Tom

The American perception of the Iranian Revolution started, for many, with the seizing of the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979. That's where this book ends. The apparently sudden collapse of... (Tom)

On one hand, this is, like many memoirs, the story of a curious, ambitious child and a flawed, fascinating parent. The son of a white American mother and a father—a brilliant, larger-than-life, and of... (Tom)

Shanbhag's debut here, Ghachar Ghochar, was one of the first novels written in Kannada, a language spoken by tens of millions in southwestern India, to be translated into English. His second, also tra... (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

I remain intrigued that the same person wrote the plain-spoken farmer's memoir, A Garlic Testament, that was our January Phinney by Post pick this year and this brilliant piece of weirdo fiction, but... (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)

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)

In the wake of the fame granted by her bestselling, Booker-winning debut novel, The God of Small Things, Roy has mostly turned her writing to political reporting and activism. But the death of her mot... (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)

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)

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)

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)

"117 Days Adrift!" read the headlines, as well as the title of the book that Maurice and Maralyn Bailey published soon after being rescued from the raft they survived on when their sailboat was wrecke... (Tom)

This hefty, beautiful, and mysterious book tempted me from across the store for months, and when I finally had the time to sit down with it, it turned out to be all of those things: hefty, beautiful,... (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)

I had never heard of Rosalyn Drexler before I opened this novel, published in 1972 and reissued this year as the first book from the cool new imprint Hagfish, but she seems like a heck of a woman. Mos... (Tom)

A light touch in fiction can be the hardest to master. Gary Shteyngart has always been overloaded with talent, especially with a kind of manic clairvoyance that sees about six months ahead of whenever... (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)

Recently I sifted through our new releases in search of—well, I wasn't sure. A certain kind of book I knew I needed without quite knowing what it was. And this little novel, I realized almost as soon... (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)

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)

There are a lot of folks in the Northwest who want to get away from it all. One of them is Rhys Kinnick, an ex-journalist who pissed off his family, chucked out his smartphone, and disappeared into th... (Tom)

Would you prefer never to relive your awkward teen fumbling again, or would you jump at the chance to repeat those misspent moments again and again until you finally perfect connecting with the person... (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)

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)

"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)

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)

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)

The biographical fallacy—the assumption that fiction comes directly from the author's own life—is full of dangers, but nevertheless I was not at all surprised to learn that Adam Ross was a child actor... (Tom)

If you stopped by the store earlier this spring, you may have noticed our amazing front window celebrating Papilio, a new picture book by the three-author team of Ben Clanton (Narwhal and Jelly series... (Tom)

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)

To say that this book began as a tweet—a single sentence posted in late October 2023, a little longer than what became its title but the same in spirit—is not to belittle it, but to capture the power... (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)

"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)

This short book took a long time to come together. Kennedy, a star of the zine movement in her twenties, had become a design columnist at the NYT, writing about everyday inventions, when one invention... (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

One of the first books I reviewed for this newsletter was Richard Flanagan's novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which soon after won the Booker Prize and remains one of the best books I've read... (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)

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)

Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Berkeley, has made the one-third netherworld of sleep his life's work, and when you're a reader in his hands, it's hard not to be convinced there'... (Tom)

When Mersal, a young Egyptian literary scholar, encountered the novel Love and Silence by chance at a Cairo bookshop, she was drawn to the book's beauty and strangeness, but also to the author, the ne... (Tom)

What began as a book about the craft and politics of writing—addressed to his Howard University students, as his bestseller Between the World and Me was written to his son—became something else as Coa... (Tom)

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)

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)

Greenwell's first two books, What Belongs to You and Cleanness, each made my year-end top 10, and this third one is likely to as well. Those earlier books were both disarmingly frank (and often breath... (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)

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)

Lucienne and Gaston “believe as much in their country as in their love.” Their country is Algeria, which at the time (the late '20s) was also France; their love is mismatched (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)

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)

A delicate and lyrical counterpoint to the weighty Challenger, Orbital is called a novel, but it bears about as much relation to your average novel as its characters' sixteen daily zero-gravity orbits... (Tom)

This little book carried such a reputation—as one of those exquisite literary gems whose compact perfection is a miracle of tone and concision—that for a long time I didn't want to actually read it an... (Tom)

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)

Reading the latest offering from McNally Editions, you might think it’s a reissue of a slim Victorian classic. It’s actually a historical novel that was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize. Schlee n... (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)

In the decade since Fedarko's first book, The Emerald Mile, came out, that tale of someone else's record-setting whitewater ride through the Grand Canyon has become a modern classic of outdoor adventu... (Tom)

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)

Kids' Book of the Week by Alki Lei, translated by Karen Emmerich If you're an adult who doesn't usually read middle-grade books, I highly recommend you give this one a try! Set in 1936, and originally... (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)

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)

In an ideal world, every person would write a book like this near the end of their career, summing up their life's work with anecdotes, some funny, some wistful and even regretful, that capture the ph... (Tom)

What a big, strange, good book the folks at Boiler House Press have recovered. Harris published nearly twenty inventive and eclectic novels between 1961 and 1993, nearly all out of print now. This one... (Tom)

Two orphaned sisters, Jody and Mice—near adults, half-infantile—live in a fairly specific place: Miami, in the springtime of 1961. But in Levine's telling they also live in a landscape of blocky, odd... (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)

What word do you use when you can't remember the name for something? Thingamajig? Doohickey? Whatchamacallit? Whozeewhatsit? Rilla Alexander has a hoot of a time with all those madeup words we all see... (Tom)

By the time he moves from small-town Iowa to the rural Northwest, ex-sheriff Amos Fielding is a widower in his seventies, and he's seen too much of the dark side of the world, some of which you will h... (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

David Sedaris is not for everybody, and his picture-book debut, a collaboration with the late Olivia author, Ian Falconer, won't be either. Sedaris takes a familiar story—readers might be reminded of... (Tom)

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)

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)

One thing picture books don't seem to have much of these days is patience. Things have to move, explode, somersault, etc., all in 32 pages, as if the young listeners will be checking their phones if t... (Tom)

