True Books

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)

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)

The Unwomanly Face of War is time-machine history: it's not concerned with why events happened, it explains what it felt like to live through them. Or as Nobel laureate Alexievich puts it much more Ru... (Liz)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

Just seeing their names next to each other on the shelf, you might think that Andre Dubus III stepped easily into the writer's shoes of his father and namesake, one of the great short-story writers of... (Tom)

We live in salmon country, right? That's what we tell ourselves, and in many ways it's still true, but it's a complicated, conflicted business now, with hatcheries, dams, $56 Copper River entrees, and... (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)

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

No publishing professional would expect that early June would be the time when some of the year's biggest books would appear, but it feels a little that way around the store this week. Not only has th... (Finn)

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

Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia by Anne Garrels (Liz)

New and Old Books of the Week Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia by Anne Garrels Russia... (Liz)

New and Old Books of the Week Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia by Anne Garrels Russia... (Liz)

"And there she is. That horrible girl." In the middle of life, after decades of working, marrying, and mothering responsibly, Dederer suddenly felt the restless desires of a teenager welling up again,... (Tom)

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

First, as a few of you kindly pointed out, I need to correct a couple of mixups in last week's event announcements. In both cases, I got the dates right, but the days wrong: Nicole Dieker's book launc... (Tom)

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

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

Like the manifestos we highlighted here a few weeks ago—Timothy Snyder's "twenty lessons" about tyranny and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "fifteen suggestions" about feminism—this little book by Mexican... (Tom)

If you've ever wanted to drop everything and escape to the woods (I won't say the thought hasn't crossed my mind recently), you'll want to read The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of th... (Haley)

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

What a beautiful, beautiful book. And that is part of the point. Kentridge is an acclaimed South African artist, a printer and a filmmaker, but he was unknown to me before this volume. His lessons, ba... (Tom)

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

Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Tom)

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

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

Reading The Souls of Black Folk (newly reprinted by Restless Books with an introduction by Vann R. Newkirk II) is a little like seeing Hamlet for the first time: phrase after familiar phrase—"double c... (Tom)

Is Walter Murch a crank? That is, from one perspective, the question raised by this little book. But the flip side to that question is: Has Walter Murch, Oscar-winning editor of Apocalypse Now and The... (Tom)

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

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

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

Long before Lewis collaborated on his National Book Award-winning comic-book memoir, March, he wrote this more traditional memoir, recounting his decades in the center of the civil rights movement, be... (Tom)

As soon as I heard the first words of Cleese's memoir, spoken in the familiar tone (a little thickened by age) of the tallest Python himself, I thought, "Oh, right. This is going to be funny." Well, o... (Tom)

Josh Mohr drank immensely, consumed every drug he could, and did unspeakable things he now does his best to speak of. And then when he got clean he had a stroke. Sirens is his first memoir after five... (Tom)

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

I had forgotten how much I liked The Places in Between, Rory Stewart's account of his walk across Afghanistan just after the fall of the Taliban. A decade later he undertook another walk, through his... (Tom)

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

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

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

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

Bannick, a Seattle photographer and naturalist, has captured the lives of owls in all their weird majesty, through the kind of stunning moments—at home, in flight, and with prey—that take hours and mo... (Tom)