All Books A-Z

Leaving the Atocha Station, poet Ben Lerner's first novel, became an unlikely hit (by literary standards) in 2011, an event that's now part of the story of his second novel, 10:04, which (like his fir... (Tom)

In our mixed household, the Jewishness of certain foods (and other items) is a subject of frequent debate. Noodle kugel? Obviously. Marshmallows? Apparently not. (I'm not the expert.) In this fun and... (Tom)

Kids' Books of the Week 101 Ways to Read a Book by Timothée de Fombelle and Benjamin Chaud, translated by Karin Snelson The Magicians by Blexbolex, translated by Karin Snelson Our talented friend Kari... (Tom)

What kid doesn't have a 13-floor treehouse in his or her head, featuring a man-eating shark tank, a lemonade fountain, a giant catapult, and plenty more? Griffiths (the writer) and Denton (the drawer)... (Tom)

There's been a renaissance in giant illustrated kids' fact books (we love Maps and Animalium), and The 50 States is our new favorite. Each state gets a two-page spread crammed with Sol Linero's high-s... (Tom)

There is no shortage of picture books to help little ones learn their ABCs, but there are few that will also get them (and you!) up and moving like this one. The illustrations (by one of our favorite... (Tom)

Booksellers geek out devising pithy comparisons that telegraph the feel of one book with the modified title of another. So I gave myself a pat on the back when I realized I had just finished the Hunga... (Liz)

Perhaps you know Julien Temple's mostly terrible '80s movie-musical adaptation, or perhaps you know the Jam's wonderful 1981 hit single by the same name. If you grew up in the UK at a certain time, yo... (Tom)

Over a year ago I read one of those reviews that makes you want to drop everything you're doing and rush to the bookstore, even if what you're doing is running a bookstore. Tantalizingly, I couldn't t... (James)

What's an "ACB"? It's a mixed-up alphabet book nine-year-old Perry is making for her Gran, Honora Lee, who has lost her husband and most of her memory and who lives at the Santa Lucia rest home, where... (Tom)

A few years ago, on vacation, I picked up an old copy of Act One, knowing only vaguely that it was a famous theater memoir. Some number of breathless, elated hours later, I picked my head up again. Wo... (Tom)

There's a reason that Act One, a massive bestseller when it came out in 1959, is still beloved by theater kids everywhere as the great Broadway memoir. Hart himself was as stage-struck as they come, a... (Tom)

Audiobook of the Week Actress by Anne Enright My usual policy (with a few notable exceptions) is that an audiobook is almost always better when read by the author, who brings, if nothing else, the emo... (Tom)

Ada Twist, by the same team that brought us Rosie Revere, Engineer and Iggy Peck, Architect, is already one of our picture-book hits of the year, so perhaps I'm not telling you anything you don't alre... (Tom)

How could Adrian Simcox have a horse? He lives in town, in a tiny house, and horses are expensive! Chloe's sure that the red-headed dreamer in her class is telling lies, and she makes sure everyone kn... (Tom)

Into the fine and hilarious tradition of men making every possible wrong decision stumbles Ray Morris, a 33-year-old tech journalist living on the still-too-expensive outskirts of London with a wife n... (Tom)

You can tell even from the thumbnail cover to the left how this item, from Chicago's acclaimed Macau-inspired restaurant Fat Rice, jumps out from the usual cookbook crowd. Hidden behind the comic-book... (Tom)

Almost exactly two years ago, I was writing my review of Cusk's last novel, Outline, which turned out to be one of the best books I read that year. I think Transit, the second in a proposed trilogy ab... (Tom)

These days, when public discourse seems like so much shouting past each other, the last thing you want to read is a fictionalized he-said/she-said about a #metoo moment. BUT! Not many write as lucidly... (Liz)

These days, when public discourse seems like so much shouting past each other, the last thing you want to read is a fictionalized he-said/she-said about a #metoo moment. BUT! Not many write as lucidly... (Liz)

Again Again both was and wasn’t the young adult love story I expected. Adelaide’s summer can and does go a myriad of different ways, in a number of possible worlds, perhaps thanks to her introduction... (Anika)

Famously, Gibson predicted our future in books like Neuromancer, and then our present caught up to him. Fittingly, his current loose trilogy, of which Agency is the second book, is set both in the fut... (Tom)

Let's just get going with some of the sentences: (Tom)

You'll be hearing a lot about Alan Turing this fall, with The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, telling the story of this math genius who played a crucial code-breaking role in World War... (Tom)

Young Adult Book of the Week Phinney by Post Kids Book #106 Aldo: Ghost Dog by Joaquín Camp, translated by Kit Maude One day while playing catch, Aldo the dog gets caught in a white sheet hanging from... (Haley)

This is a tough one to describe, because as soon as I start I'm afraid I'll scare some of you off. Avian demigods? Fertility goddesses? An epic journey to the Isle of the Dead to recover a lost love?... (James)

Angsty loner Eloise would much rather be spending her time gaming than logging volunteer hours at LifeCare—an elder care service that's at odds with her social anxiety—but that's what her guidance cou... (Anika)

[The story of an 11-year-old foodie who becomes a secret restaurant reviewer] This book is a great book if you love food ... or if you don't. It's realistic fiction. It's light and funny but you won't... (Henry)

Well, this might be the best book I've read so far this year. For all the flutter of "quirkiness" that surrounds July, she is a stone cold serious artist, in whatever form she chooses, and this is a c... (Tom)

This picture book colorfully illustrates a year in the life of the five-member Tanaka family, following them through holidays, milestones, meals, and seasons. Chihiro Takeuchi's detailed papercut illu... (Haley)

This one sneaked up on me. It’s the story of two bourgeois families, neighbors in a Northern Italian town, beginning with the deaths of both patriarchs and following the second generation as it comes... (Liz)

I just returned from the best summer reading experience I've had in a very long time. I spent almost 2,000 pages soaking up the imagined atmosphere of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) during the decade of 1... (Tom)

Boy, I hope this isn't all that man is. Szalay's nine stories of men across Europe—often in the act of traveling across Europe's open borders with no real direction in mind—make up a loosely-knit nove... (Tom)

Anders's debut novel has been filed, officially, on the adult side of fiction (and it does have an R-rated scene or two), but I think it might find its most passionate readers among older teen readers... (Tom)

All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire "How did something this good actually get made?" That's the underlying question at the heart of this superb oral history, because The Wire still see... (Tom)

When I first started to read on my own I couldn’t get enough of Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family chapter books, which I recently heard called the “Jewish Little House on the Prairie.” The series f... (Liz)

Hear ye, hear ye! If you loved Victoria Jamieson's Rollergirl, her second middle-grade graphic novel, All's Faire in Middle School, will not disappoint. Like Rollergirl, All's Faire features a relatab... (Haley)

Surely I had come across the absurdities of "Colonel" Baxter before, but never in such a concentrated fashion: in this career-spanning collection, the illustrated incongruities of this British madman... (Tom)

I should say first that Dazed and Confused is one of those movies that went straight into my bloodstream when I first saw it and has never left, a miracle of ensemble acting and pitch-perfect attentio... (Tom)

This is my favorite kind of non-fiction book—a failure. Which is to say that it isn't a biography of the influential mid-century poet Frank O'Hara, although it's full of biographical detail and wise a... (James)

Those Tipsy Nissleys we served at the store last Friday were a delicious tribute to the mixological brilliance of my friend Brad, whose James Beard-winning first book Bitters became an instant necessi... (Tom)

Republished by Penguin this week alongside three other mostly neglected classics of Asian American literature (John Okada's No-No Boy, Younghill Kang's East Goes West, and H.T. Tsiang's The Hanging on... (Tom)

Fed up with the new lives of her divorced parents, 15-year-old Anna steals her stepmom's credit card and hightails it to Los Angeles to stay with her half-sister, Delia, a struggling actress. She soon... (Karlyn)

Emily Jane’s first novel was about aliens, her second about sea monsters, and her third is about, as the title makes clear, werewolves. In each of her books, Jane uses supernatural beings to fully plu... (Doree)

Our tiny art shelves were suddenly full this year of biographies of major American photographers: Vivian Maier, Richard Avedon, Eugene Smith, Diane Arbus, and this one, which I picked up almost on a w... (Tom)

This week, someone absconded (yes, it happens, especially in that corner of the store) with almost our entire Kafka section, but they left this one behind, which is somehow fitting. It's the forgotten... (Tom)

How did a corporation conquer one of the world's great civilizations? Dalrymple's storytelling gifts and his mastery of the archives of many nations and languages are on display once again as he shows... (Tom)

"When you listen to music, your heart changes rhythm. Can you hear it?" asks And There Was Music. This picture book is bursting with many types of song, including a brass band in New Orleans, Irish fo... (Tom)

Are you familiar with the Weedle, which "has such dainty little ways of pulling up potatos"? Or the Boddles, which "screams and eats candles and soap"? (I hope not.) Or the Ding, which "is so happy. I... (Tom)

The buzz surrounding this award-winning French author’s first English translation—the saga of a family of pig farmers—always includes a warning along the lines of “You’ll never eat bacon again!” Well,... (Liz)

You can't tell from the photo, but Animalium is huge, as big as previous newsletter favorite Maps (it's from the same publisher, the well-named Big Picture). But while Maps brings a doodly whimsy to i... (Tom)

VanderMeer has created such an atmospheric and foreboding landscape in Area X, and I found myself drawn deeper and deeper into it by the beauty and mystery there. Instead of seizing up with dread or s... (Anika)

Robinson's first solo picture book, after his collaborations with Matt de la Pena (the Newbery-winning Last Stop on Market Street) and Kelly DiPucchio (our beloved Gaston), is a quietly mind-blowing l... (Tom)

Marco the fox has questions—"Why don’t trees ever talk? How deep does the sun go when it sinks into the sea?"—and none of the other foxes seem to care about the answers, so he joins the crew on a pass... (Tom)

Remember Antoinette? In Gaston, one of our—and our young customers'—favorite picture books since we opened, she's the poodly pup who falls in love with her friend, the bulldoggy Gaston. Now she has he... (Tom)

Fredrik Backman knows exactly how to break my heart. And he does it just moments after making me snort with laughter. The author of A Man Called Ove and Britt-Marie Was Here ups the comedy in his new... (Doree)

The young protagonist in Anything tells us she can wish for very hard things—a rainbow in her room or the biggest slice of pizza in the whole world! But wishes (or "anythings," as she calls them) only... (Haley)

Satarchayan, the narrator of this autobiographical novel first published in India in the late '30s, is not your usual hero: he reminds me of the naive Captain Delano through whose wide, half-seeing ey... (Tom)

First of all, Arbitrary Stupid Goal is not about football. (It's just a funny cover.) It is, ostensibly, about the general store Tamara Shopsin's parents ran in Greenwich Village, which they turned in... (Tom)

First of all, Arbitrary Stupid Goal is not about football. (It's just a funny cover.) It is, ostensibly, about the general store Tamara Shopsin's parents ran in Greenwich Village, which they turned in... (Tom)

When The Argonauts came out last year, I was intimidated by Nelson's genre-fluid book about her life with a gender-fluid partner, not wanting to be schooled on a topic about which I'm curious but some... (Liz)

If you liked Ready Player One, prepare to like Armada. Ernest Cline has done it again, creating a great book filled with action, funny moments, and all of the nerdiness that we love so much. Ready Pla... (Peter)

Any fan of S Is for Salmon, one of our favorite picture books last year, will immediately recognize Hannah Viano's distinctive papercut style in her new book. Arrow to Alaska is a story for slightly o... (Tom)