New Books of the Week The Young Man by Annie Ernaux The Pole by J.M. Coetzee Sometimes books you read make themselves into pairs, but rarely as neatly as these two did for me: two very slim books, the... (Tom)

New Books of the Week The Young Man by Annie Ernaux The Pole by J.M. Coetzee Sometimes books you read make themselves into pairs, but rarely as neatly as these two did for me: two very slim books, the... (Tom)

Kent doesn't explain why he set out in a sailboat for Greenland in the summer of 1929, with two much younger men he didn’t know. He leapt at the idea, and even when they steered into catastrophe he ne... (Tom)

Local kids-book stars Clanton and Musser have teamed up—on both the words and the pictures—for this sturdy and sweet book that takes some of the interactive style of Hervé Tullet's Press Here to fashi... (Tom)

This short and spiky novel spans decades of time, from 1980 to 2014, in both Korea and the west coast of America. Is it a poet's novel? (E.J. Koh is a poet.) Yes, but its beauties can be hard to swall... (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)

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)

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)

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)

How to describe the work of Dan Clowes for those who haven't been reading him for thirty-odd years? Cranky, biting, hilarious, and tender: he often puts his jaw-dropping drafting skills in the service... (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)

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)

Composed of short autobiographical-but-fictional vignettes tracing a life from a Vietnamese childhood during the war to a Malaysian refugee camp to Quebec, there's a crystalline quality to each piece... (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)

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)

Labatut's first novel, When We Cease to Understand the World, was a favorite of the New York Times, Barack Obama, and most important, me. This one is even better than its predecessor. Like the earlier... (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)

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)

Anyone who has owned a cat knows that you can't really own a cat. Cats, after all, as the boy in this funny and wise and stylish book from 1963 learns, are their own private and personal things and wh... (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)

This is a first: the first time we've chosen an author twice for our Phinney by Post subscription service. Babb's memoir of her childhood on an unfertile Colorado farm, An Owl on Every Post, has been... (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)

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)

If, like me, you loved Murphy's first book, the truck-driving memoir The Long Haul, you might have wondered what he's been doing since he retired from the road. The answer: trying to cash in on the su... (Tom)

Jessixa Bagley is one of our favorite local children's authors, and her picture books often have a sweetly melancholic tone, which is a perfect match for this story of a Paris musician (a dog, like ev... (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)

The postcard arrived, unexplained and unsigned, in 2003, listing just four names: those of Berest's great-grandparents and their two children, who were all murdered in Auschwitz over sixty years befor... (Tom)

Jane Wong grew up in her family's Chinese restaurant in New Jersey (until her father's gambling obsession drove it into failure); now she's a poet and professor at Western Washington in Bellingham. Bu... (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)

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)

Generations of Northwest kids have been raised on Doris Burn's classic picture book, Andrew's Meadow, but until recently I didn't know about this other gem of hers. Burn, who lived most of her long li... (Tom)

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)

Cory Doctorow wears so many hats—tech activist, anti-corporate theorist, pioneering blogger, tireless Tweeter—that you might forget that he's also a pretty great storyteller. His specialty has been in... (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)

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)

We here all identify strongly with the young hero of this story, a girl just trying to read a book, or eat a cookie, or do somersaults by herself when a friend shows up. Sometimes it's nice to be alon... (Tom)

If, like me, your idea of fun is reading stories of others going through almost unfathomable hardship, you can hardly do better than David Grann (the expert nonfiction yarnspinner behind Killers of th... (Tom)

(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)

On Frank's home planet of Xob, everybody looks the same: green and boxy. So he sets out to find something different and ends up on a planet full of strange creatures that all look different: ours! Wha... (Tom)

We haven't been short of think pieces on the subject of, to borrow the title of Claire Dederer's viral 2017 essay that was one of the seeds of this book, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men,"... (Tom)

This is one of my very favorite books, but it took me a hundred months to get up the gumption to send it out to our Phinney by Post subscribers. Why? For one thing, it's a book-length poem. For anothe... (Tom)

One of the minor pleasures of following American literature is the moment when a former outsider, like Shirley Jackson or Octavia Butler or Philip K. Dick, is ushered into our national pantheon via th... (Tom)

I love, love, love this book. Simply as an anthology of contemporary and classic writing about nature, it's an absolute treasure. It features contributions by Jorge Luis Borges, Robin Wall Kimmerer, U... (Tom)

After publishing five novels in the '40s and '50s (and spending eight years in prison in the '30s), Himes finally found a wide audience after he moved to Paris and started writing hard-boiled crime ta... (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)

"The adventure will begin the minute we step through the gate." Three friends make a springtime outing to the modest fort they've built on the other side of a meadow: they get a little lost in the tal... (Tom)

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (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)

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)

Turtle Diary has been a favorite book of so many people in my life—and I love Hoban's Frances and Captain Najork books so preposterously much—that I half-felt like I had read it already myself, but, u... (Tom)

I think of Love's Work like the small hunk of tungsten I once held, so dense that it immediately sank my hand to the desktop beneath. It's a short book, with few words on each page, but it carries wei... (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)

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)

Having abandoned an earlier attempt at an autobiography, out of her journalist's frustration with the slipperiness of memory, Malcolm, the longtime New Yorker writer who died in 2021, left behind this... (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)

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)

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)

It's a rare kids nonfiction book that is well-written and beautifully illustrated enough to make a bedtime book that kids and grownups will both enjoy, but Seattle's Kuo achieves a lovely balance betw... (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)

It's a too-familiar American story: a city—New Haven, Connecticut, in this case—divided by race, a young black man falsely imprisoned. To it, Dawidoff, who was raised in the city and who has written b... (Tom)

If you've ever seen the 1950 Kirk Douglas movie based on this book, please forget that you did: the book is so much better. It's the story of a rootless, almost anonymous boy who finds himself in musi... (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)

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)

You might know the late Mary Rodgers as the author of the kidlit classic Freaky Friday, or as the composer of the musical Once Upon a Mattress (her one big hit in a long career of trying), or—her most... (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)

