Powell's Books Indispensable is a book subscription box by the iconic bookstore in Portland, Oregon.
Every 6-8 weeks, subscribers will receive another box of expertly curated new books with a focus on indie publishers.
My Subscription Addiction pays for this subscription. (Check out the review process post to learn more about how we review boxes).
The Subscription Box: Powell's Books Indiespensable
The Cost: $39.95 a shipment (every 6-8 weeks)
The Products: Thoughtfully curated new books, with an interest in indie authors, plus fun extras
Ships to: Shipping is free in the U.S., and $12.00 per package outside the U.S.
Check out all of our Powell’s Indiespensable reviews and all of our Book Subscription Box reviews!
Keep Track of Your Subscriptions: Add this box to your subscription list or wishlist!
All the shipping information is on the back of this oversized, almost poster-like page.
Night of Fire by Colin Thubron - Listed Value $26.99
This book isn't available on traditional sites—Amazon only has the hardcover version. That's because this paperback is the uncorrected proof. Cool huh?
Award-winning, bestselling novelist and travel writer Colin Thubron returns to fiction with his first novel in more than a decade, a searing, poetic masterwork of memory.
A house is burning, threatening the existence of its six tenants—including a failed priest; a naturalist; a neurosurgeon; an invalid dreaming of his anxious boyhood; and their landlord, whose relationship to the tenants is both intimate and shadowy. At times, he shares their preoccupations and memories. He will also share their fate.
In Night of Fire, the passions and obsessions in a dying house loom and shift, from those of the hallucinating drug addict in the basement to the landlord training his rooftop telescope on the night skies. As the novel progresses, the tenants’ diverse stories take us through an African refugee camp, Greek Orthodox monasteries, and the cremation grounds of India. Haunting the edges of their lives are memories. Will these remembrances be consumed forever by the flames? Or can they survive in some form?
Night of Fire is Colin Thubron’s fictive masterpiece: a novel of exquisite beauty, philosophical depth, and lingering mystery that is a brilliant meditation on life itself.
I like this writing style a lot. It deftly makes use of illustrative, evocative language that reads beautifully. And the idea of different stories weaving together is always exciting to me.
Moonglow by Michael Chabon - Value $17.39 on Amazon (retail price $28.99)
Michael Chabon is a folk hero in my hometown of Pittsburgh, as he's the acclaimed author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I've read a smattering of his work before and am eager to dive into his newest work!
This hardcover comes inside a sturdy sleeve. I love the graphic, mid-century match pattern.
Book Summary from Amazon:
Following on the heels of his New York Times bestselling novel Telegraph Avenue, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure—and the forces that work to destroy us.
In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.
Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.” It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait of the difficult but passionate love between the narrator’s grandfather and his grandmother, an enigmatic woman broken by her experience growing up in war-torn France. It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination.
From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York’s Wallkill prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of the “American Century,” the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive.
I really enjoy memoirs, so I'm excited by the memoir-meets-fiction aesthetic of this story.
Plus, Michael Chabon's voice really charms me. It's matter-of-fact, gently tongue-in-cheek, and humbly sentimental. The way he discusses his characters and their stories have a sense of curiosity about it. Even if he's being serious about a subject, the language still sounds like a real person eager to tell the story to the reader.
The box also comes with a small booklet of content about the books in the box. It's a handy companion for getting even more out of the literature.
I love this unique take on a book box info booklet!
3 Packs of Drinking Chocolate from Treehouse Chocolate Co. - Value $9.00
The "extras" in this edition are some sizable packets of specialty hot chocolate mix from Treehouse Chocolate Co. The uncommon flavors (dark chocolate, sea salt, and cinnamon and aji chili) are a super-rich, sophisticated companion to a day of winter reading. Yum!
Verdict: I really liked the Powell’s Books Indiespensable box! Given its reputable source, I'm not surprised that this box featured extremely noteworthy literature, but also that the versions they provided (the uncorrected proof and the beautifully packaged hardcover) were special in their own right. The value of the box is $53.38, making the $34.95 price extremely fair, if not a deal for the beautiful, curated books you're getting. Plus, they're current books, which you don't always find in these kinds of boxes. If you're looking for a way to get back into reading or to put you in touch with great books of the moment, I can't recommend this box enough!
What do you think of Volume 63 from Powell’s Books Indiespensable box?
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