The Art of a Lie is my favorite book of 2025 so far! I was drawn in by the main character's eighteenth-century confectionery shop and treated to a page-turner full of more twists and turns than a Hitc... (Haley)

I confess: I am mostly untroubled by art crimes, whether thefts or forgeries. I even find them a little charming, mostly victimless, and a kind of art in themselves. And that's surely how Stéphane Bre... (Tom)

There's something about the particular eloquence of Sally Mann's photographs—their locality, their intimacy, and the sense you get of her as not merely a silent, reserved observer but a real participa... (Tom)

One of the things I love best about young adult fiction is that it doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff. In Emily X.R. Pan’s impressive debut, just out in paperback, she illustrates an expert handling... (Anika)

"Solitude" is a seductive word in our chaotic times, but Johnson doesn't just mean a quiet week in the woods to rejuvenate us for the rat race. His solitude is a lifelong vocation, a choice made by th... (Tom)

At the Window is a celebration of the people we become accustomed to seeing throughout our daily routine (especially in a neighborhood like Phinney Ridge). You may never exchange a word, but there is... (Haley)

by Roy Andries de Groot by Roy Andries de Groot The "Auberge" of the title is a small inn and restaurant, tucked away in a valley in the Alps and largely undiscovered, until de Groot's 1973 book, whic... (Tom)

In the middle of a preposterously accomplished career that included writing hit pop songs with his brother and leading the NAACP during perhaps its most influential decade, James Weldon Johnson also w... (Tom)

I am learning: a comedian reading their own audiobook is a good way to go. (Eddie Izzard next?) But W. Kamau Bell is not your average comedian, and his Awkward Thoughts is not your average comedian's... (Tom)

Brian Selznick, known for intricate illustrated epics like Wonderstruck and The Invention of Hugo Cabret, reinvents the early-reader book with this fat set of simple stories about a primate private ey... (Tom)

The Silicon Valley startup in question is Theranos. Perhaps you heard of it: the company, led by the young, Steve Jobs-wannabe CEO Elizabeth Holmes, that was going to disrupt health-care with pin-pric... (Tom)

Local newspapers, retail chains like Toys R Us, rural hospitals, affordable housing: all things that are being driven from our landscape by impersonal but inevitable market forces, right? The winds ma... (Tom)

Peter Temple launched his career as a novelist (at age 50) with a very enticing sentence, introducing one "Edward Dollery, age forty-seven, defrocked accountant, big spender, and dishonest person." Th... (Tom)

An aside in the new Robert Frank biography led me to this item, a reprint in the Books on Books series of a landmark 1945 photo book, the only one the legendary Brodovitch (editor and mentor to Frank... (Tom)

I've never surfed, and I'm not about to start now. But Finnegan's memoir of fifty years of surfing (while building an acclaimed career as a journalist) is a thrilling immersion in both the wonder and... (Tom)

A bad (well, mostly bad) month in Vera Brosgol's own childhood turns out to be the perfect source for a smart, subtle, and entertaining graphic novel that anyone thrown into a new situation will appre... (Tom)

The first comparison of any detective story set at the end of the 19th century is Sherlock Holmes, and R.F. Jackaby, the cryptic, socially indifferent sleuth in Ritter's first novel, Jackaby, and this... (Tom)

Warner, an administrator at the Smithsonian Institution, was nearly sixty when he published this book, his first. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977, and has never been out of print since. It's a grace... (Tom)

The unhappiness of families is a gift to novelists everywhere; the particular unhappiness of the Barnes family, one of the most prominent in a dull town not far from Dublin, is surely made worse by th... (Tom)

The recently announced longlist for the first National Book Award for translated literature inspired me to pick up, finally, a book I'd had my eye on: this remarkable account of Iraqi women who escape... (Tom)

I've often flattered myself that my love for the music of Thompson and his formative band, Fairport Convention, is some obscure passion, but it's clear at any show you go to that his fans are legion,... (Tom)

You wouldn't think that there was anything new to discover in the ol' "before and after" gambit, but over and over in this bright and appealing board book Jullien, a multi-talented French designer liv... (Tom)

Muyu and his fellow young bachelors may have moved from the provinces to the massive Chinese capital, but from the rooftop of their single-story building of crowded apartments on Beijing's western out... (Tom)

Over twenty years in the drawing, Berlin covers just a few crucial years in the city's history, from late 1928 to the end of the Weimar Republic in early 1933. Lutes's scope is wide—he marks the major... (Tom)

Betty Bunny Loves Chocolate Cake by Michael B. Kaplan and Stéphane Jorisch A customer tipped us off to this recent gem, which makes me laugh every single time, not just for Betty herself, stuffing a s... (Tom)

One of the most appealing things about Ta-Nehisi Coates as a writer is his humility: his openness to change, to self-education, to acknowledgment of his constantly reforming knuckleheadedness. But as... (Tom)

Does your heart, like mine, quicken at the thought of entire chapters on the hyphen, the objective case, and the best pencil for marking proof? Oh, you'll get all the grammar porn you could hope for h... (Tom)

This sweet, sunny YA novel is just in time for graduation and summer. Josie Hazeldine is supposed to be going to college in the fall—it's her mother's dream for her—but Josie has other plans. She's tu... (Anika)

Many admirers of Stegner will argue that his finest book is not one of his most acclaimed novels, Angle of Repose or Crossing to Safety, but this book, a biography of the great expedition leader that... (Tom)

Those of you who know Jane Mount only from her colorful illustrations of shelved and stacked book spines might be surprised—as I was—that her new book of literary "miscellany" is as miscellaneous as i... (Tom)

I have been to Currance's Big Bad Breakfast in Oxford, Miss., though, thanks to a tip from my savvy foodie friend Brad (see above), while making a pilgrimage to William Faulkner's Rowan Oak estate (an... (Tom)

A Big Mooncake for Little Star was my favorite picture book last year, and Lin has followed it with a companion book that is a perfect match for its feeling that you have stepped into a timeless fable... (Tom)

David Maurer, a linguistics professor, was drawn to the underground by its lingo, but he stuck around to lovingly describe an entire subterranean culture of grifters, marks, and intricately constructe... (Tom)

While Lark seems to have grown out of our soggy soil, Capitol Hill's little Wandering Goose is more like a successful transplant, a pink flamingo standing out proudly in the Northwest drizzle. Earnhar... (Tom)

One sign of how much Lin's new picture book feels like a timeless classic is how surprising it is to turn to the book's last pages and learn that the fable she tells—of a girl whose nighttime nibbles... (Tom)

It's a very good thing if the main character in a novel blurts. It can set all kinds of mayhem in motion. You would think, in Greta's situation—she is a professional transcriber for a sex therapist in... (Tom)

Unless you have your own test kitchen, reviewing a new, 600-page cookbook can only be a partial exercise, but after using Big Vegan Flavor for the last two months as a part-time, non-expert cook in a... (Tom)

Lara Feigel's work of WWII history and literary criticism, The Love-Charm of Bombs, made my personal Top 10 books of 2015. Her latest, The Bitter Taste of Victory, has done it again—but a little bit d... (Liz)

When I'm asked for a favorite Seattle book, I usually choose one of two titles: Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (and its sequel, How I Grew), set in her teen years in the 1920s, and th... (Tom)

I believe story is how we make sense of the world. This is not an original thought, but it is why I read books. Author Emily Bernard is a masterful storyteller. She makes writing her life look easy in... (Nancy)

The Black Jacobins (Tom)

Having read The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James's still-classic 1938 account of the Haitian Revolution, earlier this year, I was curious what a modern version could add to the story. Even more than James... (Tom)

They sure boiled their books hard back in the '50s. This one, published in 1953, has been almost as difficult to find since as an armored car at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft (to borrow a memo... (Tom)

There has been a murder on the stark Hebridean Isle of Lewis, in the same small town where Edinburgh police detective Fin Macleod was raised, but Fin, sent to investigate, spends much more time peelin... (Tom)

One response to the complexity of explaining the Haitian Revolution is to narrow the scope, as Hazareesingh (see above) does by focusing on Toussaint. Despite his tinier canvas and his younger audienc... (Tom)

Geoff Manaugh's BLDG BLOG is unlike any other blog you'll read, and his BLDG BLOG Book is unlike any other item on our shelves. He's equally, insatiably curious about the actual environments we build... (Tom)

The literary highlight of my year so far came from a writer I thought I knew well already. I had read (and loved) many of Morrison's novels, but when I learned that she narrates the audio versions of... (Tom)

What a sweet and tender book! Seattle artist Bagley makes a breathtaking debut with this tale of two beavers, a mother and son, who live at the shore and miss an absent father. It's a story of hope, l... (Tom)

Sometimes, though rarely, I will read a book and feel like I'm watching a movie as I read. Reflecting on this beautiful funny sweet melancholy moving book, I experienced something rarer still: feeling... (Anika)

Our second "True" selection for the Phinney by Post book subscription service (subscribe here!) might be more precisely categorized as "Strange but True." J.S.G. Boggs is an artist both fine and con,... (Tom)

Everyone says that Pessoa's unfinished (unfinishable?) Portuguese classic is best taken not whole, but in morsels, chewed and reflected on, and so, having always wanted to read it, that's how I'll beg... (Tom)

Reyes's book is a collection of letters, written to a friend over thirty years and published after her death, that recount the distant years of her childhood in Colombia. Reyes became a painter in Fra... (Tom)

Told from dual perspectives—from Benny and from "the Book" itself—young Benny's story begins when his father is killed in a senseless accident and he begins hearing the voices of inanimate objects. Mu... (Anika)

Annabelle and her son Benny have a lot to deal with, emotionally and otherwise. Her hold on her job is tenuous while her accumulating piles of stuff have a choking grip on their household; he's suffer... (James)

As with so many of the best stories, this one begins with a mistake: specifically, an errant splotch on an otherwise perfect illustration. While this mistake easily evolves into a feature within Luyke... (Kim)

Forget space, or the dark depths of the oceans: the true unexplored human frontier is the third of our lives we spend suspended in the strange netherworld of sleep. For all the talk of dreams, how lit... (Tom)

How do you describe a book as singular as this one? Writing in the wake of family tragedy—the sudden deaths of two sisters—Raffles, a British anthropologist living in New York City, is drawn to the so... (Tom)

"Once near a border, it is impossible not to be involved, not to want to exorcise or transgress something." The border Kassabova is drawn to is the territory where Turkey, Greece, and her native Bulga... (Tom)

Yoshitake's Still Stuck, the story of a boy who can't get his shirt off, is one of our very favorite picture books, and in his latest, a child is confronted by an even more common, and more challengin... (Tom)

Phinney Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago Mayors, even the most powerful, recede in our historical memory almost as quickly as newspaper columnists do, and this compact biography of Chicago's most fam... (Tom)

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (Tom)

We have a very large new book in the store, so large I haven't even figured out where, or how, to display it. Thirteen pounds, 1,495 pages, and $70; seven years in the making in the original German an... (Tom)

Beard came to writing late, and this collection of autobiographical essays was the only book she published until her late fifties, but clearly she was paying attention all along. She's drawn by a rest... (Tom)

This classic mystery from 1949 follows few of the rules set down by Tey's peers (Christie, Sayers, Marsh) of the "Golden Age" of British crime writing. To begin with, there's no body, and no detective... (Tom)

Finally, after twelve months of Phinney by Post, an NYRB Classic (the series that helped inspire our program in the first place)! Schwarz-Bart's 1972 novel, the first she published solely under her na... (Tom)

