On a college trip to England, I wandered off by myself to explore a small town. I wanted to find a bookstore, and I wanted to find a very specific book. It was not a book I had ever seen, yet I thought it must exist. As I entered a secondhand and antiquarian bookstore, I …
We’re pleased to introduce Amber James as a contributing editor to NWBL. James is a freelance all-star and part-time Powell’s cashier who’s been a volunteer for PNBA for several years. Lately, she’s been helping us out with social media. Our Portland readers can meet Amber tomorrow (Saturday the 25th) at Powell’s 41st Anniversary Block Party (music, authors, …
Move over Tom Clancy and Richard Marcinko. I have discovered a writer, Tom Grace, with a body of work going back to the late 1990’s.
Trying to introduce Cheryl Strayed reminds us of what she wrote in her Pushcart Prize-winning essay Munro Country, about meeting Alice Munro for the first time and fumbling over what to say to the fiction icon who she’s long admired. She finally concludes there’s “both too much and nothing to say.” You really have to read …
Days 27 & 28. For the grand finale of 28 Authors, 28 Variations on a List, we’re pleased to present the author/illustrator and life team Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis, whose collaboration Wildwood has been hailed as both beautiful to behold and to read. Wildwood has been number one on the NW Independent Bestseller List …
“Portlander Vanessa Veselka has written a phenomenal debut novel that kicks ass and takes names. Zazen (which is set in an slightly alternate universe, but is still wonderfully and satirically recognizable as Portland) is a brilliant, moving, maddening, punk-rock novel that will give you fury and hope.”— Jill Owens, Powells.com. Buy Zazen from Powell’s.
“As Damascus, Mohr's third novel, is set in a bar, the comparisons to Charles Bukowski are inevitable. However, Mohr's worldview is far less caustic than Bukowski's. He gives readers a novel that pulls off the nearly impossible feat of breaking their hearts while lifting their souls and finds a lust for life in characters that …
We were intrigued when we found out that Indigo Editing Senior Editor (and NWBL contributor!) Kristin Thiel has a story in the new collection Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience. The anthology’s editors asked women to explore sexuality from a male point of view—to engage in “fictional cross-dressing” that, as the press materials for the …
We love, love, love this story about two Powell’s booksellers geeking out over Richard Brautigan’s former lover. The woman stopped by the store last week to pick up a copy of Brautigan’s story collection Revenge of the Lawn and mentioned to bookseller/author/editor/publisher Kevin Sampsell that she was the woman on the cover, the one smiling over …
In a recent blog post, David Shapiro points out a couple or minor errors in the story the The Oregonian ran about his new Portland publishing company, Craigmore Creations—but he’s definitely not complaining. “The story is well written and it is our first major press appearance,” he writes. Shapiro started Craigmore Creations when he couldn’t get New York …