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)

What is there to say about a story as simple as this one? "This is the story of a man who took part in a dance contest," its first line declares, and that's what it is: a short portrait, told in the p... (Tom)

Two twin girls, one blanket, which they've shared since they were babies. But now they are five, and ready for their own beds. Who gets the blanket? This lovely picture book is twice as old as the gir... (Tom)

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 her long and well-traveled life, Han Suyin, the physician daughter of a Chinese father and a Belgian mother, wrote mostly about Asia, but in 1955 she published this very British gem of a novel, tel... (Tom)

"Courage," "Hate," "Longing," "Trust": I don't whether these feelings translate exactly from their Polish equivalents, but, judging from the irrepressible and distinctive personalities of Aleksandra Z... (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)

Murray's life story is a remarkable one, as an often behind-the-scenes influence on the Civil Rights Movement, a co-founder of the National Organization for Women, and one of the first women ordained... (Tom)

Reang was her mother's youngest, with a special bond founded between them when she barely survived their escape from the war and the coming genocide in Cambodia in her mother's arms in 1975. But once... (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)

Little Witch Hazel's year starts with spring, but its four seasonal tales circle 'round and can be read in any direction. The Bellingham-based Wahl's lush and cheery illustrations are quickly making h... (Tom)

You just need to pick up this book of poetry, Hill's sixteenth or so collection, to see what it is and whether you might like it. The poems are tiny—two or four or six lines long—grouped in series abo... (Tom)

I picked up this book (at New York's McNally Jackson bookstore) because it didn't look like anything else on the shelf, and inside it doesn't read like anything else either. Mostly, it's a biography o... (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)

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)

Taking a cloud home is more complicated than you might think: you have to make sure to water it (but not too much!), be ready for surprise downpours or even thunderstorm tantrums, and give them all th... (Tom)

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)

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)

Phinney Tiny Cedric In the land of unintended consquences, when a pint-sized king banishes everyone taller than him from his castle the result is: a castle full of babies! The result for the reader is... (Tom)

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)

With romance novels replacing their Fabio-licious covers with cute cartoony illustrations, it's refreshing to see Vladimir stepping boldly, winkingly, into the void. And the winking continues inside.... (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)

For a book with a premise (and a cover!) as darkly chilling as this one's—a dystopian England in which art, and those who make it, are destroyed by roving mobs and vague official authorities—They is c... (Tom)

For those of us fans of Hild, Griffith's beloved historical epic set in early Britain, who can't wait until its sequel, Menewood, arrives next spring, this little adventure is the ideal appetizer to h... (Tom)

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)

I might express the strangeness of this novel by saying that the extensive footnotes about a misguided thinker named de Selby, who believed, among other things, that night is caused by "accumulations... (Tom)

You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe In the season of her life when she is gathering her work, Brown has brought together occasional essays she wrote for the Stranger in the previous decade into a... (Tom)

As soon as Mina came into the store, we knew we'd have to send it to our Phinney by Post Kids subscribers. Forsythe's lush illustration and the deadpan humor of his story of a worried mouse daughter a... (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)

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)

One of the best things a fairy tale can do is take a bizarre premise and make it seem natural, following wherever its strange rules lead. What would happen, for example, if a childless royal couple ha... (Tom)

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Josiah Wedgwood might be remembered best now as a venerable fine-china tradename and, perhaps, as Charles Darwin's grandfather, but in his tirelessly eventful life he put himself at the center of a ra... (Tom)

Does the cover of Time Is a Flower make you think of an early '80s jazzercise VHS tape, or a late '70s Gail Sheehy bestseller? Open it anyway, and you'll find a wonderfully evocative and open-ended ap... (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)

The story of Matrix kept reminding me, strangely, of its fellow National Book Award finalist, Laird Hunt's Zorrie, which also compresses the full scope of a woman's life, cloistered and full of work a... (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)

When she was six, in 1913, Babb's father brought their family from their Oklahoma town to an isolated homestead in eastern Colorado, a sod house dug out of a dry land, with the nearest water two miles... (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)

There are few writers whose every book I know I'll read, but, two books in, Atticus Lish is one of them. His debut novel, Preparations for the Next Life, grabs your lapels with its story of two people... (Tom)

As much as I liked The War for Gloria (see above), when I finished it I needed an antidote, and this sweet little book was the perfect prescription. When I say that it's a novel about an Apple repair... (Tom)

Admirers of Tamara Shopsin (see above) are likely aware that Jason Fulford is her husband and collaborator, a photographer and fellow designer who shares her sideways view of things, a viewpoint in fu... (Tom)

Have you ever, from desperation or inertia, had a job so terrible that, perhaps most terribly, caught you in a trap of service and subsistence that left you no choice but to wake up and do it again? L... (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)

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)

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)

Jones's first novel in two decades reads like a story that has been marinating at least that long. Set in late-17th-century Brazil, with a historical community of escaped slaves as its title and centr... (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)

In her 40s, Baek has already become the first Korean to win the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Award, and with Moon Pops, her first book in English, it's easy to see why. For her illustrations, she build... (Tom)

It's rare that I read everything a writer publishes—I tend to sample more widely—but I come back to Offutt every time, because I know I'm in good hands and because I'm compelled to let everyone else k... (Tom)

One thing that's especially hard to do in a small town is change your life. Everyone knows who you are, and sometimes they don't like it when you try not to be who you're supposed to be. Joe Walsh is... (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)

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 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)

Yes, those Netanyahus—sort of! The Netanyahus is, on its face, a novel about Ruben Blum, an economic historian and, as the story takes place at the end of the 1950s, the only Jewish professor at small... (Tom)

A review quoted on the back of The Names calls it "a Native American version of Roots," an obvious comparison at the time (both books came out in 1976, and Roots was an immediate blockbuster) for an A... (Tom)

Amid all the bright colors and exclamation points in our picture-book section, you might overlook this lovely, but more subdued, item. Illustrated mostly in muted grays and browns, and featuring a rab... (Tom)