"Life is the ongoing effort to live. Some people make it look easy. Chickens do not." As a person who aspires to one day keep my own backyard chickens, I was delighted by this little novel about an un... (Anika)

Two mixed-race immigrant kids, who spoke Dutch until they moved to California when they were nine and seven, where they won citywide competitions in classical piano. That may not be your image of the... (Tom)

Phinney Bullfight An executive at a fledgling newspaper in Japan, just after the end of World War II, decides, perversely, to gamble the future of his enterprise on a bullfighting tournament (a Japane... (Tom)

Whenever I am championing Jarman's "funny, cluttered, driven" novel, Salvage King, Ya!—I sometimes feel that I am its only champion, though it deserves many more—I say something to the effect of, "But... (Tom)

Oh, Business Pig, I can't believe it's taken me this long to put you in the newsletter. Not very proactive of me! This little tale of a pig unlike any of the others in the barnyard—he was born, appare... (Tom)

With its primary colors and interactive premise, The Button Book is not the first picture book to be inspired by (or, alternatively, rip off) Hervé Tullet's modern classic Press Here. But regardless,... (Tom)

The concept of Buzz! Boom! Bang! is simple: look at each page and make the noise you think the illustration would sound like. But once you start to "clip clop," "boink," and "hiss," you may find yours... (Haley)

One of the books What Belongs to You reminded me of, and this is high praise indeed, was André Aciman's first novel, Call Me by Your Name, also a slim, elegant, explicit novel about a short-lived affa... (Tom)

It may not be the best time of year for camping, but Mann's picture book, a recent winner of the Washington State Book Award, is a warm, funny, and relatable story of just what its title says, young E... (Tom)

This travelogue of three months Levine, a Canadian expat who had migrated semi-permanently to England, spent tramping across his native land in 1956 proved so unpopular in Canada it took two decades t... (Tom)

A Career in Books is a real treat: a substantial graphic novel full of wisdom, heart, and humor. The story centers on three best friends, fresh out of college and living together in New York. Each roo... (Haley)

Despite (or because of) Meta's clumsy efforts to suppress this Facebook insider's expose, it has received a flurry of coverage, focused, unsurprisingly, on its more sleazily scandalous tales. If that'... (Tom)

The duo behind Last Stop at Market Street, the rare picture book weighty enough to win the Newbery Medal, returns with another story balancing melancholy and hope. It's Carmela's birthday, and she get... (Tom)

Imagine the future Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, as an 11-year-old Sherlock Holmes, with the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, as her 14-year-old Watson (and the young Charle... (Tom)

"Terse and exact about the work they do," as his many admirers know, describes the fiction of James Salter too (although The Dig makes even Salter seem a little gabby!). He's better known for his late... (Tom)

In Cat Nap, a sleepy kitten follows a mouse into a Metropolitan Museum of Art poster. From there, the chase is on, through ancient Egyptian carvings, Mexican ceramics, a medieval prayer book, and more... (Haley)

If you let go of your expectations of a thriller plot from Caught's thriller premise—a young man, caught smuggling pot by boat into Newfoundland four years ago, escapes from prison and makes his way w... (Tom)

Want to get angry? Dayen's character-driven expose takes up where Michael Lewis's Big Short left off, in the chaotic, greedy aftermath of the real estate collapse. Among the millions—millions!—of home... (Tom)

The tenth and last flight of Space Shuttle Challenger lasted only 73 seconds; to tell the full history of those terrible moments, Adam Higginbotham requires, justifiably, over five hundred pages and m... (Tom)

As far as time-travel goes, Charlotte takes a minimal leap—she only goes forty years into the past. But since she is living in 1958, today’s reader goes back a nice round century. Details about the Gr... (Liz)

Cans of sore-eye salve, cashew salesmen, plastic-slipcover showrooms, a forgotten beverage made from carbonated water, syrup, and half-sour milk known as a Herbert water: from these humble elements, n... (Tom)

I admit that I do a lot (a lot) more reading than cooking, so of course I'm drawn to a book about cookbooks. This is the sort of project (ask a bunch of chefs for their favorite cookbook) that could b... (Tom)

For all my fellow Blitz Lit fans out there: have I found a book for you! This thrilling memoir of WWII London is written with such immediacy and attention to detail that I swear I could hear my heartb... (Liz)

Those of us who loved the quirkily indomitable spirit of Ishida's first picture book, Little Kunoichi the Ninja Girl, will be glad to see Little Kunoichi return in a supporting role in the story of he... (Tom)

I'll be honest: as a book, Chicken Butt might not hold its own on the picture-book shelf next to the emotional depths of Sendak or the sophisticated wit of Ada Twist, Scientist. It is, after all, just... (Tom)

This book reminded me of the 1983 movie, The Big Chill, but with more nuance and an off-beat soundtrack (and an Australian setting). Published just a year later, it’s also about college classmates fro... (Liz)

Origo, a wealthy Englishwoman who supervised a Tuscan estate with her Italian husband, was (justly) made famous by another diary (also reissued by NYRB Classics): The War in Val d'Orcia, covering the... (Tom)

It has all the ingredients for my ideal comfort read: a family tree, a house with a name, and a story that spans at least a century. As one plotline unfolds over two weeks in 1960, tales of earlier ge... (Liz)

Consider my breath taken. I'm not much of a follower of fashion (you may have seen how I dress), and we haven't featured many art and fashion books in the store (for one thing, I'm not sure how to dis... (Tom)

I love to read novels about libraries, bookstores, or authors, especially if there’s a kernel of historical truth in there. Nina de Gramont’s new novel, The Christie Affair, imagines what really happe... (Doree)

Reading last week about the late Michael Seidenberg, I got to thinking about this book by his great friend Jonathan Lethem, who started selling books for him as a young Brooklyn teenager. Perkus Tooth... (Tom)

Is an elephant a shape? Is a lemon? A bus? I don't see why not, but somehow it's still hilarious (to me, and I expect to a toddler just learning all these rules we've decided on) to see such incongruo... (Tom)

Miéville is best known as a baroque and endlessly inventive fantasist, but in this novel he harnesses his imagination to the rules and the spare language of a police procedural, which he turns inside-... (Tom)

Miéville's best known as a baroque and endlessly inventive fantasist, but in this novel he harnesses his imagination to the rules and the spare language of a police procedural, which he turns inside-o... (Tom)

A while ago I was calling Turgenev the Russian Jane Austen—now I've discovered that the country has its own Brontë sisters! Like the British writers, the Khvoshchinskaya sisters were poor but educated... (Liz)

A familiar tale of friendship is wonderfully refreshed in this photographic tale of two blobs of clay, one gray and one brown, who are given new lives by an artist's hands and then take matters into t... (Tom)

I loved Greenwell's first book, What Belongs to You, the elegant and intense story of an American's desire for a Bulgarian man, and I love this one too. It's also the story of a young American in Bulg... (Tom)

Even as the president uses snowstorms to mock the science of climate change, the scientists working for his government quietly do their work, producing a report buried on that most deadly of news days... (Tom)

I first read this elegant memoir by a Bay Area software developer when it came out a quarter century ago, at a moment of technological optimism that seems far away now. But the book itself hardly feel... (Tom)

If not for World War II, and their roles in it, Queenie of Scotland and Maddie of Manchester would likely have never met, which would be a shame, because their fierce love and dynamic talents make the... (Anika)

Jess Walter's fiction has covered comedy, history, crime, character study, and more, but I don't think he's ever put so much into one book before. His most recent novel centers on two brothers, Rye an... (James)

Aside from a few novels (most notably Sleepless Nights) and a short and apparently wonderful biography of Melville, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote essays, many of them published in the New York Review of Bo... (Tom)

New Book of the Week by Darryl Pinckney In 1973, as a Columbia undergraduate, Pinckney talked his way into Elizabeth Hardwick's writing class, and—at least for the decade and a half covered by this wo... (Tom)

I binge-read the first 17 books in Jacqueline Winspear’s historical fiction/mystery Maisie Dobbs series during the pandemic. Somehow, immersing myself in the years between World War I to World War II... (Doree)

Although she worked alongside civil rights legends like Bob Moses and Medgar Evers, you won't find Moody's name in the indexes of the big histories of the movement, and her memoir doesn't follow the a... (Tom)

This innovative book of history comes with a history of its own: as a legendary PhD thesis shared for three decades among scholars but never published for a wider audience until now. Its innovation? P... (Tom)

Énard has become one of France's leading novelists by writing about the Mediterranean as a crossroads of cultures—East and West, North and South—and Compass, which won the Prix Goncourt, France's most... (Tom)

Welcome to my 1990s, which you can now purchase in a single package for $49.95. I came to Eightball midway through its run, walking down to Fallout Comics to catch up on an early issue or—happy day!—f... (Tom)

There was a time (the early '90s, specifically) when there were few things more exciting than seeing a new issue of Eightball on the racks at Fallout Records & Comics. There were lots of artists r... (Tom)

For as long as I've known of Lispector, the legendary Brazilian writer, I've been drawn to her but always intimidated by her "greatness," her glamour, and her difficulty, and so I had read plenty abou... (Tom)

Agnès Varda made her first film in her twenties, before the French New Wave, with which she was long associated, began to crest; she made her last in her nineties, when she had lived long enough to wi... (Tom)

One of my favorite books on creativity is this book-length dialogue between a novelist and a film editor, who got to know each other when Murch, best known for his work on The Godfather and Apocalypse... (Tom)

Who knew that NunLit was a genre with a passionately devoted following? Not me, until I read this unique story about a medieval convent, considered one of its classics. Townsend writes brilliantly abo... (Liz)

"Fighting make my life," a Brazilian tells J.D. Daniels while beating him up as a way of teaching him jiu-jitsu. "You know what you feel in fight." That's pretty much the presiding sentiment in Daniel... (Tom)

Country Dark is the first fiction Offutt, who in his youth was compared to Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver, has published in twenty years, and it shows. Not because it's an encyclopedic novel packed w... (Tom)

In the first years of China's boom, frantic dispatches from the "New China" came back almost daily, but Hessler settled there for the long haul, first with the Peace Corps and later as a New Yorker co... (Tom)

Kids' Books of the Week Smart About Sharks and Crazy About Cats by Owen Davey It seems to be a golden age for oversized, gorgeously illustrated compendiums of facts, and (as you can likely tell, if yo... (Tom)

I'm usually too proud to confess an interest in self-help books ("Who needs help? Not me!"), but this one I embraced immediately. Maybe it's because Tharp's art form, dance, feels so distant and myste... (Tom)

You know how sometimes the only thing that will hit the spot is an episode or twelve of Law & Order? Well, these stories, by a lawyer and bestselling author in Germany, satisfy in a similar way. L... (Liz)

Sure, many people are afraid of crocodiles. And many people are afraid of dentists. But what about a crocodile who (with all those teeth to take care of!) is afraid to go to the dentist? And a dentist... (Tom)

Of all the things a novelist can do, Jonathan Franzen is among the best at one of the most important: creating full, human characters who make terrible decisions, again and again. In Crossroads, those... (Tom)

The reputation that Olivia Laing gathered from her books on writers and nature (To the River), writers and drinking (The Trip to Echo Spring), and writers and loneliness (The Lonely City) caused quite... (Tom)

I am, for better or worse, not usually a cryer. Heather Christle is, and at first I thought her book would be a defense of that maligned, female-aligned activity. And in some ways it is, but it quickl... (Tom)

