On Wednesdays, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Bestseller List is published. Every week, we love to see what books have been most popular in independent bookstores around our region. As we peruse the list, we look for something special to showcase. Then we present this weekly feature: Thursday Themes. We discovered a math-like theme to some titles this …
Several lifetimes ago, when I was finishing my first novel, Swamplandia!, I had a kind of waking dream, something more vivid and mysterious than an idea—I still have no idea where it came from. A woman was seated in a bare room, holding up a green earhorn, an antique hearing aid. It looked like a …
In January of 2025, about a month before One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This was set to be published in North America, I received an email from my editor. He said he was worried: we’d gotten no confirmed major media at that point. By this he meant national radio, morning TV, that …
Every Wednesday, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association publishes the regional bestseller list. On Thursdays, we celebrate Thursday Themes to shine a spotlight on some of the books from the list and give our brains a different way of thinking about books. This week’s bestseller list has a Pacific Northwest Book Award winner at #1 on hardcover nonfiction. (Watch …
I grew up in a house where creativity lived in the walls. Cartoons taped along cabinets, carved rocks on display, a small unicorn painting near the coffee cups, and a 4-foot plaster cast of illustrated ducks hung on our dining room wall. As a child, I didn’t realize how these surroundings shaped my memories. They …
I am an unrepentant regional chauvinist. I believe in my heart that those of us lucky enough to call the Pacific Northwest home live in one of the best places on the planet. Perhaps because I was raised in the region—at the base of the foothills of təqʷubəʔ (aka Mount Rainier)—I have always had a …
Like most writers and cartoonists I spend an excessive amount of time in my head. I’m sensitive and self-critical. I love people, but people also make me anxious. In conversation I have to choose my words very carefully, and therefore, I rarely feel like I have anything clever to say in the moment. My voice …
The winners for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association’s 2026 Pacific Northwest Book Awards have been announced. The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) is a non-profit association of independent bookstores from five Northwest states: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. Since 1965, the annual Book Awards have recognized such luminary figures in Northwest literature as Ivan Doig, Ursula …
