translating [...]

If you thought watching funny animal videos was a bad habit, a time-sink, a distraction from writing your novel, well, you're probably right. But if you feel like indulging a little self-delusion, here are nine animal videos that EVERY WRITER must study carefully. They were absolutely instrumental for us in writing War of the Encyclopaedists! [...]

Here are the books that knocked my socks off in 2014. All of them would make great gifts; each of them was truly something that evoked that inexpressible delight of finding an author you are excited about. ÷ ÷ ÷ Prince of Fools (Red Queen's War #1) by Mark Lawrence Prince of Fools is essentially [...]

Describe your latest book. My new novel is called Station Eleven. It's about a traveling Shakespearean theatre company in a post-apocalyptic North America. The book moves back and forth in time between the years just before a devastating flu pandemic brings about the collapse of civilization as we know it, and a time 20 years [...]

It is arguably the worst and best time to be a feminist. In the years since I first wrote Full Frontal Feminism, we've seen a huge cultural shift in the way feminism is thought of along with the same old nonsense. Decades after feminists fought for access to birth control, against sexual assault and rape [...]

Siri Hustvedt's latest novel, The Blazing World, is aptly titled; it is a tour de force about a larger-than-life artist, Harriet ("Harry") Burden, whose three great works used "masks" — male artists who claimed the works as their own. Hustvedt frames the book as an anthology of Harry's life and work after her death, including [...]

Describe your latest book. The Enchanted is a story narrated by a man on death row. The novel was inspired by my work as a death penalty investigator and some of the questions I face. Why do people do such terrible things to each other? What is the meaning of redemption? While the setting is [...]

For my second blog post (ever), I wish to conduct a simple (but extensive and even possibly endless) interview with myself. Its purpose is to force the reluctant subject into inadvertent admissions or revelations that the reclusive subject has hitherto kept secret. You were born in New Zealand. True or false? Too much importance is [...]

Editor's note: Chris Bolton is not only a former Powell's employee, he was also once the primary writer for this blog. So we are particularly proud today to post the following essay by our former coworker and friend as he promotes the publication of his first book. Congratulations, Chris! As is so often the case [...]

Growing up in an Italian-American family in Danvers, Massachusetts, Domenica Ruta had a life filled with violence and poverty but also imagination and love. Ruta's mother, Kathi, who "believed it was more important to be an interesting person than it was to be a good one," cycled between welfare and great wealth, helped get her [...]

George Saunders fans have long been stalwart champions of his work, recommending CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia to anyone who would listen, pushing copies of In Persuasion Nation and The Braindead Megaphone into the hands of the unconverted. He's always had critical praise, from no less than Thomas Pynchon ("An astoundingly tuned voice — [...]

As a writer, Whitney Otto is a democrat. Her tendency is to tell a story through a plurality of voices, to refract her narrative through a prism of perspectives. This is most obvious in her bestselling first novel, How to Make an American Quilt, whose central metaphor is literally a collection of discarded bits of [...]

I feel as though, in a certain sense, I've spent the last two years in Antarctica with Douglas Mawson while researching and writing Alone on the Ice, my book about Australia's greatest explorer. Exactly one century ago, in January 1913, Mawson pulled off the feat that Sir Edmund Hillary later called "the greatest survival story [...]

"Today is Christmas Eve. Today is my birthday. Today I am fifteen. Today I buried my parents in the backyard. Neither of them were beloved." Those dramatic first lines of Lisa O'Donnell's debut novel, The Death of Bees, launch the story of two sisters, 15-year-old Marnie and 12-year-old Nelly, who, in alternating voices (along with [...]

When you write a children's book called A Rule Is to Break: A Child's Guide to Anarchy, some eyebrows inevitably get raised in your direction. As a result, people might not come to you for parenting advice, but we say they're wrong about that. For parents fearful of children run amok, our book sets off [...]

The motto "Art and War," under imposing statues of Minerva and Mars, has graced a cartouche over the entrance to Stockholm's Riddarhuset — the House of Nobles — since 1647. Those words struck a powerful chord while doing research for my novel, The Stockholm Octavo. Providing a factual core for the story was Gustav III, [...]

In a 2003 TED Talk, Steven Johnson quipped: "Who decides that SoHo should have this personality and that the Latin Quarter should have that personality? There are some kind of executive decisions, but mostly the answer is, everybody and nobody." A running theme through Johnson's work is that complex systems operate best when they are [...]

J. Robert Lennon's first book, The Light of Falling Stars, got a glowing review from the New Yorker: "Lennon's impressive first novel — psychologically nuanced, richly detailed, unexpectedly comic — offers us an unsentimental examination of the ways in which we find and lose those we love, both before and after death." His novels and [...]

Devil Said Bang is the fourth Sandman Slim book. As I write this, I'm currently working on book five, Kill City Blues. When I started out, the last thing I thought I'd be writing was a series or anything other than science fiction. However, Sandman Slim dwells in that ever-shifting netherworld somewhere between Jim Thompson [...]