I confess myself somewhat bewildered by the actual tale that transpires in Cursed Pirate Girl, the meticulously drawn comic book whose first three chapters have been collected handsomely in paperback... (Tom)

I was charmed into reading this novel by its first pages, in which a self-sabotaging former ad exec revels in the slushy city beauty of a Minnesota December as he trudges to his weekly group therapy a... (Tom)

A polar bear on a gelatocycle. A fish on a hydrocycle. An armadillo on a penny farthing (that's a bike too). Mayor Snail on a snazzy little BMX. A giraffe on a very tall unicycle. Everyone in Cycle Ci... (Tom)

Tom Carew was something else, a charismatic and fearless commando who parachuted in to prepare the French Resistance for D-Day and then by age 25 was known as "Lawrence of Burma" for coaxing the antic... (Tom)

To call this the greatest soccer novel ever written would imply that I've read any others, but people say it, and I can't believe it's not true. Peace, otherwise a crime novelist, took a bizarre episo... (Tom)

There's a reason Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel keeps being remade into movies (not only 1988's deservedly celebrated Dangerous Liaisons, but 1989's Valmont and 1999's Cruel Intentions): it's a bril... (Tom)

The short and eventful life of Christopher Marlowe—at least what we know of it—would have provided enough drama for one of his own tumultuous plays, or one by his one-time collaborator William Shakesp... (Tom)

This is a book framed by grief—Broks's wife died of cancer in middle age—but it is not the usual memoir of loss. Broks has long been a scientist of consciousness, and he sees death, as well as the mir... (Tom)

What begins as a story about attempted assassination—Queen Victoria is shot at during an 1860 coach ride through London—quickly becomes a knotty but witty mystery involving Charles Darwin’s recently p... (Jeff)

There's no pink on the cover of this picture book, and no hearts, but it's a love story for sure. A boy falls in love on the first day of school with a girl who loves birds, so he becomes one (or at l... (Tom)

To call Days Without End "Blood Meridian lite" might sound dismissive, but it's not. (In fact, for many readers, it might be just right.) You can't get any darker than Cormac McCarthy's Western hellsc... (Tom)

When I say that Dayswork feels like it was written for me, that doesn't mean it wasn't written for you too. Written by a married couple, both writers, it is the story of a married couple, both writers... (Tom)

Dear Cyborgs is a tiny book; in your hand it's almost lighter than air. And the writing has an airy lightness to it to: not funny-light, but nimble and light on its feet, even as it deals with such we... (Tom)

Told in a modern epistolary form that includes emails, texts, and social media posts, Dear Edna Sloane is a delight. With the ambition and earnestness of an MFA graduate who's landed a dream-adjacent... (Anika)

Here's the best way to say how much I like this book: when I read, I turn down the corners of pages to remind me to write down a memorable quote later. In good books I might do this a few times, in gr... (Tom)

Phinney One of our first Old Book of the Week picks returns this month as our fifth Phinney by Post selection. Ursula Nordstrom made history as the editor of such kid's-book geniuses as Maurice Sendak... (Tom)

It's hard to think of a mid-century kids' classic that wasn't guided into print by Ursula Nordstrom. Where the Wild Things Are, Charlotte's Web, Harriet the Spy, Bread and Jam for Frances, Goodnight M... (Tom)

Twenty-one years and five books after the release of his exceptional first historical mystery, River of Darkness, Airth continues to devise new investigations for his original Scotland Yard-trained sl... (Jeff)

Having missed out on Marlantes's fiercely admired Vietnam epic, Matterhorn, and in the mood for a big Northwest tale, I decided Deep River, only his second novel in four decades of writing, would be m... (Tom)

D. Esperanza's story is a perfect example of how the personal is political. Thirteen-year-old Esperanza could not have anticipated that his first journal would become this memoir, just as he could not... (Anika)

One of our favorite novels to recommend in recent years has been Happiness, Forna's story of two people meeting in London: Jean, an American woman in her 40s, and Attila, a wonderfully appealing Ghana... (Tom)

My glib line on this novel is, "Like Rachel Cusk, if she liked people," but that doesn't really do this book (or the great Cusk) justice. Like Cusk, Govinden, a British novelist hardly known over here... (Tom)

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 h... (Doree)

Dictionary contains all the words that have ever been read, but unlike the other books, she doesn't tell her own story. So one day she decides to bring her words to life, starting with a hungry alliga... (Haley)

If you noticed me laughing out loud on my walk home in the last week or so, I was probably listening to this new memoir, which, despite being about the death of O'Reilly's mother when he was five, aga... (Tom)

Like Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, Kelley's novel (his debut, published in 1962 when he was 24) straps itself into the straitjacket of American racial history but leaves just enough roo... (Tom)

His author bio says Cynan Jones has published, along with his novels, a "retelling of a medieval Welsh myth," which isn't surprising after reading The Dig. It has the fatalistic momentum of myth or fa... (Tom)

You wouldn't think that the easy-going life of Dean Martin, who skated through a haze of booze, broads, and untold millions with a wink and a shrug, would provide such depths, but for Tosches, drawn t... (Tom)

This is a novel about gambling, heavy metal music, late-night debauchery, and washing dishes in a restaurant. Guess which is the most interesting, by far? The dishwashing! If you've read other behind-... (Tom)

When Michael Herr died this week, this book, one of the few he wrote, understandably dominated his obituaries. Published in 1977, a decade after his year spent reporting in Vietnam—and after he weathe... (Tom)

Jarre was always an outsider: raised speaking German in Latvia, where her Jewish father was killed by the Nazis in 1941, she learned Italian after she moved to her mother's country but spoke French at... (Tom)

Why not? Because it's covered in germs, but then again, as it charmingly (or disturbingly, depending on your outlook) explains, so is everything else! Ingeniously combining the content of Elise Gravel... (Tom)

You could subtitle this book “Diary of a Madman,” except Dr. Glas is too logical and high-functioning for that. Maybe “Diary of a Sociopath,” but I’ve never come across one so genuinely charming and s... (Liz)

Dash Shaw is willing to bewilder you. His comics layer images and stories in a dream logic that I find helpful to approach with a wide-eyed openness. And when they've worked for me—as his new one, Doc... (Tom)

"Gone five, six days. You got a dog or a snake or something, find someone to feed it." That's about all East, a skinny sixteen-year-old drug-house lookout who's never left LA, is told about his assign... (Tom)

It's hard to recommend a book you think has flaws. As soon as I express ambivalence, I can see people turn their attention elsewhere. And why not? There are so many good books in the world. The Dog qu... (Tom)

I hardly ever truly laugh out loud when I'm reading. But I make a racket when reading Portis, especially this novel, the third of the merely five he has written in fifty years. I could describe the pl... (Tom)

Whether your house has a dog or a cat—or better yet, both—you and your young readers will appreciate Gall's new picture book, which finds the sitcom-worthy setup—an odd couple forced to become roommat... (Tom)

Ever since Vlautin, the singer-songwriter of the longtime Portland alt-country band Richmond Fontaine, started writing novels, I've been hearing how good they are, and I finally sampled one, via an au... (Tom)

"Don't write about your childhood," someone told Lucinda Williams when he heard she was writing this memoir. "Just write about your music." Well, as anyone who loves her music knows—"Child in the back... (Tom)

What a tale: two brothers, both writers, found themselves in a plot beyond their own imagining, accused of a casino blackjack scam. But the real story, as those brothers tell it in Double Down, comes... (Tom)

Kids' Books of the Week Finding Wild by Megan Wagner Lloyd and Abigail Halpin Douglas, You Need Glasses! by Ged Adamson Well, I tried to choose a favorite between these charming new picture books and... (Tom)

Can there be a Dr. Seuss book that's actually underrated? Though it's overshadowed by the tongue-twister nonsense of Green Eggs and Ham and Fox in Socks and by (Tom)

Oh, good gravy, what a gorgeous and gigantic book. If you're like me, and grew up with Drawn & Quarterly, the scrappy Montreal comics publisher that along with Seattle's own Fantagraphics has led... (Tom)

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare: You send your child out into the world, and tragedy strikes. The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker opens with a series of small-town college students falling aslee... (Doree)

Being copyedited well—having a wise and sympathetic reader improve your sentences—is one of life's great pleasures, and perhaps the highest praise I can give Dreyer's English is to say it made me desp... (Tom)

Calling Drive Your Plow a murder mystery is a bit like calling Beloved a ghost story. There is a series of unsolved murders (which—spoiler!—are solved), but the real story is in the storyteller: Janin... (Tom)

To title this superb oral history, collected in the early '70s and published in 1980, Gwaltney chose a word that means "ordinary," but that also, unlike many terms in black English, has never quite cr... (Tom)

"Du is tak?" What does that mean? "Ma nazoot." Huh?! What are these bugs saying about the green, growing thing before them? After a few readings of what looks like nonsense at first, I think you and y... (Tom)

No getting around it, this sounds like a tough sell: 1000 pages of unbroken thought, not a stream of consciousness but a torrential river scouring a mental landscape. But that's how you produce someth... (James)

While Kate Beaton was first creating the goofily hilarious history comics that made Hark! A Vagrant such a hoot, her day job was in the oil fields of Alberta, trying to make money quickly, like so man... (Tom)

In Dungeon Crawler Carl, Carl’s world collapses. Literally. Every interior on Earth with a roof is collapsed and absorbed into the 18-Level World Dungeon. Part Hunger Games, part role-playing game, Th... (Shane)

This is one of the most beautiful books of the year, and to me one of the most joyous. Paz traveled the world photographing record collectors with their vinyl, and the result is a gorgeously and thoug... (Tom)

Old Book of the Week by Rosamond Lehmann Does it sound patronizing if I call this a "young person's book"? I don't mean it to—realizing what it is (a book that finds it impossible to imagine what it's... (Tom)

I didn't need much convincing to read a book about those chubby, flat-tailed rodents: their industrious ingenuity has always made them among the most appealing of animals. But what Goldfarb does in hi... (Tom)

This is the kind of book I used to read more of: a debut novel by a young writer about, well, young writers. They drink too much, sleep with the wrong (or the right?) people, get poorly paid for iffy... (Tom)

Anybody who falls in love with Shopsin's from Tamara's book (see above) will, naturally, want to turn to this ten-year-old cookbook, designed by Tamara but written by Papa Shopsin himself, the foul-mo... (Tom)

It's usually the case in books that the story takes place when people are not working: that's when life, apparently, begins. Gill's memoir flips that on its head: there is almost nothing in the book o... (Tom)

In the two decades since this debut novel came out, Chee has been ever-present as an essayist, a teacher, and a general literary citizen, but he's only published one other novel (2016's The Queen of N... (Tom)

Some writers have such fun with our shared language—stretching it, wandering down its more neglected byways, reveling in its regionalisms—that it makes you wonder why so many of their peers are conten... (Tom)

The first book I finished this year—published in Germany in 1951 but recently translated into English by NYRB Classics—does two things at once. It immersed me so deeply in pre-WWII, bourgeois Jewish B... (Liz)

Let's say this from the outset: Eileen is dark, as dark as its pitch-black cover. Eileen, who tells the story, lives a miserable, grimy existence with her alcoholic father, and, she says, likes "books... (Tom)

The title of this 1964 picture book (just brought back into print by—of course—NYRB Classics) may be the greatest in the history of publishing—how could you not want to read about its hero's oddly spe... (Tom)

You can likely read this slim novel in less than eleven hours, but it will feel like it's happening in real time. The clock starts with the morning admission of Lore, 31 years old and alone, to a New... (Tom)

