Post Books

Louise White Elk is, like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady and Antonia Shimerda in My Antonia, the sort of literary heroine whose magnetic allure draws the entire plot of a book around her like... (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)

In 1933, Christiane Ritter, an Austrian artist, told her husband, who had spent the last few years living off the land on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, that she wanted to join him. And so s... (Tom)

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)

This is a book about the human hunger for communication: the joy when it can fully take place, the frustration when it's thwarted. Many of its happiest moments happen when a group of Deaf people rearr... (Tom)

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)

On the first page of Pavane, Queen Elizabeth I is assassinated. On the second, after the resulting chaos, the Catholic Church regains its medieval authority over Britain. And in the next, the story le... (Tom)

Ethel Wilson lived over ninety years, most of them in Vancouver, B.C., and many of them as a self-described “doctor’s wife,” but starting when she was nearly sixty, she published a handful of books, i... (Tom)

For a number of reasons, it's rare I choose a history book for Phinney by Post, our backlist subscription, but Morton's 1979 microhistory made for a nice fit, both for its slim size and especially for... (Tom)

Mary Colby and George Oppen met in a college poetry class in Corvallis in 1926; they spent a night together, for which Mary was expelled, but by then they had chosen to leave their pasts behind to sha... (Tom)

At the center of this novel is a single, inexplicable incident from the end of the Spanish Civil War, when an unknown Republican soldier caught a leader of the right-wing Falange escaping a Republican... (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)

Thank goodness for strange, little books. This one, almost 25 years old already (!) [Ed.: now almost 35], may not be for everyone, but if you have the smallest bit of fascination with how one writer t... (Tom)

Does your heart race with anticipated pleasure when you see not only a list of characters but a family tree on the first pages of a fat novel? If so, prepare to luxuriate, as this is just the first of... (Tom)

When I finally picked up this book from 1955 about the 1930s, I can't deny I had current events in mind. We look for echoes in history, to see how a society—or part of a society—could embrace authorit... (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)

Some of you might recall an earlier Phinney by Post pick, A Simple Story, by Leila Guerriero, about a dance contest in Argentina. Though it's a story about another dance contest in South America (duri... (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)

Among the many high points of John Huston's film career, from The Maltese Falcon through Prizzi's Honor, his 1951 adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage would hardly rate a footnote if not for this, o... (Tom)

Some writers, faced with the prospect of an early death, respond, at least on the page, with a kind of grace, a generous, expansive clarity, colored, even purified, by the urgency of their awareness o... (Tom)

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)

Over the more than five decades spanned by this lovingly curated collection, Carol Emshwiller held to something distinctly Emshwillerian in the stories she invented: out of the most straightforward la... (Tom)