You open a Michael Lewis book knowing it will be full of Michael Lewis characters—brainy, contrarian visionaries—and here they include a California public health official, a Zuckerberg-funded biochemi... (Tom)

No book could capture the endless chaos, ambition, and struggles for survival of our biggest city, but you can get a hint of its millions of voices here. Working in the Studs Terkel oral-history tradi... (Tom)

Gordon-Reed made her name, and won a Pulitzer, as a historian of Virginia, and specifically of Thomas Jefferson's estate of Monticello, as she told the history of its black residents alongside its whi... (Tom)

I had always wanted to choose a book of poetry for Phinney by Post, and I knew, when we did, it would be one in which the poems truly made a book, something Dove leaves no doubt about at the beginning... (Tom)

What is the proper level of preposterousness for a picture book, especially one about a piece of toast that thinks it's a dog? Whatever it is, Sarah Hwang hits the perfect balance of logic and absurdi... (Tom)

Secrets of Happiness Does Joan Silber's novel contain any of the secrets promised by its title? Actually, yes! Such titles are often ironic, and there is certainly plenty of unhappiness to go around i... (Tom)

A modest property on the outskirts of Pretoria, an unhappy white family whose dysfunctions seem likely to be remembered by no one outside their tiny circle: these might seem unpromising materials for... (Tom)

The Lights and Types of Ships at Night by Dave Eggers and Annie Dills Those former and current bedtime-readers among you likely are aware how difficult it can be to turn a much-loved fact book (e.g.,... (Tom)

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)

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)

When you start a novel with Patricia Highsmith's name on the cover, you have certain expectations: betrayal, desire (often same-sex desire), consequence. The most striking thing about this novel, abou... (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)

In the funniest of his often droll footnotes, Bailey notes that, after he finished his Zuckerman trilogy, Roth had to have his typewriter repaired because the "I" had worn off. Through 31 books, inclu... (Tom)

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)

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)

Our weekend-long Seattle snowfest is already fading into memory, but you can evoke snow's wondrous sensory transformations with this lovely celebration of the sounds—Ploompf! Thwomp!—of winter, which... (Tom)

Shorto is an acclaimed historian (you can usually find his modern classic, Amsterdam, on our Cities shelf), but he was reluctant to tell his own family history, specifically that of his namesake grand... (Tom)

Loomis takes the cadence and concept of "The House That Jack Built" and makes them her own with a wonderfully rhythmic and evocative story of traditions of Hawaiian food, land, and farming, writing of... (Tom)

Zorrie is a short novel about a full life. Not full in the usual way we think of for a character in fiction: travel, romances, adventure, public achievements. Zorrie Underwood's life, covering most of... (Tom)

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)

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)

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)

When Bill Barich decided, "with the same hapless illogic that governed all my actions then," to spend the spring of 1978 at a second-rate racetrack in Northern California, he might have been looking f... (Tom)

George Saunders is one of the best short-story writers around—he blew out the doors of the genre back in the '90s and has not rested since—and if you've seen him speak or read his interviews you'll kn... (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)

And you think the old lady who swallowed a fly had problems! What starts with a little gum stuck in your hair soon grows until there are scissors, a vacuum, and a rabbit (and much more) up there. Adam... (Tom)

We know what a homonym is, those words that amusingly sound alike, but what do you call it when it's a whole sentence? Haldar, Carpenter, and Gladfelter, authors of the witty P Is for Pterodactyl, hav... (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)

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)

The strangest and most baffling book I've read this year—and one of the best—is shelved in our Middle Reader section. Alan Garner is a legend in the UK but much less well-known here, and The Owl Servi... (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)

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick Hardwick called this book a novel, and it may look to some like a memoir (the life of the "Elizabeth" in it matches of the outline of Hardwick's), but to my mind... (Tom)

Skulls, glorious skulls! You might think of this as a scary Halloween book (it is October, after all), but really it's a wonderfully unscary celebration of that big, well-shaped bone in your head, a "... (Tom)

I was drawn to this novel for two reasons: because it was a surprise hit in the UK last year, from a small publisher I admire, and because it was described as "a nice book about nice people." That mig... (Tom)

You might be drawn into this book by the brilliant bright orange of that rambunctious little fox, set against the pale, windswept Dutch seaside. But then the book opens out into an expansive story tha... (Tom)

It hasn't been easy to explain why I like this novel so much (Laura and Nancy and the Booker Prize judges do too), but I think it comes down to what it's like to be inside the head of Wallace, the gay... (Tom)

Who knew that the finest chronicler of the modern conservative movement would be a writer from the left? Or that his four massive volumes of history, taking us from Goldwater's landslide defeat to Rea... (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)

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)

I hope it doesn't trivialize last week's New Book of the Week, Erica C. Barnett's memoir of alcoholic blackouts and self-destruction, to say that the humiliating confessions in this book are nearly as... (Tom)

All of Ernaux's work blurs the line between fiction and memoir, but The Years blurs it further, into history. The book covers a lifetime—hers, from 1941 to the present—but it is the history of a "we"... (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)

You may know Erica C. Barnett from her dogged local reporting in the Stranger or PubliCola or on her current blog, The C Is for Crank, or her appearances on KUOW, but what you may not have known was t... (Tom)

The Black Jacobins (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)

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)

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)

"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)

Nearly every discussion of Chesnutt's 1901 novel, only recently acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of its time, focuses, understandably, on the real event it was inspired by: the white riot in Wi... (Tom)

The Living Mountain It's hard to imagine that a book this powerful sat unread in its author's drawer for thirty years. Written in the '40s and finally brought out a few years before Shepherd's death,... (Tom)

The Little Island We usually choose new picture books for Phinney by Post Kids, but when this one—which I had never seen before, even though it was written by Margaret Wise Brown and won a Caldecott i... (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)

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)

I'm one of the few members of our staff who is not from the Midwest, but the region's allegedly bland mysteries are a draw to me as well. The mystery starts with the region itself (does South Dakota c... (Tom)

I really think of this as two books. There's the novel itself, a beautiful, thoughtful channeling of the great late-Roman emperor that is graced by an elegant, regal reticence and one of the rare powe... (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)