Maybe it has something to do with Seattle's recent hot weather, but I've already found the book I'll be recommending to anyone who comes in to the bookshop looking for an upbeat summer read. It's a re... (Liz)

Poets, with their gifts for compression, rhythm, and (sometimes even these days) rhyme, would seem like natural picture-book writers, and Young, the poetry editor of the New Yorker and the new directo... (Tom)

My first introduction to Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas was through Jim Henson's underrated 1977 TV special (a Christmas tradition in our house when I was growing up). This charming movie was based... (Haley)

Where are you, in this little novel? From its subtitle, you can tell you are in the next century, and from the description on the back (and, slowly, from the reports within) you learn you are in a spa... (Tom)

No thumbnail image can do justice to the elegant intricacies of Enchanted Forest (or its "inky quest" predecessor, Secret Garden, which we've belatedly brought into the store as well). A coloring book... (Tom)

No thumbnail image can do justice to the elegant intricacies of Enchanted Forest (or its "inky quest" predecessor, Secret Garden, which we've belatedly brought into the store as well). A coloring book... (Tom)

Are you the sort of person who would choose to read The Road in the middle of a blackout? Then The End of October might be for you! Wright has been justifiably acclaimed for his fearlessly reported ac... (Tom)

Sometimes all I want from a novel is people saying funny things to each other, and for those times, Drury's first novel is a tonic. He is a master of the deadpan, of the dry, offhand remark that build... (Tom)

The English Understand Wool This little book is a delight every bit as scrumptious—though perhaps not quite as sweet—as the slices of Wayne Thiebaud cake on its cover. Helen DeWitt is, for my money, t... (Tom)

A copy of this 2015 collection came into the store a little dinged up, so I took it home. I'd always wanted to read Ryan, and it turns out I like her a lot: she makes tiny aphoristic paradoxes mostly,... (Tom)

Over twenty-five years later, one of the central events in Northwest history finally has its storyteller. Timber tycoons, a maverick governor, intrepid geologists, loggers, conservationists, gawkers,... (Tom)

Ever since I heard about the big splash The Essex Serpent made last year in Great Britain, I have been anticipating its appearance on our shores. And this wondrous book ended up arriving exactly when... (Liz)

"Show, don't tell," that's what all the writing guides say, and there's plenty of truth to that truism. But sometimes you want a story to be told—there's a reason they're called "storytellers"—and whe... (Tom)

Followers of our Facebook page might recall this spring a link we posted to the Kickstarter campaign a Greenwood neighbor, Sara Crow, had created for her board book, Even Superheroes Have to Sleep. We... (Tom)

Young Mabel has a very important appointment every Monday morning. Her sister thinks it's boring, her mom thinks it's cute, and her dad thinks it's funny. But to Mabel, watching the garbage truck rumb... (Haley)

Ratliff's title refers not to the range of his own book, which is slim not encyclopedic, but to the endless world of music our Spotify-era ears have available to them. Listening is indubitably differe... (Tom)

This book had me at "Gilda, a twenty-something, atheist, animal-loving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death." I was fully prepared from that one-sentence summary to love this novel, but I hadn'... (Anika)

The story of migration from Central America to the United States over the past few decades—especially in the last decade—is almost unutterably complex, and the misery driving it, and the misery furthe... (Tom)

As anyone who reads kids books out loud knows, not every rhyming picture book has rhymes that really sing. But Colin Meloy, the singer and songwriter of the Decembrists, knows how to compose a singabl... (Tom)

New-ish Book of the Week Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi I love oral history and I love speculative fiction so I grabbed... (Liz)

For 20 years now, Bell has been making comics that create marvelous depths out of everyday moments, sometimes with low-key fantastical turns, like a woman who turns herself into a chair so she won't b... (Tom)

Madeline has lived inside an unforgiving and forbidden world all her life. She hasn't left her house in seventeen years. If she did, she could die. But when a mysterious boy named Olly moves in next d... (Dori)

It's expensive being poor. The struggle for decent (often barely livable) housing is a full-time job, and even in a depressed city like Milwaukee holding on to the worst places to live, with no workin... (Laura)

I’m discovering that, even more than historical fiction, I love reading stories written during the particular era in which they are set. The combination of the author’s first-hand knowledge and the re... (Liz)

Sometimes I pick up a book and I just know we're going to get along. This sweet YA novel ticked so many of my boxes. Positive mental health rep? Check. A post-graduation road trip with surprising dive... (Anika)

Six students of various ages and backgrounds all sign up for a new master's level art class at a university in England. The senior art tutor needs this class to work so it can be added to the universi... (Doree)

Audio Book of the Week Exit West by Mohsin Hamid A recent roundtrip drive to Portland proved the perfect way to listen to Mohsin Hamid's short new novel (I was done by the time I passed Tacoma on the... (Tom)

How does a child recover from abuse? If you’re 11-year-old December, you become convinced you’re really a bird, with wings ready to sprout from that ugly scar on your back. Those wings will take you a... (Doree)

Those of you (and there are many) who've encountered the previous volumes of the Barrøy Chronicles, The Unseen or White Shadow, will not need me to say anything about this new book other than It's her... (James)

Our front window this week is full of faces, in tribute to a new series started by Restless Books: beautiful, inexpensive little books on a subject we all share, but one that defines us most distinctl... (Tom)

It doesn't seem a stretch to wonder if Wes Anderson makes films (especially The Grand Budapest Hotel) as an excuse to create exquisite fictitious letterhead, and when he wanted someone equally meticul... (Tom)

In his first stab at psychological suspense, poet and novelist Lasdun proves himself a pro. He takes the most basic narrative tools—a vacation home, a love triangle—and with an ear for inner monologue... (Liz)

"Wisconsin is a laboratory for the rest of the country." Those are words that might have once applied to the progressive "Wisconsin Idea," but in Kaufman's book are spoken by a conservative activist a... (Tom)

In Benway's novel, the surprise winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature this fall, three adopted teenagers, strangers to each other, reckon with the discovery that they have si... (Tom)

For 6,000 years, the human alliance with the horse has been unparalleled—more stable even than our relationship with our gods, argues Raulff—but for two centuries we have been gradually withdrawing fr... (Tom)

The ruined farmhouse on a property Sophie Blackall moved to in upstate New York could not have fallen into better hands than the Caldecott-winning author of Hello Lighthouse. Layering actual materials... (Tom)

Part of what made the documentary Bill Cunningham New York so fascinating was the enigma of its subject: the photographer infatuated with fashion who himself lived an ascetic and deeply private life.... (Tom)

A memoir looking back on the author's escape from a fundamentalist childhood was as familiar in Gosse's time (1907) as it is in ours (e.g. Tara Westover's Educated), but the two things that continue t... (Tom)

Raban's final book is the story of two journeys: his father's, as a British officer, through the World War II battlefields of Dunkirk, North Africa, and Anzio, and his own, as he recovers from, and ad... (Tom)

Alex is known as "the girl with the dead sister." Her older sister Anna was murdered three years ago, and in the time since, Alex has succeeded in carrying out a violent, but secret, revenge on her si... (Karlyn)

Jo Ann Beard doesn't write—or at least publish—a lot, but, boy, when she does... She's in her mid-sixties, and this is just her third book; her first, The Boys of My Youth, made her a bit of a cult he... (Tom)

One reason traditional mysteries are satisfying is that everything is tied up and explained at the end. But a true horror story never gives you that way out. Fever Dream is a tiny book you can read in... (Tom)

One reason traditional mysteries are satisfying is that everything is tied up and explained at the end. But a true horror story never gives you that way out. Fever Dream is a tiny book you can read in... (Tom)

At the end of Calle Sol in Puerto Rico, the myth says, there's a cursed house consumed in plants, the home to a scientist and his daughter, a girl filled with poison and with green skin and grass for... (Karlyn)

The first selection for our Phinney by Post subscription service is a book I hadn't opened until a couple of months ago, but after reading just the first two pages I was pretty sure I had found Book #... (Tom)

If you're looking for a book that has something useful to say about the current situation that isn't too, you know, on point, look no further. In previous books (The Big Short, Flash Boys, etc.) Lewis... (James)

What happens when you put people with contempt for government in charge of the government? Lewis takes his eye for the untold story into the unglamorous—but, as he demonstrates, desperately necessary—... (Tom)

How do you tell the story of America's decade and half at war (during a time when much of America hardly felt like it was at war at all)? Chivers, the Pulitzer-winning New York Times correspondent and... (Tom)

Anyone who loved Taylor's debut novel from last year, Real Life (as I did), will feel right at home in the stories in his first collection, which also mostly feature young graduate students in the Mid... (Tom)

I returned to another author of an all-time favorite this month. I often name Charles Burns''s 2005 graphic novel, Black Hole, a jet-dark story of a disease sweeping through '70s teens, as my favorite... (Tom)

You may remember Shopsin as the author of one of my favorite books of last year, the funny, odd, and wise memoir of her family's Greenwich Village diner, Arbitrary Stupid Goal. Her day job, aside from... (Tom)

Douglas, You Need Glasses! by Ged Adamson (Tom)

If you've seen Miranda July's movies or read her story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, you might have an idea of what to expect from her first novel. But otherwise, how to explain Miran... (Tom)

Malu finds herself caught between a Mexican mother who wants her to be the perfect señorita and a music-loving father who helped foster her love of all things punk. After their divorce, Malu and her m... (Gabi)

The story (a Caldecott Honor winner from 1976 just now brought back into print) is as simple as its endearingly simple pen-and-ink illustrations. A grandmother wakes up early, has breakfast, cleans up... (Tom)

illustrated by Joseph R. Tomelleri 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 pre... (Tom)

Harris's first book, Pictures at a Revolution, which be built around the five Best Picture Oscar nominees from 1967, was a smart treat, and in his second he returns to that magic number, telling the p... (Tom)

For a fat book that covers half a decade (as the title implies), Five Decembers moves at the speed of a drag-race sprint. Published by the self-conscious throwback wizards at Hard Case Crime, it's a t... (Tom)

If the first thing you think when you finish a book is, “How did he do that!?”, you can be sure the author has pulled off something remarkable. I’ve long admired Szalay’s style and enjoyed his previou... (Liz)

Two teenage boys (the ages of my own children, who I'm proud once drove to Anacortes by themselves!) decided to fly across the country in a tiny plane in the summer of '66. That alone is quite a tale... (Tom)

I am slowly catching up with the genius of Joseph Roth. After the multigenerational sweep of his masterpiece, The Radetzky March, this little novel reads like a minor chamber piece, but in some ways i... (Tom)

Suddenly it seems I'm on a roll (or a jag) of reading (or wanting to read) books by men about their uncommon professions (airline pilot Mark Vanhoenacker's Skyfaring, neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's Do No... (Tom)

The public drama of Penelope Fitzgerald's life came late, as she burst into literary fame in her sixties after years of poverty and quiet desperation. She mined those private years for much of her fic... (Tom)

The New Yorker cartoon is one of those venerable comedy institutions that, like Saturday Night Live, is at this point often more "funny" than funny. But, as also happens on Saturday Night Live, once i... (Tom)

The story of this lovely novel is simple: will the Stevenses, a lower-middle-class family of five from the outskirts of London, enjoy their holidays? It's no small matter: their two weeks at the seasi... (Tom)

When Berger died in January, I realized I had never read any of his many books, but in all the accounts of his work, including his celebrated art criticism and fiction, this lesser-known book from 196... (Tom)

How did I only recently learn about this wonderful picture book from 1964? Created by Remy Charlip (a design and choreography collaborator with Merce Cunningham and John Cage and—fun fact!—the physica... (Tom)

