I can say this without spoiling anything, but the epilogue to Becoming Little Shell begins with reflections from “a little green house high on a hillside that overlooks Butte, Montana.” It is mid-November of 2021 and, as I wrote, I was in that house enjoying a residency where I largely completed the first draft of …
At the center of this novel is a single, inexplicable incident from the end of the Spanish Civil War, when an unknown Republican soldier caught a leader of the right-wing Falange escaping a Republican firing squad but then walked away, sparing his life. Writing six decades later, Cercas frames his own investigation into this mystery …
Takiko is an overlooked heroine—a stubborn, pregnant young woman with nothing to recommend her except her conviction that she and her child should be entitled to a life worth living. Highlighting the healing powers of nature and small acts of social resistance, this book is inspiring in the subtlest of ways. —Lucy, Secret Garden Books, …
I should perhaps be focusing on Coats’s newest book, the middle-grade fantasy The Green Children of Woolpit, but it’s just come out and well, I haven’t read it yet. But I really want to, based on how much my daughter and I enjoyed Coats’s earlier novel, The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming. I can’t …
Merci, Notre Dame. Find sanctuary in independent bookstores, where you can honor the past and imagine the future.
I couldn’t tell you who won last year’s World Series, because I don’t follow baseball. But this sports book has earned a sterling reputation as a classic that transcends the game. Author/knuckleball pitcher Jim Bouton has the humorist’s eye for telling, pithy detail, and the memoirist’s courage in sharing honest and sometimes unflattering anecdotes about himself …
The headline to a review I wrote of this book when it came out in 2004 read, “Caribou Hair Everywhere,” and I can’t think of three words that better describe it. Raised by a father who moved from the Midwest to a sod igloo in remote, northwest Alaska, young Cutuk grows toward an inevitable choice …
This is a little book, written in a modest style, but its claims are large. Despite her title, Ginzburg wants us to set aside the “little virtues” of frugality, caution, and tact for the greater ones of love, courage, and generosity. The essays were written between 1944 and 1962 in the wake of personal and …
Sit down. Right here in the aisle is fine. Get your phone, put in earbuds. Go to YouTube. Watch Li-Young Lee read his poem”This Room and Everything in It.” Buy this book. –Shawn, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA Immerse yourself in poetry at Elliott Bay Book Company and other independent bookstores.
Ever since freshman year of high school, when I was first introduced to the likes of Great Expectations and The Ox-Bow Incident, talking about books—for me—has always come a close second to actually reading them. So, in December, I boarded a plane in Philadelphia to live every bibliophile’s dream: selling books. I couldn’t have felt …
