From the recommendations of bookseller and kids’ author Rosanne Parry, here are three middle grade novels perfect for 9- to 14-year-olds: The Artifact Hunters by Janet Fox is like Harry Potter set in a magical school in Scotland. But, unlike Harry Potter, the characters travel through time in an attempt to solve real historical problems and keep the dangers of the …
Have you ever wondered about the idea of progress, about whether life is better today than it was a generation ago, or fifty generations ago, or five hundred generations ago? Christopher Ryan explores these themes in depth. Civilized to Death challenges the Narrative of Perpetual Progress (NPP) in its many iterations. The civilized define themselves …
July is a master of mining uncomfortable moments, both for laughs and for poignant revelations of character. Well, poor Cheryl Glickman’s life is one long, uncomfortable moment. So, when her bosses coerce shy, awkward middle-aged Cheryl into housing their obnoxious Amazonian twenty-something daughter, Miranda July revels in the opportunity to explore all the weird, murky, …
“Paul Greenberg’s Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food is filled with good stories, good science and good writing! It’s a fascinating book with a worrisome message. My book group loved it.”—Mary, Annie Bloom’s, Portland
“Given the historic revolution in Egypt this spring, Alaa Al Aswany’s novel, The Yacoubian Building, couldn’t be more relevant. This compelling story illustrates how impossible it is to lift yourself up in a society riddled with corruption. It also shows how moments of grace can be found in the strangest places. (You can also download …
Whenever we buy a book, we say we buy a “copy” of it. We buy a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow, say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word “copy” fails. Because what I experience when I read Gravity’s Rainbow, or Beloved, or …
Before the first official reading of my book, Little Green (Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts, 2010), at Annie Bloom’s Books in Multnomah Village, I was a little nervous. That evening in June on the final night of the NBA playoffs, I took the #44 bus to The Village, my old neighborhood. In the early 90’s …
