Congratulations to Annie Bloom’s Books, Portland, Ore., which will celebrate its 40th anniversary on Sunday, October 28, with an afternoon party. The bookshop will serve cake, sparkling beverages, and coffee; raffle off prizes; and have a weekend sale on select titles. At 2 p.m., a toast will be made to Bobby “Annie” Tichenor, owner and co-founder of …
Author James Patterson continued his holiday tradition of independent bookseller appreciation this year, awarding $500 bonuses to 600 booksellers at independent bookstores around the country. Booksellers were nominated through a simple form, which included an opportunity to share why the bookseller deserves a bonus. In our opinion, every bookseller we know deserves a great holiday …
This book is a doozy, a colorful history of a specific time and place, which continues to have major implications today. New York in the early 1970s was facing many of the same economic problems as the rest of urban America: simultaneous blows of recession, inflation, and suburban flight sucked revenue out of the city and …
Eggers has created a thoughtful–and at times darkly humorous–idea novel that aspires to challenge the all-encompassing corporate rule of the present day, in the way that Orwell confronted the authoritarian state of the previous century. The Circle is an amalgamation of several recognizable tech/marketing/social media companies, which is led by corporation’s “3 Wise Men,” seemingly …
The fall of the Soviet Union left a power vacuum in which organized crime and former KGB agents coalesced in the newly capitalist state. The 2006 London assassination by poison of dissident Alexander Litivinenko served as a lethal threat to Russians who would defy the kleptocratic state and also displayed the willingness of some Western …
This anecdotal history of baseball is a gem. Musings—both personal and historical—are intertwined with snippets of Americana, dashes of history, and cultural observations by an urban anthropologist. Flip through the book and randomly read about pissing in the Wrigley Field troughs, Allan Dulles’ CIA coups, bubble gum and tobacco rituals, the politics of facial hair, …
Several Portland bookstores booked events this summer featuring some unusual contributors—high school students. The kids are staffers of Roosevelt High School’s Unique Ink Publishing, a student-led writing and publishing center that operates under the guidance of PSU’s Master’s Program in Publishing, more commonly known by its publishing imprint, Ooligan Press, and they’re currently leading a mini-tour for …
“When Bobby [Tichenor, store owner, Annie Bloom’s Books], Will [Peters, store manager] and I [Mary Fellows] all love a novel, you know something unusual is going on. In this case it’s a funny, edgy, good-hearted send-up of all things Seattle, in particular a badly-located, upper-crust private school. But behind all the cleverness is a really touching, …
