A bestseller in Europe, this elegant, thoughtful novel will restore your faith in humanity. In her small French village, Violette is the cemetery keeper who soothes the mourners and keeps their secrets. Abandoned by a missing husband, she builds a loyal surrogate family from others who work in the cemetery. When a stranger disturbs her …
…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. …
The Prix Goncourt is France’s highest award for fiction, and the most recent recipient was Éric Vuillard for The Order of the Day. It’s an interesting choice for at least three reasons. First, it’s really good, like prize-winning good, written in crystalline sentences ably translated by Mark Polizzotti. Second, it’s not a bog-standard war story about generals and …
by Cila Warncke for frugalportland.com In an era where you can read yourself blind online without spending a penny, buying books is an act of enlightened frugality. Magazines and newspapers get tossed; websites morph. Books stick around. What’s more, books slow us down. There are no hyperlinks or banner ads, nothing to whisk our mind into the …
When you work in retail, it’s inevitable that strange things will happen from time to time. Bookstores are probably less susceptible to such encounters than most other kinds of shops, but I’ve seen my share of weirdness. Quite often when I worked at a different, hyper-urban spot, not so much in recent years. However friendly …
This is a refreshingly charming story of the steadfast, predictable journalist Vatanen who has a run-in with a hare—bunny, that is. After his car veers off the road, Vatanen goes into the surrounding woods in search of the culprit. He finds the hare, picks it up gently, and puts it into his jacket pocket. He …
Whether The Story of Hong Gildong is the oldest extant Korean prose fiction or the second oldest, whether it was written by poet and statesman Heo Gyun (1569-1618) about a real bandit or whether it’s popular fiction by an anonymous commoner in the second half of the 19th century matters greatly to some. Not so …