Just out in paperback after being one of our most popular middle-reader novels last year, The Fourteenth Goldfish neatly slides a science-fiction premise (11-year-old Ellie Cruz's cranky, arrogant gra... (Tom)

I'm not really sure that this is a kids' book at all. Will little readers or big ones most appreciate its simple fable of courage and friendship and its intricate, exquisite illustrations? "Illustrati... (Tom)

The first historical novel in Smith's spectacular career is built from the bones of two true stories from Victorian England: the forgotten literary life of William Harrison Ainsworth, a friend and riv... (Tom)

When I started listening to the audiobook edition of French Exit, I thought, "Oh, this narrator [the book is read by Lorna Raver] is a bit much." Well, it turned out she was just right, because French... (Tom)

I was first drawn to this under-the-radar book by its cover, with its fascinatingly odd photo of Sergius Pankejeff, the patient Freud called the "Wolf Man," as a child, and by its premise: short portr... (Tom)

I’ve thought for a while now that short stories just aren’t for me, but Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut has made me reconsider. At just under 200 pages, Friday Black is an intense and provocative rea... (Anika)

Friends are one thing Eddie Coyle doesn't have. He talks to a lot of guys—this book is made of talking—but every conversation is a wary exchange, negotiated sometimes in half-spoken ways and sometimes... (Tom)

We pay attention to Michael Hofmann's translations here, not only for his skill in turning German into English (e.g., Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March and Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos) but for his taste i... (Tom)

Remember visiting your friends' houses? This blissfully kooky book carries with it an immediate and probably unintended nostalgia for those carefree days of going from house to house. But the real ple... (Tom)

When Kelly Yang was a child, she would hide out in the school library to avoid her bullies at lunchtime. Many years later, her love of books allowed her to turn her pain into an award-winning new midd... (Haley)

Fox sisters Celeste and Miriam explore a sparkling winter wonderland in this cozy picture book. Older sister Miriam tells Celeste all about snow dragons—they collect "diamond dust," breathe frostfire,... (Haley)

This punchy work of graphic nonfiction reads like the best of stand-up comedy in its presentation of the feminist history of "the female genitalia." It highlights the absurd and infuriating; for insta... (Anika)

One of the great mysteries of American literature—what was Harper Lee working on for the fifty years after To Kill a Mockingbird?—was left mostly unanswered after her death in 2016, but Casey Cep has... (Tom)

You may have read Alec Wilkinson's New Yorker profile this summer of his friend Edward Hirsch and the long poem he'd written about the death of his son, Gabriel. The poem came out last month, and it's... (Tom)

I've generally been immune to Richard Powers's novels: for a time I tried almost every one, intrigued by their premises, but found myself left cold by their earnest brilliance. But my searching stoppe... (Tom)

The Gallery turned out to be a masterpiece of WWII literature I wasn’t expecting and didn’t know I needed. Burns alternates brief recollections of his travels in the military bureaucracy trailing the... (Liz)

The Gallows Pole recounts the rise and fall of the Cragg Vale Coiners who, as the pastoral moorlands of their native Yorkshire were being transformed by the architecture of industry in the 1760s, so t... (Tom)

Add this big, beautiful new volume to the growing shelf of books celebrating ground-breaking women (Rad Women Worldwide, Dead Feminists, Women in Science, and more), with portraits and profiles of bet... (Tom)

Only when Stanley Crawford died a year ago, at age 86, did I realize that the same person was the author of two very different books that had long intrigued me: the notoriously weird experimental nove... (Tom)

Fi-Fi, Foo-Foo, Ooh-La-La, and Gaston: Mrs. Poodle's new puppies, one of whom--guess who?--doesn't look quite like the others. In fact, he looks rather bulldogish, which becomes particularly interesti... (Tom)

This delightfully illustrated graphic memoir is an emotional and straightforward account of self-discovery and acceptance. Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, explores coming to terms with eir genderq... (Anika)

When Henry Montague's father sends him on a Grand Tour of the Continent, eighteen-year-old "Monty" is only looking forward to unsupervised partying, drinking himself into oblivion, and waking up in st... (Haley)

What do you call what Kelly Link does? She takes a story that at first seems to follow the usual rules of realism, and turns it slightly—and then not so slightly—toward the strange, the magical, the f... (Tom)

I know it's early yet, but this is the best book I've read in 2015, and it might remain so. For over a decade Leovy has reported on murder in L.A., especially on the killing of black men (and boys) by... (Tom)

Newish Book of the Week Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay by Jeff Young Imagine a book about post-war Liverpool that takes 90 pages to even mention the Beatles (and then only to say his mum was sad w... (Tom)

No Nobel Prize again for Philip Roth? No matter. You can still read him, and if you haven't before, you might start here. I've loved, variously, Goodbye, Columbus, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock,... (Tom)

If you ever start to forget what the old, weird Seattle was like (or if you never knew), you'll want to have this big hodgepodge of a book nearby. Garbacik, a self-described "guerrilla ethnographer,"... (Tom)

The Gift first appeared in 1983 to immediate acclaim and lasting popularity. Despite the praise, I avoided it for years because I thought it was a long-winded version of those insipid inspirational po... (James)

I might have raved to you about The Golden Age, London's most recent novel and one of my favorite store recommendations. Gilgamesh, her first novel, is nearly as good, and clearly from the same brilli... (Tom)

Really, there's almost no way to choose among A Girl and Her Gator and the linked picture books by Bryan and Murphy that precede and follow it, each with its own similarly inexplicable but ultimately... (Tom)

At first I was just smitten with the title, and imagined what story inside could live up to it. Unsurprisingly, a word-drunk one. After all, September, the thoroughly admirable girl of the title, "lik... (Tom)

Each year, the rulers of a sorrowful town at the edge of a forest sacrifice a baby to the forest's witch. Little do the rulers know that the witch saves the babes and delivers them to adoptive familie... (Haley)

You might, on first glance, find Evaristo's prize winner daunting: the stories of twelve characters, told over 450 pages in a style that, with its idiosyncratic layout and mid-sentence line breaks, lo... (Tom)

The "girl" of the title is Ernaux herself, at age 18, marked by her bookishness for a life outside the working class in which she was raised. And the story is, in essence, that of a single moment and... (Tom)

This little reissue, originally published in 1986, lured me in with its gorgeous Edward Gorey cover art, and then I couldn't help but stick around. Set in the mid-1970s in the Midlands, it begins with... (Anika)

Yes, I know that Station Eleven is one of the most brilliant and entertaining books about a pandemic ever written, but I swear, it's a coincidence that I'm recommending another book by Emily St. John... (James)

This tiny book is made up of tiny sketches of the departed, their brevity a reminder of the brevity of all of our lives. They are known only by the nicknames Winik gives them—the Clown, the Junkie, th... (Tom)

Old Books of the Week The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence Ritter Pitching in a Pinch by Christy Mathewson It's August, with the Mariners actually still in a pennant race, so let's take a few moments... (Tom)

I love seeing how things (especially movies) are made. I've listened to all three DVD commentary tracks for Scorsese's Raging Bull and wished there were more, and, to be honest, I'd rather watch Heart... (Tom)

In a drought-stricken California town, a teenage girl grows up in thrall to her troubled single mother and a pastor with a cultish power over his flock, struggling to assert autonomy over her mind, so... (James)

Godwin is, as advertised, about the search for a teenage soccer prodigy who may or may not exist in West Africa and who may or may not be the next Messi. But it's also about a minor power struggle at... (Tom)

A polio hospital for children in Western Australia in the 1950s might not seem the most promising territory for a story of heart-catching beauty, but that's exactly what London's third novel is. I hat... (Tom)

This book never goes where you expect it to. Is it a satire of '80s SoCal self-empowerment? Is it a post-nuclear-war story of human apocalypse and survival? Both? Neither? The real story, for me, is i... (Tom)

What a delicious feast! Golden Hill is Spufford's first novel, after five idiosyncratic books of nonfiction, and it's clear he had a ball with it, delighting in the language and the details of his sub... (Tom)

The rest of the book's pretty great too, but Milo's right—the part where she ets the pudding is the best. (Unsigned)

Your first clue that this romantic comedy is a break-up story is the list that kicks it off: Reasons Why It's Good I'm Not with Jen. Here begins Andy's obsessive wallowing. To be fair, he deserves a g... (Anika)

With all the books celebrating women scientists, activists, and heroes, this is the one we've had the most inquiries about in recent months. We're delighted it's finally available for sale in stores l... (Tom)

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, a... (Haley)

Kids' Books of the Week Good Ol' Charlie Brown, Snoopy, etc. by Charles M. Schulz As much as I have loved the reverential treatment Fantagraphics has given to the 25-volume Complete Peanuts series the... (Tom)

"Sometimes, you don't know how confused you are about something important until you try explaining it to someone else." Starting with a premise similar to Ta-Nehisi Coates's in Between the World and M... (Tom)

The first rule of Bridge, Tab, and Em's club: no fighting. But as they enter seventh grade, Em has developed curvy new curves, Tab has a newfound interest in social justice, and Bridge has a pair of f... (Tom)

I am often in the process of reading multiple books at once. The trick to this, I think, is to pick books that are different enough from each other: light vs. heavy, fiction vs. nonfiction, long vs. s... (Anika)

Just read the first two pages—the "Sort of Preface" to this 1972 story collection—and see if you can resist going further. That sly confidence, that voice: lively, boastful, affectionate, exasperated!... (Tom)

Got to Get to Bear's is a sweet and simply constructed tale of friendship ("If Bear asks, you gotta go!"), cooperation, and surprise, but what makes it special are Lies's illustrations, which evoke th... (Tom)

To Amundsen and Zheng He and Armstrong and the list of other great explorers add our two young heroes, who decide to go on an expedition. They set up a tent in the backyard, bring treats (and when tho... (Tom)

Who doesn't love a big book packed with tiny, hand-drawn details? You can play visual detective with your young readers through dozens of tours of the Grand Old Oak, and best of all (with those dozens... (Tom)

Great is a retelling of The Great Gatsby as a contemporary YA novel. In this version, Nick Carraway is reimagined as a teenage girl named Naomi Rye, who is spending the summer at her mother’s East Ham... (Anika)

When I opened the store, I was surprised and disappointed to find that only the first three of the original seven Great Brain books are still in print. There may be no kids' books I remember more inte... (Tom)

A magical and immersive piece of literary fiction, Great Circle offers readers a little bit of everything—a coming of age story, sprinkled with adventure, forbidden love, family tension, mystery, and... (Brittany)

My new and fanatical devotion to How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen led me to this kindred item, also from the '70s and also illustrated with chaotic glee by Quentin Blake. If you thi... (Tom)

For twenty years, Park has spent the summers tracking the rare and regal Siberian tiger through Russia's eastern wilderness, and for each of those twenty winters he has hidden himself in tiny undergro... (Tom)

I would never have picked this book up if I hadn't read a very funny essay Sernovitz wrote for the New Yorker website recently, where his bio identified him as both a novelist and an oilman. Intrigued... (Tom)

I have never seen such a collective swoon behind our counter as when an advance copy of this darling book arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. Why do we love it so? Emily Jenkins's words appear simple... (Tom)

Old Book of the Week by Andrew Holleran Thomas Wolfe once divided novelists into "putter-inners" (like himself) and "taker-outers," who pared their art down to its bones. This is one of the taker-oute... (Tom)

Grief? Feathers? Didn't I already read that book when it was called H Is for Hawk? Not in the least. The bird in this case is a crow, and the book, well, it's a beast of another kind entirely, a slim,... (Tom)

