No Catherine the Great. Not even a shirtless Putin. We’re talking authors. And we’re talking Idaho. When Robert Wrigley entered the annals of Northwest literary royalty last Saturday night at his hometown store, BookPeople of Moscow, among the one-hundred-or-so attendees in the house to enjoy the presentation of his 2014 Pacific Northwest Book Award for …
If the University of Idaho were not located in Moscow—right where the state’s handle attaches to its pan—the town itself would likely be no more than a crossroads, with, like many small towns in the West, a more or less equal number of churches and taverns, maybe a grain elevator or two. Moscow is a …
The Book Awards Committee of the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Association (the pro-indie bookstore professional organization behind this blog) announced the six 2014 PNBA Book Award winners today! Over the next month, nwbooklovers.org will publish essays from the winning authors and local independent northwest stores will host the winners for celebrations. Committee comments for the winners (as …
Read the opening paragraphs of Kim Barnes’ latest novel, In the Kingdom of Men, and your breath is knocked right out of you. Barnes immediately packs a punch that leaves you reeling to the end. The story, set in the 1960s, follows Gin McPhee and her husband, Mason, as they leave their Oklahoma small town …
To get an idea of the genius behind Jess Walter, follow him on Twitter, where you’ll find treasures like: “I once saw, in a used book store, a book I’d signed and given to a friend. I bought it and gave it to him again. ‘Last time,’ I said.” Fortunately, Walter goes beyond the 140 …
Nope, not a Roald Dahl character. HooPalousa is a charity basketball tournament at the University of Idaho, and it's happening tomorrow night. The play-by-play could go something like this: Jess Walter brings the ball over the time line, kicks it right to Shann Ray (pictured) on the wing. He dumps it in to Sherman Alexie at …
When I was first starting to write fiction, I read a piece by William Styron about the difficulties of beginning a story. What you needed most, he said, was a strong sense of place. Something that would ground you through all the uncertainties that were sure to follow. You might not know what, but you …
In the great Preston Sturges movie, The Lady Eve, a dowager turns to the late-arriving dinner guest as he slips in next to her and proclaims “The fish was a poem!” in perfect high-haughty English. Sometimes it does seem that anything called a poem is a poem. My happy task here is to offer three …
With eight poetry collections to his credit, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, multiple Pushcart prizes and countless other honors and awards, Robert Wrigley has clearly produced a lot of exceptional poetry in his 30-plus-year career. So what propelled him to write what Fogged Clarity arts review firmly declared “…an achievement …
