From 2018-2019 Iris Graville served as the first writer-in-residence aboard the Washington State Ferries, spending a couple days a week writing on the route that travels between Lopez, Orcas, Shaw, and San Juan islands. The subtitle for her book Writer in a Life Vest: Essays from the Salish Sea is quite literal, as much of the book …
If, like me, you loved Murphy’s first book, the truck-driving memoir The Long Haul, you might have wondered what he’s been doing since he retired from the road. The answer: trying to cash in on the supposed hemp boom in his adopted state of Colorado. First he buys a chunk of farmland, then he spies …
Think: Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, but sapphic and romantic. Leah returns home to her wife, Miri, from a deep-sea research mission that was only supposed to last three weeks. But after six agonizing months of absence, the Leah who has returned is as mysterious to Miri as the circumstances that kept her away. Foreboding and beautifully written, …
From family of friends of Chandler O’Leary, through her website: “Our dear friend Chandler passed away on April 2 from sudden and severe pneumonia. She was just 41 years old, and leaves behind an astonishing body of work as an author and artist[. . . ] “In her short life, she filled countless sketchbooks and …
As a teenager in the ’80s, the music—the very existence—of Prince had a profound effect on me. Purple Rain (the movie, as well as the album) totally blew my mind. Seeing him in concert in 1985 was a highlight of my life (as was visiting his home and studio Paisley Park in Minnesota this past summer). So …
Book lovers everywhere will adore this sweet picture book in the rhyming style of Goodnight Moon. We travel around a cozy bookstore saying goodnight to the bookstore cat, customers’ forgotten items, and other familiar bookshop sights. Eagle-eyed readers will enjoy scanning the shelves for clever covers based on real books. Charming illustrations and text would …
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 …