From the outside, 35-year-old Jenny McLaine appears to be a successful adult. She owns her house, has a cool writing job in London, a few good friends, and up until recently she lived with her famous... (Anika)

All I knew about Thomas De Quincey was opium: his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is often considered the first addiction memoir, and it made him a hero to Poe, Dostoevsky, and Borges. His life... (Tom)

A customer request tipped me off to this webcomic-turned-book, and I think it might find a lot more fans, young and old. Orientation is an apt title for this first volume, as its two intrepid girl her... (Tom)

You may have already heard about this book. You're going to hear a lot more, especially around here. It's a story of grief, of nature and friendship and loneliness, but it's really the story of an enc... (Tom)

Speaking of how things are made, we've been admiring this handsome item in the store since spring (often while playing the Hamilton soundtrack). "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?" are the wo... (Tom)

A Hanging at Cinder Bottom opens in the town of Keystone, West Virginia, in 1910, with Abe Baach, the town's most skilled card player, and Goldie Toothman, the graceful madam of the local brothel, hea... (Laura)

Attila is a psychiatrist from Ghana who has made a career of assessing trauma in war zones. Jean is a divorced wildlife biologist from New England. It almost seems enough that Forna has imagined these... (Tom)

Beaty and Roberts have become picture-book superstars for their ongoing series about brilliantly ambitious youngsters—Rosie Revere, Iggy Peck, Ada Twist, and, coming soon, Sofia Valdez. And for good r... (Tom)

Is "pre-apocalyptic" a word? There are books all over our shelves that imagine futures after various disasters, but Davis's graphic novel taps into a feeling that's more intensely present: how to move... (Tom)

"What makes you think you're so important that someone should listen to you?" It's the question Neko Case has been asked—and even worse, asked herself—her whole life, born into a spectacularly neglect... (Tom)

Cobwebs? Check. Creaky doors? Check. Squeaky stairs, rattling pipes, flickering lights? Check, check, and check. What house wants to be haunted, because who would want to live in a haunted house? Well... (Tom)

Harold's woolly hat is indeed special. Made up of nine strokes of Vern Kousky's paintbrush, five red and four yellow, plus a little dab of blue at the teetering-over top, it's the kind of deliciously... (Tom)

In the fine American tradition of Tom Sawyer and the Great Brain, meet Harris, nine years old and full of spit, foul language, and half-baked ideas for making life on the farm a little less dull. Paul... (Tom)

This wonderful and strange book may have launched the sub-genre known awkwardly as the "swimoir," but there is much more swimming than memoir here. You hardly learn more about the author than you do f... (Tom)

You don't need to know that Have You Seen My Trumpet? completes Escoffier and Di Giacomo's "Word-Play Trilogy" (after Take Away the A and Where's the Baboon?) to understand that it's a total hoot. The... (Tom)

Mailhot's memoir is short, but she doesn't let it go down easy. She knows how indigenous memoirs like hers, are taken. "I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle," she writes on... (Tom)

The thing a novel does better than any other kind of art is put you inside the thoughts of someone else, as they fork and forget and turn back on themselves. In this book, Marías's sentences do just t... (Tom)

Audio Book of the Week Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner, read by Peter Giles Heat is not my own favorite Michael Mann film—I'll take The Insider or Thief—but thirty years after it pitted Pacino... (Tom)

For whatever reason (having nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that publishing is dominated by intellectually aspirant professionals who live in Manhattan and Brooklyn), the New York novel is a fi... (James)

Heavy is a book unsatisfied with itself, by a writer unsatisfied with himself, and with us. He begins by saying he "wanted to write a lie," a happier, less messy memoir, but he couldn't. Instead, he w... (Tom)

From the very start of his career, Thoreau has been one of the most divisive members of the American literary canon—visionary or crank? self-reliant or sponge?—in large part because he offered his own... (Tom)

From the very start of his career, Thoreau has been one of the most divisive members of the American literary canon—visionary or crank? self-reliant or sponge?—in large part because he offered his own... (Tom)

My favorite book I've read so far this year came out in 1985 and takes place in the late '50s. You may know Segal (I did, at least) from her fantastic kid's book, Tell Me a Mitzi, but boy, she is quit... (Tom)

I love historical fiction that focuses on strong female characters, especially when it’s written by Beatriz Williams, who is a master at slowly unfurling connections between characters years apart. He... (Doree)

Emily Jane’s very funny debut novel, On Earth as It Is on Television, was one of my favorite books two years ago, and I frequently recommend it to people who want something hilarious yet also poignant... (Doree)

Writing in a clipped, hip style any James Ellroy fan will recognize, Selvin unearths the story of the long-neglected Berns, who in his short life, and his even shorter time at the top of pop, wrote "T... (Tom)

Oliver Jeffers has written and drawn many picture books and illustrated others, including the colossally popular The Day the Crayons Quit, but his new one feels special: a welcome message written to i... (Tom)

So many customers have raved to me about Millard's previous histories, The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic, that I had to try her new one, about one of Churchill's early imperial adventures... (Tom)

You might read this little book, as I did, loving almost every page, and not be sure at the end what actually happened. What happens, more or less, is the narrator—this is not a memoir, she says, but... (Tom)

Schizophrenia is among the most ruthless of diseases, suddenly erupting in a life, often in adolescence, and turning it inside out in ways few treatments have been able to solve. That's what happened... (Tom)

This might be the funniest—or the truest—book in the store. Fourier, you may recall, was the French utopian socialist from your economics classes who influenced Marx and predicted the seas would somed... (Tom)

What a cozy little adventure! Hilda lives in the mountains and likes to draw, camp out, and wander in the woods: she's awfully appealing, and so is the world she investigates, which has just enough de... (Tom)

As a former bookish girl who loved to read about other bookish girls, I hereby nominate Joan Skraggs a worthy successor to literary heroines Anne Shirley and Francie Nolan. In her newly acquired diary... (Liz)

The crime is clear: Roderick Macrae, a young crofter in the Scottish Highlands, murdered three people on a summer's day in 1869. But the story is less straightforward, layered by Burnet with great pre... (Tom)

You can find all kinds of beautifully printed surveys of art history for your library, but why not choose as your guide the charming, deeply knowledgable, and idiosyncratically opinionated David Hockn... (Tom)

It's no easy trick to weave three generations into fifteen stories, tracing lines of heredity, loyalty, and betrayal, holding onto a dozen and more characters as they shape-shift across leaps in time... (Tom)

My copy of Homage to Catalonia which I bought for this month's Ridge Readers Book Club meeting is the 49th printing of the American edition. Why are we still reading Orwell's memoir of fighting in the... (Tom)

You don't need to know that Carson Ellis is the hip Portland illustrator for the Wildwood series and the band the Decembrists to appreciate her delightful solo picture book debut. Beginning with the m... (Tom)

When an advance copy of Home Baked arrived at the store, I took it home hoping merely to escape into the iconic 1970s San Francisco setting. I never anticipated that this memoir would give me an in-de... (Haley)

The arrival of full shelves of Persephone Books was one of the highlights of our year, so it seemed appropriate to close 2025 by choosing a Persephone book—in one of their slightly less expensive but... (Tom)

Some novelists unpack a single day in their 300 pages, while others unfurl a quarter of a millennium. Gyasi, ambitiously, does the latter, tracing the parallel lineages begun by two West African half-... (Tom)

Akhtar pulls you in with his very first sentences—intellectual and political, but flowing with the energy and intimacy of friendly conversation—and you are off on a ride through post-9/11 America, as... (Tom)

One of the challenges for a writer of short stories is to resist the tidiness that their compact form seems to demand, and evoke the full messiness of life while still telling a tale. Messy is somethi... (Tom)

When it comes to books about Seattle and its surroundings, there's one must-read writer as far as I'm concerned, and that's David B. Williams. I've long been telling recent arrivals and lifetime resid... (James)

I’m fine with all sorts of grim reading material but apocalypse stories are just TOO stressful. That said, if it’s set in an English village and written by the author of The Fortnight in September, I’... (Liz)

The House in the Cerulean Sea is a heart-swelling wave of sweetness and hope. Mild-mannered government caseworker Linus Baker is sent on a secret assignment to an island orphanage he's never even hear... (Haley)

House Lessons: Renovating a Life Erica Bauermeister's memoir-in-essays is a treasure for anyone who, like me, can't resist the intrigue of an open-house sign. House Lessons beckons you inside a trash-... (Anika)

What an idea: to trace Russia's revolutionary generation, from its utopian beginnings to the paranoid purges of its end, via the massive Moscow apartment complex that was built to house the party's el... (Tom)

The title alone has an aspirational allure (at least for book hoarders like me), but the book inside is even better: it's a beautiful, subtle, and knowledgeable portrait of a singular man, Chimen Abra... (Tom)

How did Hettie Cohen become Hettie Jones? By marrying the poet LeRoi Jones, who later marked his own transformation by changing his name to Amiri Baraka and leaving his mixed-race family behind. That'... (Tom)

In addition to writing the exquisite little novel A Month in the Country, which ensorcelled our staff last year, wrote a number of other little novels, and even published them himself, in oddball edit... (Tom)

I read How to Be Loved in two days' time, but I’ve been carrying to book with me for weeks. I mean literally putting it in my bag so I can pop it open any time, to reread one of the 30 pages I've fold... (Nancy)

The diagnosis is obvious, and one I make for myself nearly every day: that marvelous, seductive object, the smartphone, is an addictive parasite (as is my laptop as well), drawing my attention multipl... (Tom)

A different book about the art and science of flavor might be called "How We Taste," but Becky Selengut, local chef and (you can tell) beloved cooking instructor, emphasizes the "to" in her title. Tas... (Tom)

That is a banger of a book! (Peter)

How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen by Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake I knew how great Russell Hoban was, and I knew, vaguely, that he had written a kids' book with the thrillingly... (Tom)

I knew how great Russell Hoban was (in his Frances books for kids and his grown-up novels Turtle Diary and Riddley Walker), and I knew, vaguely, that he had written another kids' book with the thrilli... (Tom)

Melchor’s English-language debut is a portrait of a Mexican village as unnerving and entrancing as any painting by Bruegel or Bosch. The scene opens on the village's outskirts, its resident Witch foun... (Liz)

My favorite historical fiction author, Beatriz Williams, is back with her 16th book (not counting her collaborations with fellow authors Karen White and Lauren Willig), all but one of which have inter... (Doree)

I Am Not Jessica Chen is a haunting portrait of social pressure and academic burnout. When Jenna Chen's wish to become her golden child cousin literally comes true, she's initially elated. She finds h... (Anika)

[I recommended this fine and slightly unhinged essay collection this time last year with the review below. We hardly sold any copies, and I don't think many other people did either, but now that I Am... (Tom)

Is Kent Russell timid? It's hard to say, but he seems terrified he might be. The progeny of brawlers, soldiers, and a charismatically unemployable dad, Russell is drawn to the sorts of men whose fists... (Tom)

As someone who thinks about death more than is probably average or healthy, I couldn’t resist diving into Maggie O’Farrell’s unconventional memoir. Told in non-chronological order, each chapter is the... (Anika)

I could not stop reading Jami Attenberg’s new memoir I Came All This Way to Meet You, and that is exactly how I like to read books. I read this one, in its entirety, on Boxing Day. I loved Jami’s hone... (Nancy)

In the admirable title-that-sums-up-the-story tradition of The Elephant Who Liked to Smash Small Cars, the story of this goofy, Day-Glo counting book is just that: if you can only draw worms, well, yo... (Tom)