If you think that Etgar Keret, the Israeli master of oddball tales for grownups, might also be pretty good at writing stories for kids, you would be correct. Here he turns the premise of a distracted... (Tom)

Barnes has written wonderful historical fiction; this lovely book is nonfiction, but it's written with a novelist's wandering eye. On the face of it a biography—of the celebrity physician Samuel Pozzi... (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)

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)

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)

The first book by the Pumphrey brothers has the classic feeling of the old truck (and the way of life) it celebrates, with beautiful pastel prints and a story of technological obsolescence that brings... (Tom)

Matar wrote this book in between books. The one he had just finished, The Return (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017), was a memoir of his attempt to discover the fate of his father, who was disappear... (Tom)

For so long I've looked forward to trying Patrick O'Brian's famous tales of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and I'm glad I finally did so via Patrick Tull's utterly delightful audio rendi... (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)

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)

It's a subject ripe for satire: a young literary woman leaves publishing to try out tech in San Francisco and gets drawn into the money and ambition of Silicon Valley. But Wiener's memoir, sharp-tongu... (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)

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)

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)

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)

We loved the art and story of Mora's first picture book, Thank You, Omu, but might like her new one even more. It's a simple tale of a shared routine between mother and daughter in a busy life, of mod... (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)

There are counting books, and then there are counting books! With elegance and imagination and, finally, an extremely long foldout page, Völker demonstrates, in concrete terms, the difference between... (Tom)

This is a young man's book, written at a particular time (the late '80s) about a subject that, in our own time, is almost impossible not to see in a different way. Before Bass moved to remote Montana... (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)

You could be forgiven for wondering, for the first half of this novel, why we have it shelved in the Crime & Mystery section, as you get to know two families, the Parks and the Matthewses, in cont... (Tom)

When your city is changing every time you turn around, history can be something you want to hold onto, and the indefatigable local historians at HistoryLink know that is often best done deep in the ar... (Tom)

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)

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)

Detectives and detective fiction arose together in the 19th century, and Summerscale, with relish, uses the style of the murder mystery to unravel an infamous true-life crime that helped birth the gen... (Tom)

While we wait for her weird and wonderful collaboration with Maurice Sendak, A Hole Is to Dig, to return from the out-of-print limbo to which it's been inexplicably banished, we have this never-before... (Tom)

To say that Mary Gaitskill is the ideal author to translate the #MeToo movement into fiction doesn't really do justice to the subtlety of her work, or the complexity of the movement. But nevertheless,... (Tom)

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)

If you've read Lerner's cultishly celebrated first two novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, you'll find both familiar and unfamiliar things in his third one. Familiar is the character Adam Go... (Tom)

This must surely be a first: a Phinney by Post selection has been adapted into a children's picture book. In this case, it was one of the New Yorker Talk of the Town vignettes in Jamaica Kincaid's Tal... (Tom)

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)

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)

You'll rarely find a novel so straightforward: a single cyclist, a single race; 137 kilometers in 148 pages. Like the racers themselves, it's stripped down for speed, every gram weighed against necess... (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)

The work of a scarecrow is lonely: your job is to keep things away from your fields. But when a baby crow, lost and lonely itself, lands nearby, this scarecrow ignores his job description and leans do... (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 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)

Someone on Twitter asked for suggestions of "angry" books just when I was in the middle of reading this one, one of the angriest books I've ever read. It comes in such a deceptive package, with its mo... (Tom)

When I sat down to write the little introductory card I include in our Phinney by Post selections for what I had planned would be this month's choice—Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place (see below)—I real... (Tom)

Wenzel returns to the same premise as in his Caldecott Honor winner, They All Saw a Cat—everyone brings their own perspective to the same thing—but for me there's something even more evocative about m... (Tom)

Even if you've been to New Orleans, it's unlikely you've been to New Orleans East, a sprawling tract reclaimed from marshland in the '60s but suffering from neglect even before Katrina swept many resi... (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)

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)

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)

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)

Nearly every discussion of Chesnutt's 1901 novel, only recently acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of its time, focuses, understandably, on the real event it was inspired by: the white riot in Wi... (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)

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)

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)

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)

Do friends have to stay exactly the same to stay friends? Smouha and Marton take the old lost-sock gag for a new spin (sorry) and wring (sorry!) a surprisingly subtle tale out of a sock who gets separ... (Tom)

I'm not sure if Ocean Vuong's first novel is more intense on the page or in your ear. I took it in the latter way, read in Vuong's own soft, quavering, and forceful voice, which he keeps at such a pit... (Tom)

Lawrence Weschler's great and unique talent—and it's great and unique enough that it makes him one of my favorite writers—is as a conduit for the obsessive ideas of others, from cartoonist Ben Katchor... (Tom)

I will, at some point, shut up about Robert Macfarlane, but while it's fresh in my mind I wanted to recommend an earlier book of his that I've just gotten to know. I like books about nature, but I rea... (Tom)

More Old Books of the Week Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin and True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hoc... (Tom)

I almost gave up on Outside the Gates. Having liked Gloss's Wild Life quite a bit, I decided to read her first novel (also recently republished by Saga Press) but at first thought its allegorical styl... (Tom)

Macfarlane is often called the great nature writer of his generation, but his vision of nature is not one of a pristine, unpeopled wilderness: his wilds are, for better or worse, deeply human, connect... (Tom)

Sometimes I suspect the gradual reprinting of Mark Alan Stamaty's books from the '70s and '80s has been undertaken with me in mind. Certainly Phinney Books must be among the nation's top sellers of hi... (Tom)

Those of you familiar with the quirks of Cretaceous-era evolution might be aware of the problem our hero, Tiny, faces: "It is very difficult to hug with tiny arms." So what do you do when your friend... (Tom)

Paul Le Roux is a Zimbabwean-born software coder who might have built the Uber of prescription painkillers—exploiting the complexity and anonymity of the internet to create a massive business in the g... (Tom)

