The winners for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association’s 2026 Pacific 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 …
For the second year, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) unveiled its Book Awards Shortlist live on the show floor at the association’s Fall Tradeshow, Sept. 29, 2025. These honorees are now being promoted throughout PNBA’s 170-store membership. Selected by an Awards Committee of independent booksellers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska, the following …
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. Maybe readers already had hydration on their minds because they knew about the heat wave; we notice that several of the regional bestsellers had water-related titles. The Sweetness of Water …
…we’ve also got Haboo, a collection of tales from the Lushootseed-speaking peoples of the Puget Sound. Drawn from a period of oral traditions, Haboo highlights the Myth Age, a time before the world transformed. These fables feature talking animals, anthropomorphic trees, and wise old rocks, who manage to speak of the human condition without being, you know, human. …
Madison Books hosted an event with Lynda Mapes and David B. Williams this autumn. The excerpt from their conversation with James Crossley was originally printed in the Madison Books newsletter. You can click here for more! We’ve long been fans of their acclaimed writing about the human relationship with the natural world, and we’re delighted …
To say this is the perfect gift for the fish fan in your life is both an understatement and an assumption that you have $150 to throw around. Over two decades in preparation, this three-volume wonder from the University of Washington stands where no book has stood before, as an authoritative—and exquisitely beautiful—guide to the …
By Michael Upchurch Special to The Seattle Times Looking for Betty MacDonald: The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and I by Paula Becker University of Washington Press, 221 pp., $29.95 Seattle writer Betty MacDonald (1907-1958) was a beloved best-selling humorist who wrote about her life with a biting sense of the absurd. But if she’d …
The desire to write about a place begins to register in the bones long before the writing happens. A subconscious need to write about the Olympic Peninsula began to grow in me, arose from experiences of the place, for some time before I ever tried to write about it: The immense silence of the old …
From David James Duncan and William Kittredge to Kathleen Dean Moore and John Daniel, to William Ruckelshaus and Bruce Babbitt, this is a wonderful anthology of thoughtful pieces on issues public and personal from the heart of the Pacific Northwest. For more info, visit Open Spaces or University of Washington Press.