What a beautiful book. First published in 1997 and reimagined and republished this year with the cooperation of its two authors, it brings together story and photos to much the same hauntingly evocati... (Tom)

Kids' Books of the Week Red: A Crayon's Story by Michael Hall I Don't Want to Be a Frog by Dev Petty and Mike Boldt You are what you are. Or are you? I sat down with these two appealing new picture bo... (Tom)

"It's my birthday. So boo! I hate all of you." "Go away! No! Stay!" This is not your average birthday picture book, but I'll bet it reflects the true roiling, ambivalent emotions of many omf the toddl... (Tom)

About three years ago, Sante, a writer in her mid-60s known until then as Luc, sent to a few dozen close friends a piece of writing titled "Lucy," a tender, exact, joyful, and terrified confession and... (Tom)

"It's the books that have the power, but a good bookstore will influence what a person chooses to read." So ponders Mort, one of several endearing characters in Acampora's novel of literary rebellion,... (Kim)

I Know How to Draw an Owl is my favorite picture book of 2024. Beautiful and heart-wrenching, yet as quiet as an owl gliding through the trees, it depicts a serious issue with subtlety and sensitivity... (Haley)

This is the month for monsters, and you'll find few more appealing ones than the father and child in this rhyming tale. The rhythms and the rhymes are note-perfect for reading aloud, and the monstrous... (Tom)

I’ve heard it said that other peoples’ dreams aren’t interesting, but I’ve never agreed with that! I love hearing about dreams, particularly if they’re Roz Chast’s. In I Must Be Dreaming, the combinat... (Haley)

Sometime a book of the most stunning originality is the easiest to imitate. I Remember is simply that: a series of tiny declarations, all beginning, "I remember...." The poet and artist Joe Brainard b... (Tom)

Zeina Abirached was born into war, Lebanon's civil war that divided its capital, Beirut, in the '80s, and her graphic memoir, drawn in gorgeously blocky blacks and whites that will remind readers of M... (Tom)

Unpublished until 1995, these diaries of a German Jew who survived the Nazi years have become one of the most essential records of the era. Klemperer, a scholar of language and literature, was ultimat... (Tom)

Even during their own lives, the women, men, and children entangled in the Salem witch trials were caught between reality and the imagination, and as their lives have been further mythologized since,... (Tom)

I'm Just No Good at Rhyming: And Other Nonsense for Mischievous Kids and Immature Grown (Ups)

This fat new book of verse is unrelated to almost anything else on our shelves, except that it might be a nephew to old Uncle Shelby, Shel Silverstein. With tiny punch-line couplets, silly multi-stanz... (Tom)

I read this book twice last year, at the beginning of the year and the end, and my awe and delight at its beauty only increased. The story is simple—a new girl comes to a small Norwegian town, and mak... (Tom)

"If you make a call on a banana phone, who will answer?" The boy in this picture book finds out when he strikes up a long-distance friendship with a gorilla. Emily Hughes's soft-looking illustrations... (Haley)

After a long phone call one day, author/illustrator Felicita Sala's daughter asked her, “Mum, what if you talk so much that you run out of words, and then there won’t be any left for me?” Her daughter... (Haley)

As wartime capers go, it can hardly get more daring and debonair than this one: the kidnapping of a Nazi general in occupied Crete by a team of local partisans and British commandos. One of the comman... (Tom)

This is not your typical YA dystopian sci-fi romance novel. (I should know, I read enough of them.) This is the first book of any type to grab me and not let go in way too long a time. Told in hacked... (Steph)

This is a joyful book. Much of the joy comes from the wild turkeys Joe Hutto raises from a clutch of eggs, as they investigate and appreciate their portion of north Florida woodland, but Hutto is full... (Tom)

This oversized item from the writer and publisher of the equally large and fact-filled Atlas of Adventures has its own unique attraction: three-colored glasses, which allow you to see, in the same pic... (Tom)

Many books are bad (I can admit that), some books are good, and a few books are great. Even fewer are great at being more than one kind of book at the same time. Oregon's Emily Winfield Martin has lon... (James)

"I had the sense," Celia, the only daughter in the troubled family in Imagine Me Gone, thinks on seeing an unnamed painted portrait in a museum, "that this person had been alive." That is the sense yo... (Tom)

If many of our favorite recent nature books celebrate the complex and often surprising intelligences of particular organisms—trees, mushrooms, octopuses, birds—Yong's new book is like a sense-by-sense... (Tom)

Part sendup of the world of art collecting, part love story, and part art-theft mystery, The Improbability of Love is great fun. Opening with the daring theft of a painting from what was supposed to b... (Laura)

I don't know if it's because the film noir idiom is so familiar or if lit noir (?) is just naturally cinematic, but I didn't so much read In a Lonely Place as I saw and heard it. Hughes's writing is f... (Liz)

You may remember Jack Goldsmith from the Bush-Cheney years (he stood up to Cheney to stop the Stellarwind surveillance program and now is a Harvard law professor), but his life has been shadowed by a... (Tom)

When Amy Bloom's husband, a vigorous ex-jock architect in his mid-60s, learned he had Alzheimer's, he knew immediately he wanted to end his life well before full dementia could have its own way. Doing... (Tom)

In her assured debut, Winn accomplishes the mission of historical fiction with wide-ranging research, emotional depth, and a dash of derring-do. WWI buffs will recognize details and themes, all presen... (Liz)

Have you ever edited a film? Are you likely to? Probably not (though in the age of iMovie, you are more likely than you used to be). But most of the readers who have made Murch's elegant little guideb... (Tom)

The stories in this book were written a half-century ago, and in a preface he wrote for them halfway between then and now their author was surprised even then that they were still being read, survivin... (Tom)

No one would use the world "realism" to describe Matthew Simmons's stories—God, for one thing, makes a number of appearances, starting a band in one story and making a deal with a guy who calls him "D... (Tom)

Wow, this book just jumps off the shelf! The Day-Glo realism of surf-dad Gorman's illustrations explode his simple, boldface story of paddling, falling, and persevering into something unlike anything... (Tom)

"What's that thing?" Brian Hayes's daughter used to ask from the back seat. You might have asked the same, when seeing some strange man-made object sticking out of the ground or on the side of a build... (Tom)

I’ve read and loved all of Dani Shapiro’s memoirs, so I brought high expectations to Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love. Shapiro has a firecracker of a storyline: when she whimsica... (Nancy)

I took the opportunity of this little volume in the Faber Stories series to introduce myself to a new writer, Robert Aickman, the British horror specialist in whose stories, to quote my favorite podca... (Tom)

The blurb for this describes it as "a plumber's Mrs. Dalloway," which I think is just about right. It's a beautifully handled interior monologue of a fictional tradesman's day, and the narrative intim... (James)

I've been waiting for years to make Athill's 1963 memoir a Phinney by Post selection, so as soon as NYRB Classics brought it back into print, I pounced. Athill was a prominent British book editor, and... (Tom)

Emily Austin's debut, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, was easily my favorite book of 2021, so I approached her sophomore novel with excitement as well as trepidation. There's a lot going o... (Anika)

What sort of book is this? Schalansky, a German writer and designer (she designed this starkly beautiful book), loves lists, and in part it is just what the title promises, a list of things that are n... (Tom)

Perlstein's four-book project is remarkable not only for its subject—a liberal historian writing an at times sympathetic history of modern American conservatism, the dominant political movement of our... (Tom)

If rivers can die—we've all seen that they can—shouldn't that also mean that rivers are alive? Macfarlane's newest book is his most pointedly provocative, adding an activist's urgency to his usual, mi... (Tom)

To preface, this is the fourth glowing review of an Emily Austin novel I've had the pleasure of writing in the past five years. Yes, I'm a fan. Yes, she's a favorite. In this one, our protagonist Darc... (Anika)

I love to learn things from the books I read, and this book taught me so much—not only about the South Korean island Jeju, its matrifocal society of haenyeo (women divers), and its culture and traditi... (Anika)

I first heard about It's Useful to Have a Duck when Mac Barnett (author of former Kids' Book of the Week Sam and Dave Dig a Hole) called it "a perfect board book," so I brought it in the store, and it... (Tom)

Mark Twain famously began Huckleberry Finn by declaring, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons a... (Tom)

There are few moments in the creative history of America as densely potent as the jazz scene in New York City in the late '50s, when you could find Mingus, Monk, Coltrane, Davis, and Evans all gigging... (Tom)

Bedford's few novels rarely stray far from the facts of her own history, but with a family like hers, you can understand why. She was raised in the fertile (for a novelist) ground of a family with mor... (Tom)

On page 114, about two-thirds of the way through this little novel, the narrator remarks, "The whole evening had taken a dark turn, and I feared for the worst." It's a sentence that could appear in al... (Tom)

One of the most acclaimed books in the UK last year (Mary Beard called it a "game-changer") turns out to be as good as advertised. John Aubrey, one of the first modern biographers, was nearly lost to... (Newton)

The ferocious energy of Marlon James's prose, the first sign of the literary genius that the Booker judges later recognized in A Brief History of Seven Killings, is immediately evident in this debut n... (James)

The Jolly Postman, by the British married duo, the Ahlbergs, was a throwback when it was published in the '80s and seems even more so now, but its inventiveness remains, with letters between Mother Go... (Tom)

What a beautiful and haunting book. This story of a family that loses its home and father to war and must set out for a safer home might not be a soothing bedtime tale, but for a child curious about t... (Tom)

I don’t often read memoirs but this reissue of two volumes by British writer Storm Jameson falls smack dab in the middle of my current literary sweet spot. Born in the small coastal town of Whitby, Ja... (Liz)

In this wonderfully funny and charming YA debut, we accompany a young queer Puerto Rican woman—Juliet—as she travels to Portland to intern for the hippy-dippy white woman who wrote her favorite book.... (Juliet)

What praise is left for me to shower on Roy Jacobsen? I've called his writing a "document for the ages," said of it that "I don't think I've ever read anything that better touched the essential truth... (Tom)

Christian Robinson's name keeps popping up on the covers of our favorite picture books (Gaston, Last Stop on Market Street, and Another, to name a few), and here his sprightly, generous illustrations... (Tom)

"Ooooh, honey, all that's going to make you tired, tired, tired," Rosa Parks once told Bryan Stevenson when he breathlessly listed his ambitions for the Equal Justice Initiative, his shoestring legal-... (Tom)

You could describe Kairos as a Manhattan story—an ill-fated romance between a 50-something man and a teenage girl—or as an allegory for East Germany before, during, and after unification, but neither... (Tom)

I had to read it three times to make sure: on page 21 of the novel that bears her name, Katherine Carlyle leans over the side of Rome's Ponte Mazzini and drops her phone into the Tiber. Her phone?! On... (Tom)

This little novel has always been hard to find in the U.S., but it's been a staple of school reading lists in England ever since it came out in 1968—and for good reason, as it's the sort of story, of... (Tom)

One more time hearing Steph's masterful storytime rendition of this tale of a small Western town beset by bandits and saved by a young paleontologist (who arrives, slowly, on a tortoise) convinced me... (Tom)

Like the real world, the internet contains places just too unpleasant to visit oneself. So I am grateful to intrepid online explorer Angela Nagle for letting me sit in my armchair and be queasily fasc... (Liz)

It's an incredible and largely forgotten (but somehow not surprising) story: for a time, in the 1920s, the Osage Indians of Oklahoma were among the wealthiest people in the world, because they had bee... (Tom)