Before I was an author I was, briefly, a bookseller. The summer between finishing graduate school and getting my first teaching job, I worked a Spokane’s gorgeous downtown bookstore, Auntie’s. The story I want to tell is about something that happened on my first day. I had just been trained on how to answer the …
I grew up in the shadow of mountains, along the mucky edges of the Nisqually River Delta on the outskirts of Olympia. On a rare clear day, you could see the Olympics to the West. Mount Rainier towered to the East. Our rambler abutted a tract of undeveloped forest land near Luhr Beach. Expansive, wild, …
I did not know that I would find pleasure in the rain. I grew up in northern Alberta on the edge of the subarctic, where everything is covered in snow for several months of the year. I moved to Vancouver, BC to teach and to write. It rained every day that first January. I was …
This spring has been one of the chilliest in decades, which might be why my thoughts have been turning toward the Arctic Circle. More likely, though, it’s because of the paperback re-release of Nobody Gets Out Alive, a debut book of fiction from Alaska native Leigh Newman. A collection of dazzling, courageous stories about women …
Portland publisher Tin House won big last night when Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez was awarded the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. What a joy to see photos of the NYC ceremony from Tin House publisher Craig Popelars this morning! Fiction-lovers and book club readers, take note– this …
I keep a spreadsheet that lists every book I’ve read since 2010. It’s the most consistent and representative record of my life that I have—a life spent reading. I can look back and see that I spent the summer of 2015 reading or rereading Jane Austen novels, and the summer of 2016, all of Sarah …
The winners for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association 2023 Northwest Book Awards have been announced. The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) is a non-profit association of independent bookstores from five Northwest states: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. Since 1965, the annual Book Awards have recognized such luminary figures in Northwest literature as Ivan Doig, Ursula K. Le Guin, …
The author of Severance is back with a brilliant book of short stories– my favorite being a dreamlike (nightmarish?) story about a woman living in a mansion with her 100 ex-boyfriends…and her husband. Scathing and hilarious and unforgettable. Ling Ma is a massive talent. –Becky, Secret Garden Books, Seattle, WA Buy something unforgettable from Secret …
The perfect entry point for people new to Murata, this is my favorite of her works translated to English so far. A master of mixing the macabre with the sweet, her short stories will leave you asking questions like, is it weird to a make a table out of human femurs? Should you leave your …
Of course I was captured right away by the wonderful world building in “The Book Making Habits of Select Species,” and while this book of short stories is perfect for any “Black Mirror” fan, fascinated by technology’s impact on humanity, it is also so much more. This book is a fantastic blend of sci-fi, speculative, …
