Powell's Books

Our July calendar of events is here! Click through for details:...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:46:29 -0700

Our July calendar of events is here! Click through for details: http://powells.us/143WTHB

(P.S. Did you know that if you can’t make it to the event, you can usually preorder a signed copy online? It’s true.)

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Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:51:59 -0700

The latest from Neil Gaiman! We have copies of The Ocean at the...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:06:47 -0700

The latest from Neil Gaiman! We have copies of The Ocean at the End of the Lane in our stores and online. Plus, as one of our new favorites, it’s 30% off for a limited time: http://powells.us/13ZJAYC

Lian Dolan on the Powell’s Books blog:...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:56:22 -0700

Lian Dolan on the Powell’s Books blog: http://powells.us/14IkMqC

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Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:05:57 -0700

“The Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’ is like a...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:25:49 -0700

“The Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’ is like a secret that you want to share far and wide, a song about not needing friends just as you realize how much you need friends, a song that taught this writer a thing or two about emotional connection and atmosphere and what it feels like to fall in love with other people’s love.”

Read more of Richard Melo’s original essay on the Powell’s blog: http://powells.us/14GDMpt

"We writers are a whiny lot. And not everyone likes to listen."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:51:00 -0700

“We writers are a whiny lot. And not everyone likes to listen.”

- I’m blogging at Powell’s this week. I answered a few questions about writing, specifically sharing your work with your comrades and using outlines. Feel free to ask more! (via jamiatt)

Happy to have Jami Attenberg guest-blogging this week!

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Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:10:32 -0700

strugglesofanengineer: Powell’s City of Books is a very cool...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 09:32:23 -0700

strugglesofanengineer:

Powell’s City of Books is a very cool place.

We’re very excited to announce that Powell’s is hosting our...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:26:46 -0700

We’re very excited to announce that Powell’s is hosting our first-ever design contest!

Your original artwork could be featured on a limited-edition Powell’s tote bag. (Plus prizes!) Details here: http://powells.us/14BFsQW

Heidi Durrow: What was the inspiration for Good Kings Bad Kings?...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:48:00 -0700

Heidi Durrow: What was the inspiration for Good Kings Bad Kings? Not just the spark of the story, but the wonderfully rich and varied voices of the seven characters who tell the tale?

Susan Nussbaum: For me, it’s always been about letting disabled characters speak for themselves. The way disabled people are represented by the dominant culture is most always as a foil for the nondisabled protagonist. They’re in the story so the nondisabled person “can become a better person.” Once the disabled character fulfills that role, they’re usually killed off, miraculously cured, or institutionalized.

Here’s an example: The movie Million Dollar Baby is based on a woman named Katie Dallam who learned how to box and early in her career sustained a traumatic brain injury in the ring. The first thing Hollywood does is trade in the head injury for a spinal cord injury, making the character more accessible to a mass audience. Then they kill her. But first they lay in this very subversive storyline involving her begging Clint Eastwood to kill her, or “euthanize” her. That’s big in Hollywood. Now that I have a disability, I can’t go on! type of garbage. It’s a strategy that solves that pesky problem of what to do with the disabled character once they’ve outlived their usefulness. Meanwhile, Clint Eastwood has become a better person as opposed to a killer because she begged him to do it. And they all win Oscars and live happily ever after.

Now the real irony here is, Katie Dallam is alive and well somewhere in Kansas, working as a painter. Not a house painter but a very gifted artist. Did she recover from her injury? No. She will always be dealing with the aftermath of that. Check out her work online.

So I’m always interested in giving a true voice to disabled characters, who are multidimensional, sexual, capable human beings with good senses of humor — and who sometimes become overwhelmed and depressed, like nondisabled people. But they are as unlikely to kill themselves as nondisabled people. What disabled people are up against is not simply the disability. If only that were the case! No, the really disabling problem is the oppression that rains down on us because of the disability.

And because I know lots of disabled people of all stripes and all ages, and live with a significant disability myself, and have a good ear for language, I feel like I could write characters that properly represent. I would be very surprised if there was another book out there by a disabled fiction writer that contains multiple disabled characters. Not to brag. Not at all. But that’s how rare it is.

Heidi Durrow, author of The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, interviews Susan Nussbaum about her new book: http://powells.us/14ByDyW

Unintentional dashboard conversations.

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:07:00 -0700

Unintentional dashboard conversations.

So many good signed editions available at Powells.com! Browse...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:45:30 -0700

So many good signed editions available at Powells.com! Browse ‘em all: http://powells.us/14BlPbU

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Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:12:23 -0700

airshipdaily: Cheese Reads: Ten Amazing Cheeses and their...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:24:53 -0700

airshipdaily:

Cheese Reads: Ten Amazing Cheeses and their Literary Counterparts

Tom Robbins is Taleggio.

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Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:34:15 -0700

buzzfeed: Yes yes yes to all of this. A new friend for...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:04:06 -0700

buzzfeed:

Yes yes yes to all of this.

A new friend for Feminist Ryan Gosling.

Drop whatever you were doing and go watch the film about female...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 09:24:55 -0700

Drop whatever you were doing and go watch the film about female superheroines* that is streaming on PBS right now: powells.us/13LkNHt

*Annoyingly, spellcheck doesn’t recognize that as a word.

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Fri, 14 Jun 2013 09:14:47 -0700

mallendrae: #portland #powells #cthulhu #lovecraft ...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 09:01:37 -0700

mallendrae:

#portland #powells #cthulhu #lovecraft

“Phnglui mglw nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah nagl fhtagn”