From the Phinney Books (Seattle, WA) newsletter: One of the side pleasures of having a neighborhood bookstore that I did not expect is having a baseball team named after you. With our fond memories of being a Ballard Little League family for a few years (not to mention fond memories of Chico’s Bail Bonds), when a friend asked …
Within a few paragraphs, I knew I was in good hands. The hands of a writer at the top of her game, exhibiting perfect control without apparent effort. The story is set in late-1960’s London and follows the still estimable Laura Palfrey (we assume she was once estimable from her handful of memories of married …
The preposterously popular Seattle Independent Bookstore Day Passport Challenge is coming back this year!… Here’s how it will work: beginning on Independent Bookstore Day (Saturday, April 30), you can pick up a Bookstore Day Passport at any of the 24 participating Seattle-area stores. And then, unlike in usual years, when you had only a single …
“These unbroken stretches of consciousness, days sometimes blurring into one another, seems just a feature of modern life, not worth complaining about,” an insomniac remarks to herself. Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is a collection of short stories that captures the modern sense of malaise that is now more pronounced, more intense, as …
Rare is the book of history that remains in print over eighty years later, but James’s ground-breaking account of the Haitian Revolution—written in 1938, revised in 1962, and meant to inspire and celebrate the revolutions of the oppressed in both moments—has become a part of history itself. And the book itself remains a marvelously readable …
Congratulations to Phinney Books in Seattle, the subject of a recent, wonderful bookstore profile by Paul Constant in The Seattle Times. Paul Constant Special to The Seattle Times January 18, 2022 Neighborhood Reads About eight years ago, Phinney Ridge resident Tom Nissley spent a long winter’s night catching up with two old friends who now …
Has anyone else noticed that wiener dogs seem to be of the moment? First there was this in Shelf Awareness on October 5 (which PNBA Executive Director Brian Juenemann commented was “thankfully… when most were too busy to notice”): In the “veeerrry long fold out book” Where’s Brian’s Bottom by Rob Jones (Pavilion Children’s, $9.95), children and …
If you’ve ever struggled to lead a creatively satisfying professional life, there’s a good chance Cass’s story will resonate. Cass’s chosen career path? Theater. After an entire decade of working on “weird downtown plays” as a no-name playwright in NYC, she wins an award along with $50,000 and lands herself an off-Broadway debut. She’s 33 …
Gordon-Reed made her name, and won a Pulitzer, as a historian of Virginia, and specifically of Thomas Jefferson’s estate of Monticello, as she told the history of its black residents alongside its white ones in unprecedented detail. But she was raised in Texas, East Texas specifically, and her little handbook about Juneteenth, the local holiday …
I got to read an early copy of Outlawed last year and have been impatiently waiting until it went on sale and I could share it. This book deftly recasts the Western genre through a queer, feminist lens, with lots of fun and adventure along the way. In an alternate 1890s where any woman who can’t …