A dull romance between a nose-picking princess (sorry, "prinsess") named Barbarotte and a hot-dog-loving prince (sorry, "prinse") named Putrick that includes soft-drink product placement and an "it wa... (Tom)

In Robert Mueller's short statement this morning, he more or less pleaded, "Uh, have you read my report?" I recently have, and I can state that it is both refreshing and depressing to actually read th... (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)

There are plenty of cookbooks for kids, and lots of oversized illustrated books of facts too, but I've never seen the two combined, and in such an appealing way. Langholtz has adapted her giant book f... (Tom)

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)

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)

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)

"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)

Amy Hempel is one of the modern masters of the short story—really, as many of her admirers would say, of the sentence. Her stories are spare, and mostly short, as are her books, which are a once-a-dec... (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)

Any expectations that a memoir by a member of a legendary gospel country duo might be squeaky clean ends on its first pages, with Charlie's foul-mouthed account of kicking his older brother Ira's ass... (Tom)

This is absolute candy for me. Caro, the buttoned-up, indefatigable biographer of Robert Moses and—in five volumes—Lyndon Johnson, has, in his 80s, become a cultural hero weighted with some of the sam... (Tom)

A picture book about the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea? Despite its unusual setting, When Spring Comes to the DMZ has the makings of a classic. Originally published in 2010 as part... (Tom)

Marianne is a loner in high school. Connell is a smart, popular jock. But Connell's mom cleans Marianne's house, and when they are drawn together, they tell no one. Rooney's second novel arrives here... (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)

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)

First, for me, was Washingtoon, Mark Alan Stamaty's '80s comic strip, starring Congressman Bob Forehead, that was just nutty enough to help me make sense of the Reagan Era as a teenager. Then, to my u... (Tom)

"Family is what you make it": Thao Lam's third picture book (and her first with words) takes an unexpected route to that final line, making a convincing and hilarious case for the dad/cat resemblance... (Tom)

Toews has become one of Canada's leading novelists by writing with insight, sorrow, humor, and anger about the patriarchal Mennonite community in which she was raised. So how would she deal, in fictio... (Tom)

Last month I read the U.S. Climate Report, but only when I read this book did our predicament come devastatingly to life. Why? The facts are, mostly, the same; Wallace-Wells has only gathered existing... (Tom)

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)

For those of us who are late catching up with the Oregon writer Molly Gloss, Saga Press is doing a great service this year by bringing much of her work back in handsome new paperbacks. Her books have... (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)

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)

Luiselli has quickly built a reputation among American readers for her short novels and, especially, for Tell Me How It Ends, her short but blistering little book about working as a translator for Cen... (Tom)

You might think a memoir of growing up in the middle of Detroit's illegal underground numbers racket might be gritty and grim, but Davis's story is, pointedly, just the opposite. Told through a loving... (Tom)

This short, intensely moving novel—an imagined dialogue between a mother and her teenage son after his suicide, written after Li lost her son in the same way—reads as though Li has invented, out of di... (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)

It's our third straight snowy selection for Phinney by Post Kids, and finally it reflects the local weather (and how). That little thumbnail image of the cover can hardly do justice to the intricate b... (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)

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)

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)

This week Oge Mora added a Caldecott Honor to the many accolades she's won for her debut picture book, and for good reason. Using a painted collage style full of muted colors, she creates a cityscape... (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)

It's been over 50 years since Percy's debut novel was the surprise winner of the National Book Award, and—gulp—it's been about 30 years since I first fell in love with its sprightly tale of despair, G... (Tom)

I must say that yellow is not my favorite color (or even close). But seeing what magic Olympia-based artist Corinna Luyken can work with it makes me think again. As she did in her wonderful debut, The... (Tom)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a very public intellectual. A sociologist by trade, she tweets with great volume and skill and has been placing essays across the internet since grad school—writing too much... (Tom)

It's a few months after 9/11, and Lane Bueche, who has long fancied himself the Bill Clinton of Lake City Way, headed from the nowhere of north Seattle toward an upscale, intellectual life of NGOs and... (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)

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)

An enthusiastic customer tipped us off to this graphic novel, nearly a year after it came out. All we needed to hear, really, was "two cats in a robotic dog suit," but "narrated by a sentient litter b... (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)

For almost forty decades, and over 1,800 installments, Paul Dorpat's Seattle Now and Then series, pairing a historical city photo with a current one and a short essay, has been one of the most beloved... (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)

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)

I've been reading these stories for months, off and on in between other books. I'm not sure I could have read them any other way: they read easily, but take some digesting, in the best way. Gallardo w... (Tom)

At some point in the previous decade, news filtered back to me that Glen Berger, the most talented person I knew in college, was writing a Spider-Man musical with U2 and Julie Taymor. What a break for... (Tom)

What do you do if the monster under your bed turns out to be a pretty great friend? Well, if you're Tiger, you bring back a little bit of dinner for your friend and play games until bedtime, before yo... (Tom)

This month's Phinney by Post selection (see above) was so tiny I added a couple of our popular Penguin Modern booklets to the package, including this perfect companion, Berger's marvelous elegy for hi... (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)

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)

Return with Gabrielle Moss to what she calls a "pastel parallel universe," the moment in teen and tween fiction between the '70s heyday of Judy Blume and the millennial rise of J.K. Rowling. In that i... (Tom)

What is Seattle? Anyone who has lived here more than a year has watched the city transform under our feet, as it has many times before. The three creators of Seattleness use their expertise in design,... (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)

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)

We're all getting used to seeing labradoodles and puggles, but this new oversized board book takes the canine combos a step further. Three sets of flip pages let you concoct your own new breeds: how a... (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)

We had heard about this book for a while—it was wildly popular and a "book of the year" in the UK, and Macfarlane, Britain's leading nature writer, is becoming beloved in the States too. But seeing it... (Tom)

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)

There's no Waldo in this big book, but it seems like just about everything else has been squeezed into its crowded pages. Wimmelbooks like this ("wimmel" means teeming or swarming) have been huge hits... (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)

