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 …
Check out this sassy trail hat (good for sports or reading with that mesh and brim) from Chapter One Book Store in Hamilton, MT. There’s more bookish merchandise where that came from, too. For the holidays and year ’round, many bookstores offer apparel, stickers, mugs, or other gifts for booklovers. Queen Anne Book Company in …
Many have proclaimed this to be the best piece of non-fiction in recent memory, for its historical and personal depth, and emotional candor. After inheriting a Japanese netsuke collection, ceramicist de Waal traces the “travels” of these small carvings, acquired by his great-grandfather’s cousin, and then moved from Paris to Vienna, to Tokyo, and now …
More than a decade after Tin House released his second novel The Dismal Science, Seattle fiction fixture and 2012 Washington State Book Award winner Peter Mountford returns with the story collection Detonator, a darkly funny gaggle of ten works spanning his career. These tales appear in all sorts of highbrow landmarks – The Paris Review, …
This marvelously funny, scathingly witty novel features a biracial professor, artist’s wife and mother of two. Jane has just finished her 2nd novel, a hefty tome exploring mixed-race reality in America, but her agent’s reaction leads her, instead, to pitching screenplays to a bigwig in Hollywood’s latest venture: a superficial, hackneyed portrayal of, in her …
Ostensibly a charmingly personal encyclopedia about the fictional television show Little Blue, Hazel Jane Plante’s debut novel is an incandescent love letter to trans friendship. A tender TV-and-karaoke-soaked heartbreaker that delights in pop culture. By the end I was as smitten with Little Blue and its colorful characters as Vivian was, and I fell in love with Vivian …
A polyphonic requiem of voices singing a dissonant fugue. Reading Dogeaters is like approaching the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. For when the world seems incomprehensible and history is playing out like a twisted farce. From Marcos to Trump, the Philippines to America, reading this book is like looking in a funhouse mirror. And the reflection isn’t …
Fat Ham is a staff pick from Dani at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, WA. Not all independent bookstores have a Drama section or plays on the shelves, but most can order for you– especially Pulitzer Prize winners like Fat Ham. Read contemporary classics from Elliott Bay Book Company and other independent bookstores.
What does a meaningful life consist of? One answer is the tender and thoughtful story of family told in the new novel by Jonathan Evison that explores the beautiful complexities of long term companionship. –Robert Sindelar, Third Place Books, Seattle, WA Johnathan Evison will tour starting tonight, January 7, 2025, with a launch party at …
