Post Books

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)

As many people discover the story of Tevis's The Queen's Gambit through the new Netflix series, I would like to note, somewhat smugly, that Tevis's novel was our very first Phinney by Post selection,...

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)

Our Phinney by Post picks have gotten an excellent response so far, and I sure hope that extends to #4, but we'll see. It's a book so self-serious that it skirts the edge of parody, told in sternly fo... (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)

The greatness of Fitzgerald's third novel (published, like all her others, after she turned 60) lies in its modesty. Its characters live, literally, on the margins, in a small group of leaky barges on... (Tom)

When we first conceived of Phinney by Post, Touching the Rock was the first book I thought of for it. (And now that it's finally been reprinted I can include it.) I've always found it deeply inspirati... (Tom)

Edward P. Jones sets the stories in this collection (and in his second, All Aunt Hagar's Children) in the streets and buildings of Washington, D.C., with an almost obsessive geographical exactitude, b... (Tom)

I love the 33 1/3 series of little books, each on a single record album (we have a sizable stack of them in the store), but this one is easily my favorite, even though I had never heard the record it'... (Tom)

Michael Kohlhaas The title of this month's Phinney by Post pick doesn't match the title of the book, because the real selection is one of the "other stories" in The Marquise of O— and Other Stories: M... (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)

McCarthy's 1957 memoir of her first dozen or so years just gets better every time I reread it. There's plenty of drama—she was orphaned, maltreated, and rescued—but the real thrill comes from her bril... (Tom)

What a strange and perfect little thriller. Published on the eve of war in 1939 and opening with the near-assassination of an unnamed European dictator, it remains as riveting as ever, with an airtigh... (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)

The name Martin Guerre may make you think of Gerard Depardieu (who played him in a 1982 movie), but his story, based on true events in the 16th century when a stranger appeared in a French village and... (Tom)

You might imagine why I picked this year to finally read this classic political portrait, but the further I got into it, the fainter the echoes of Trumpism became. Wallace is a portrait less of a type... (Tom)

How wonderful to have DeWitt's debut novel (which has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie) back in print! The story of a brilliant (too brilliant?) mother trying to educate her brilliant (too bril... (Tom)

On one side of the net, Arthur Ashe: black, liberal, artistic, free-swinging, and cool. On the other, Clark Graebner (who?): white, conservative, businesslike, stiff, and anxious. From the 1968 U.S. O... (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)

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)

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)

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 the best novel I've read in I don't know how long. Written in the '60s about Australia in the '40s and recently republished, it's about two sisters who live first with their mother and then a... (Tom)

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)

Is this a new book, or an old one? The stories were written in the 1970s, but not published until now, long after Collins's death at age 46 in 1988 and a year after her groundbreaking feature film, Lo... (Tom)

To be in Russia in 1918 was to be caught in a terrifying whirlwind, even for Teffi, a writer so famous in her day there were Teffi candies and a Teffi perfume. She was known for her poems, plays, news... (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)

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)

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)

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)

I'm not sure I've ever read a book that had a stronger, more cohesive sense of family than this one. Yang's memoir of her extended family's passage from Laos, where the Hmong, a tight-knit ethnic mino... (Tom)

Laura, who read this book long before I did, has always described it as a burst of confetti, and I still can't think of a better way to sum it up. Fans (like me) of Carter's biting and spectacularly i... (Tom)

Austin was an unknown writer in her 30s, living near Death Valley, when this tiny book of desert sketches first appeared in 1903, but from its first sentences she writes with a startling and compellin... (Tom)

Georges Simenon wrote over 400 novels, and The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By was the eleventh (!) he published in 1938 alone, but don't dismiss it as a throwaway. It has a simple premise—Kees Popin... (Tom)

Phinney Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back If organized labor was flat on its back when Geoghegan, a middle-aged Chicago labor lawyer, wrote this fantastic, funn... (Tom)

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)

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)

If, like me, you first heard about Roadside Picnic, sometimes called the "greatest Soviet science-fiction novel," because it inspired Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, you should know that going from R... (Tom)

This is a little book, written in a modest style, but its claims are large. Despite her title, Ginzburg wants us to set aside the "little virtues" of frugality, caution, and tact for the greater ones... (Tom)

The headline to a review I wrote of this book when it came out in 2004 read, "Caribou Hair Everywhere," and I can't think of three words that better describe it. Raised by a father who moved from the... (Tom)

Phinney Oblivion: A Memoir This is, as the title implies, a very sad book. So sad, in fact, that I thought twice about sending it out to our Phinney by Post subscribers. But the sadness is inseparable... (Tom)

A few weeks ago I recommended Origo's diary from the first years of the war, but this book, for good reason, is the one that made her famous, in part for the understated clarity of her style, and in p... (Tom)

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)

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)

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)

I must acknowledge that this is the most unattractively published of any book I've chosen for Phinney by Post, but don't let the cover (or typeface inside) turn you aside: there is superb storytelling... (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)

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)

Oh boy. I remembered loving this book when I first read it a decade ago, but it was even more delicious than I recalled. The action, such as it is, takes place in the miserable confines of the Rosamun... (Tom)

Imagine a history of Europe, from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Age, that makes little or no mention of Martin Luther, or Newton, or Queen Elizabeth, or Columbus. Instead, the main figures in... (Tom)