Butts Are Everywhere written by Jonathan Stutzman, illustrated by Heather Fox Who doesn’t love an entire book about butts? Cheeky and guaranteed to bring out the chuckles this book leaves no tuchus out. Set your backside down and hang out with this book. –Jesica DeHart, Neill Public Library, Pullman, WA Animals Brag About Their Bottoms …
This book continued to haunt me weeks after I finished it, like some dark, lyrical cloud. Hurricane Season exists sharply in the present—the ways in which violence affects every sense; this prose will make you squirm—but is simultaneously outside of time, folkloric. Melchor’s writing is devastating and propulsive: As much as I sometimes wanted to, I could …
However many books German writer and editor/publisher Jo Lendle has written, this evocative novel of the life and work of Alfred Wegener, known ultimately for helping develop theories of continental drift, is the first to be given to us in English (and done in masterful manner by Katy Derbyshire). To arrive at that juncture there …
A classic of European literature unavailable in English for decades, Three Summers is perfectly timeless and perfectly seasonal. Set in the countryside of prewar Greece, it traces the doings and developing identities of a trio of sisters growing into adulthood, each of whom finds a different way to balance her desires for love and freedom. …
A poignant, gripping novel about the refugee crisis challenging the globe. Recently retired and suddenly finding himself adrift, Richard becomes captivated by a group of young African refugees being housed by the German government in his quiet Berlin suburb—Who are these men? What do they want? The answers seem simple, yet issues of power, humanitarian …
A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter was my favorite read of 2016. I wrote about it on my blog, Books Can Save a Life: A Woman in the Polar Night is an astounding memoir by Austrian artist Christiane Ritter who, in 1933, joined her scientist and hunter-trapper husband, Hermann, on the remote …
Sometimes a book comes into the store that I know almost nothing about, and I can’t help but divert it into my own bag instead of putting it onto the shelf. That’s what happened with this short novel, by a Japanese-German novelist who writes in both languages. Despite the title, it’s the story of three …
A great German mystery recently discovered through a customer recommendation… It’s a dark novel set in a small town with lots of secrets that come bubbling to the surface when a local man found guilty of murdering two young women returns after having served his time. This is the fourth in the series but I …
“If you just opened to any page in this book and read the first sentence that appealed to you, it would sell itself. In my mind, it leaps off of the bookshelf, into your arms, and being finally introduced, you and it become inseparable. “Jules Renard’s life is a strange and joyful mix of the mundane …
