Elissa Washuta’s White Magic is a collection of amazing essays about loneliness, addiction, cultural devastation, and grief. Washuta, a member of the Cowlitz tribe, explores the persistent trauma of colonization on the native peoples of North America, as well as her own efforts to find her own place and identity in this modern world. Along the …
It’s time for a Thursday Theme, where we shine a spotlight on some of the titles featured in this week’s Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association regional bestseller list. Several of the books that rose to the top of readers’ stacks this week have judgment or reviews worked into the titles. The Anthropocene Reviewed John Green (Hardcover Nonfiction #10) …
Every Thursday, we shine a spotlight on some of the titles featured in this week’s Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association regional bestseller list. It’s a bit like a game of Scattergories mixed with a title-driven Rorshach test, with a dash of market research. Last week, we did the WHERE theme; now let’s do the WHEN! When the Stars …
Poet Ross Gay tasked himself with what sounds like a job for a Hallmark greeting card writer: he spent a year looking for things that gave him joy, be they people, places, or events big or small. Unlike the sentiments usually found on schmaltzy greeting cards, though, the brief prose essays that Gay has written …
On the livestreaming event celebrating the 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award Winners, an audience member asked the authors for book recommendations. Here are some of the books that came up, some literally pulled from stacks near the authors for show and tell: Entangled Life (recommended by Silvia Morena-Garcia) The Gilded Ones (recommended by Kim Johnson. …
From Broadway Books in Portland, OR: On Inauguration Day 2017, Broadway Books gave away copies of We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This gesture was so well received, we decided to select a book to give away on this year’s Inauguration Day. After much deliberation, the book we selected is Wendell Berry’s Think Little. This slim …
Be sure to read the full list, with recommendations from booksellers around the country, but why not start here, with favorites from Portland and Seattle booksellers? John Rember, A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World (University of New Mexico Press) Jeremy Garber, Powell’s, Portland: John Rember’s A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World collects …
“One of the great figures in Western literature has passed on to the last best place. He will be sorely missed.” –Pamela Lehman Meyer From the obituary in the Missoulian by Cory Walsh December 5: “What we find in these stories, over and over again, is talk of home, lost or sought after, or in …
Before she was known for her memoir Wild, Cheryl Strayed was writing advice columns under the pseudonym Dear Sugar. The essays collected in this book are unlike any other advice pieces I’ve ever read; they’re filled with empathy and gut-wrenching honesty and are the perfect thing for someone who might be feeling a little (or a …
No better $35 can be spent for a book in this country than this collection of James Baldwin’s collected non-fiction— what were published as five books, from Notes of a Native Son through The Devil Finds Work, with a selection of essays not previously collected included. Timely in their day, this writing feels prophetically and astoundingly true …
