True Books

Some have argued there are only 3 real plots in literature, or 7, or 36, but Cook, a pulp writer so prolific he was known as "the man who deforested Canada," outlined 1,462 separate scenarios (for exa... (Tom)

We've each turned to different books in the past week. Some of you have said you're too distracted to read at all. I found myself ravenous for this one, which I had been hungry to read ever since it c... (Tom)

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's nothing wrong with aspirational in cookbooks—we all like to dream—but for her first solo outing (after working behind the scenes for years as a private chef and cookbook co-author), Turshen em... (Tom)

I like Peternell's cookbooks because there's so much writing in them. His previous book, Twelve Recipes, was framed in a lovely and (for a neophyte like me) approachable way as a chatty, conversationa... (Tom)

I remember two things from the only meal I've had at Lark, at their old 12th Avenue location: a well-known New York editor's stories about meeting Howard Hughes, and the duck leg confit, which was one... (Tom)

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

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

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

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

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

I'm still a little mad at Dwight Garner. I've loved the Pretenders almost as long as I've listened to records, but when Garner, usually my favorite New York Times reviewer, panned Hynde's memoir as "s... (Tom)

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

I like to use audiobooks to catch up with books that everyone else has been reading, and lately I've been catching up with The Soul of an Octopus, a surprise hit from last year (and National Book Awar... (Tom)

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

When she moved from the U.S. to South Africa, Van Der Leun became obsessed with the story of Amy Biehl, a young white American women whose death at the hands of a black mob in the last days of aparthe... (Tom)

If you need an antidote to the visceral immersion of Eleven Hours, here it is. Galchen holds children, and her own baby—whom she refers to, without explanation, as "the puma"—at arm's length, and you... (Tom)

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

My love affair with gorgeous, fact-heavy, oversized picture books continues with this beautiful new item. Braun's portraits of fauna from across the Northern Hemisphere go beyond the usual (you'll lea... (Tom)

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

New and Old Books of the Week The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love, and Art in the Ruins of the Reich The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War by Lara Feigel Lara Feigel's wo... (Liz)

Twenty-nine inches tall, born without hands and feet, husband of four and father of fourteen, and celebrated throughout 18th-century Europe not only for his rare condition but for his remarkable skill... (Tom)

Fans of the late Wallace are often divided between those who like his novels (in other words, Infinite Jest) best and those who prefer his essays, but there is another, narrower group (which includes... (Tom)

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

Gerald Murnane is a particular man: he doesn't like travel, or the ocean, or computers, and he's never been on a horse. And for over seventy years, even as he's become one of Australia's most acclaime... (Tom)

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

You might pass by this book with a funny title about a forgotten episode in a region that brings more terrible news every day, but don't. If "Orwellian" were a term not of horror but praise—meaning a... (Tom)

Oh, this is a good one, the sort of book you feel has been welling up inside its author, waiting to burst out. An unlikely but wonderful amalgam of plant science (Jahren's specialty and passion) and m... (Tom)

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

Old Books of the Week The Argonauts and The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson When The Argonauts came out last year, I was intimidated by Nelson's genre-fluid book about her life with a gender-fluid partner,... (Liz)

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

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

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

There seems to be a lot of death in the books a lot of us are reading these days. There is as much life as death in this memoir—it's a story of births, and of the birth and rebirth of love—but it's ha... (Tom)

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

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

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

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

As I often say when I recommend this in the store, this is Laura's favorite book ever, but, really, it's one of my favorites too. Fadiman's story of the tragic misunderstandings between American medic... (Tom)

Some true-crime classics, like In Cold Blood or The Executioner's Song or The Stranger Beside Me, conduct a sort of horrified romance with their charismatic killers. Sanders's new book, which might be... (Tom)

Did you get drawn into the Netflix true-crime binge phenomenon, Making a Murderer? If so, you likely recall Dean Strang, the defense lawyer whose wry, earnest intelligence and "normcore style" have ma... (Tom)

Growing up in the Kentucky hills, boys ended up doing what their father did: a plumber's son became a plumber, a writer's son, like Offutt, became a writer. But only after his dad's death in 2013 did... (Tom)

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

Paul Kalanithi's plan was to spend the first twenty years of his working life as a neurosurgeon, and the next twenty as a writer, but fate had other ideas. Just as he was finishing his residency, he r... (Tom)

The Paris Luc Sante loves, like the old, dirty, and dangerous New York he exhumed in his marvelous history Low Life, is not the one you can glimpse from the Eiffel Tower or in the corporate boutiques... (Tom)