Poetry is such a compressed art that for me it often requires some space, some context, in which to breathe. Terrance Hayes has taken an entire book to put the work—really a single poem, the appropria... (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Not many kids' books come with a foreword, an introduction (with endnotes), and an afterword, but the reappearance of the only children's book by the great James Baldwin (nearly forgotten after it was... (Tom)

Is there such a thing as a tree of life, or is it closer to a web? With his explanation of the branching of species, Darwin made the tree one of the central images of biology. But the last half-centur... (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)

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)

Sometimes a book takes the world by storm and, nearly as quickly, recedes from awareness. Buoyed in part by the drama of its writing and rediscovery (Nemirovsky wrote this fictional account of the Fre... (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)

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)

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)

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)

Nostalgia time! As I was growing up, there were few books more holy on the shelves of my naturalist mother (or her naturalist mother) than Holling's illustrated tale of a hermit crab making his way in... (Tom)

To say, as Zadie Smith has, that Sabrina is "the best book I have read about our current moment" makes our current moment seem quite grim. (Understandably.) A story of random murder, conspiracy theory... (Tom)

New Book About Old Books of the Week Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics As regular readers may know by now, there are few parts of the literary ecosystem I like better than th... (Tom)

Sale Book of the Week The New Family Cookbook by America's Test Kitchen In our kitchen we have a shelf for our most-used cookbooks. And on this shelf there is one cookbook that is (clearly) the most u... (Tom)

"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)

Maybe you saw that recent map that showed that the most common job in 29 of the 50 states is truck driver, but when was the last time you read a book by one? Finn Murphy is an anomaly: the black sheep... (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)

Summer might feel like it's slipping away already (it does to me!), but we still have a month and a half left till Labor Day, which is plenty of time if you're doing Summer Book Bingo with the Seattle... (Tom)

Liz has already written so well about Outline (and its follow-up, Transit), that I'm not sure what I have to add, but I just want to say that I fully expected to love Outline, and I did love it, fully... (Tom)

Ryan Higgins has a particular empathy for the dilemmas of carnivores. First there was Mother Bruce, a bear who just wanted a nice meal of hard-boiled eggs and ended up with a brood of adoring goslings... (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)

Where? Oakland, mostly: the center of a dozen or so lives, all of them Native American by some calculation, though each is working to define that for themselves. They are, in Orange's words, "Urban In... (Tom)

One small pleasure of bookselling is discovering that an old favorite of yours, which you had for some reason assumed was unavailable, is in fact still in print. That was the case recently with this 1... (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)

Perhaps you read Snyder's bracing pamphlet, On Tyranny (or the Facebook post it was based on)—from its title, I had imagined this new, much larger book as an expansion of those ideas, but, while it's... (Tom)

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)

In the mathematical fable Flatland, the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world can only see three-dimensional visitors as a flat slice of their true being. That's sometimes how I think of Helen DeWitt... (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)

Plenty of kids' books introduce young readers to colors, but few do what Tamaki's beautiful book does so subtly: show that color depends on perspective (why does blue water turn clear when it runs thr... (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)

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 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)

Romy Hall has a son, a past, and the impossible sentence of two life terms plus six years to serve in a remote central California prison, which she's just beginning when this novel opens. If this is a... (Tom)

I was drawn to this book, the third in Rovelli's recent series of short introductions to the mind-blowing propositions of modern physics, by its inexhaustibly poignant and fascinating subject: time. H... (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)

Settle in quickly when you begin this little book, because it's going to charge out of the gate, whether you're buckled in or not. It begins with a stumble for its main character, Mara, which soon bec... (Tom)

I've long had a grim fascination with the somewhat-remembered Victorian novelist George Gissing (his diaries, for one thing, are a remarkable trudge through a writer's workmanlike subsistence), and fo... (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)

In our post-Gone Girl times, when it seems we are in an arms race of narrative unreliability, Araminta Hall gives things a twist of her own, putting her tale in the hands of Mike Hayes, a self-made Lo... (Tom)

An insurance scam (or two or three), lovers working at an out-of-the-way diner: the elements of James M. Cain's greatest crime novels are in plain sight, and Lippman clearly had some fun putting them... (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)

It's rare that words feel as embodied as they do in Nguyen's poems: he imagines himself in the bodies of others (his mother's, a blond boy's), he takes other bodies into his own. It brings an intimate... (Tom)

White's third novel for children may not be as thoroughly enshrined as his first two (Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web), but in our house it's the most beloved, thanks to the audiobook, read by White... (Tom)

It sometimes seems like the American reading public only makes room for one new translated superstar at a time, and already it's hard to recall just what a revelation it was when the Chilean-Mexican-S... (Tom)

On one hand, this droll, wordless picture book, about a city crocodile getting ready for a day at work, is a slow-rolling set-up for one big joke. I think it's a pretty funny joke, but the real pleasu... (Tom)

It's always a surprise to me that our infinitely complex systems don't melt down more than they do. Perhaps that's changing (for the worse), but that they don't is an ongoing tribute to the thankless... (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)

From the moment it was published 25 years ago, Understanding Comics set the standard for something that had hardly existed before it came along: the theory of comics. (And that it was done as a comic... (Tom)

Maggie and Abby have always been locked-at-the-hip pals, at least until Abby spent half the summer at camp on Orcas Island while Maggie was stuck in Seattle, but now they've discovered they are connec... (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)

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)

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)

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)

This book may be more for ex-kids like me, for whom the mysterious M. Sasek created a fascinating world of cities and landmarks in the '50s and '60s in his This Is... picture books. This Is Paris, Thi... (Tom)

Mike Muñoz aspires, sort of, to write the Great American Novel, or, more specifically, the Great American Landscaping Novel, but Johnny Evison might have written it for him. Mike is 22, mowing lawns,... (Tom)

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)

What's the line? "It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you?" It's a line that could describe more than one Philip K. Dick novel, but none so directly as in this superb early item in his oeuv... (Tom)

We're glad to say we finally have this year's Caldecott Medal winner back in stock! Wolf in the Snow has the feel of a classic, with a tale of a girl and a wolf pup each lost in the snow that might re... (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)

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)

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)

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)

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh boy do I love this book about a boy who, yes, has a hard time getting his shirt off and starts to worry he never will. Right now, it feels like it's both the most enj... (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)

If The Wire is the height of pop-culture art, Yacht Rock is mainly a punchline, a lovingly ironic gag about the cheesy hits that dominated the airwaves in the '70s and early '80s. (But greatness lies... (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)

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)

Despite the words "A Novel" on the cover, I found myself struggling to think of Vengeance as anything but true. In part, that's by design: the main character is a journalist named Zachary Lazar who me... (Tom)

I once considered making Tejaratchi's hilarious LiarTownUSA Tumblr page a Link of the Week (because it so often features fake book covers) but thought better of it because, well, there's a lot of stuf... (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Should I be embarrassed to love a picture book that's a spinoff of a viral YouTube video? (Actually a sequel to a spinoff.) Because I'm not. Marcel's quirky, squeaky sweetness survives its translation... (Tom)

Norman Borlaug (the Wizard) and William Vogt (the Prophet): they may not be household names (though Borlaug did win the Nobel Peace Prize for launching the "Green Revolution" in agriculture), but Mann... (Tom)

While you lament the inexplicable injustice that Krauss and Sendak's marvelous collaboration, A Hole Is to Dig, remains out of print, you can at least enjoy one of its sequels, this little book from 1... (Tom)

The weirdest thing about this little novel is not the six-foot-seven avocado-loving frog-faced humanoid named Larry who escapes from a local research lab. It's the tone in which that fantastic event i... (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)

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)

When a writer's first collection of stories was Jesus' Son, quite possibly the best American book of the last few decades, it's natural to ask how his second collection, published 26 years later, comp... (Tom)

It seems to be a golden age for oversized, gorgeously illustrated compendiums of facts, and (as you can likely tell, if you follow our kids' recommendations) we are here for it. Add to our favorites t... (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)

Lampedusa is a tiny island off the coast of north Africa, but it's part of Italy and therefore Europe, which means that in recent years its 6,000 inhabitants have often been joined, daily, by hundreds... (Tom)

If you're a Jeopardy! aficionado, you might remember the brilliant and wonderfully good-natured Joon Pahk, whom I was fortunate to get to know, and even more fortunate not to have to play against, dur... (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)

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)

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)

Until his death last month, few knew that Shepard had been living with ALS, and few also knew that he had been working during that time—dictating when it became necessary—on this last book. It's a mem... (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)

Audiobook of the Week Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz, read by Samantha Bond and Allan Corduner I'm late in coming to Magpie Murders, but it entirely lived up to the reports I'd heard all year of i... (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)

Alain-Fournier's The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes in the original French), the only book he wrote before dying in World War I and one of the most beloved of modern French novels, is often described... (Tom)

Last week: a scholar's loving appreciation of the glories of medieval book-making. This week: an equally loving tribute to the heyday of the pulpy horror paperback, from Rosemary's Baby to Silence of... (Tom)

Speaking of Rosemary's Baby! You've likely seen the Mia Farrow/John Cassavetes 1968 horror classic, but have you read Ira Levin's novel from the year before? It's fantastic: a tale of the occult that,... (Tom)

This book about beautiful books is, as you would hope, a beautiful book itself. But more so, like the books it describes, it has personality. De Hamel, one of the world's experts on illuminated manusc... (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)

Oh what a joy that this book is back in print! I didn't know about it when I was little (though I was the right age for it when it came out in 1973), but it was a favorite to read with our own kids, b... (Tom)

Why is this novel so absurdly entertaining? Shum, who was a casino dealer in Lake Stevens before getting his English PhD, loosely bases his story on an old gambling tale by Pushkin, but it has a seemi... (Tom)

No one ever accused Theodore Dreiser of being an elegant writer, but nearly every sentence in this book howls with things that elegance alone can't provide: desire, drive, hunger, power, exhaustion, a... (Tom)

A mysterious new doorway in their grandmother's room and some equally mysterious paw prints lead Joon and Noona into a land of mischievous and snack-loving animals, and into the world of the tradition... (Tom)

As impressive and conversation-changing as Coates's last book, Between the World and Me, was, it felt like part of a larger project, incomplete without his earlier memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, and... (Tom)

"You'd be surprised what you find inside a wolf," says the duck. Indeed! The mouse, swallowed, is surprised, and you will be too, and also amused. Barnett and Klassen are prolific kid's-book geniuses,... (Tom)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

"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)

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)

I have less than zero interest in serial killers, but Bill James, the cranky Kansan baseball analyst, was the J.K. Rowling of my sports-nerd youth, and if that's what he turns his mind to, I'll follow... (Tom)

This is not the sort of epic that jumps through space and history. Instead, it turns on itself, over and over again, circling back to one event—a lynching in 1930—and another related one—the birth of... (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)

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)

Ben Blum may have not known what he was getting into when, after his cousin Alec was arrested for an armed robbery in Tacoma on the eve of his first deployment as an Army Ranger to Iraq, he decided to... (Tom)

Lumet's guide to filmmaking, published late in his remarkable career, is one of the best exemplars of Flaubert's famous dictum, "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may b... (Tom)

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)

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)

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)

As a customer recently pointed out to me, in his lovely new book on Maurice Sendak, There's a Mystery There, Jonathan Cott makes the case that Sendak's 1981 picture book, Outside Over There, is one of... (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)

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)

This Is How We Do It is not the first book to show kids how other kids around the world live, but it's a particularly thoughtful and appealing approach. Using photographs and descriptions sent to him... (Tom)

Our hottest-selling item of the early summer is a perfect pairing of Williams's years of leading guided tours of the city and his unparalleled knowledge of Seattle's physical history (which he shared... (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)

David B. Williams might seem a one-man Seattle history industry, except that this lovely book, timed to honor the centennial of the Lake Washington Ship Canal and the Chittenden Locks that linked the... (Tom)

Sherman Alexie's memoir—an unsparing, grief-torn, angry, and admiring portrait of his late mother that is equally unsparing toward himself—seems like one of the must-read books of the year, especially... (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)