New Book of the Week (October 8, 2024)

Small Rain

by Garth Greenwell

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 breathtakingly beautiful) accounts of desire, seen through the eyes of a young gay American man in Bulgaria. In this new one the setting has shifted—to Iowa City—and the subject has too, to an aspect of the body equally autobiographical and nearly as unspoken: the vulnerability of sudden illness and the intimacy of medical care. The story is almost artless in its structure, following, with some digressions, the ten days of its narrator's hospitalization in close clinical detail, but full of art in its close attention to the body, to life and near-death, to the transcendence and the banality of everyday love. A beauty once again. —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 8, 2024)

Forces of Nature

by Edward Steed

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 in a while a genius still emerges, and it's become clear that this generation's New Yorker cartoon genius is a young British transplant named Edward Steed. It was the bitter brilliance of "You call that a banana-mobile?" that first made me notice his name, but with dashes of Booth and Addams, and of Steadman and Stamaty, he has maintained that level of hilariously angry impotence and sadly misplaced hopefulness ever since, whether in the "World's Tallest Potato Contest," "Staff Picks" (oh that hits home for us booksellers), "You're not going to find anything in your price range that isn't full of bees," or this wordless gem. I weep with joy. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (October 8, 2024)

Phinney by Post Book #117

A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889

by Frederic Morton

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 its style: it reads, as the cliche goes, like a novel. Morton slides freely into the emotional lives of his characters, from his main figure, the Crown Prince Rudolf—“the most nervous man in the most nervous century”—to a chorus of contemporary Viennese, from Freud to Klimt, who are less noteworthy in this story for their achievements than for their moods. In fact, it reads like a specific novel: Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March (a Liz favorite), with which it shares both a soundtrack (those waltzes!) and a tone, an almost menacingly delicate irony that's a perfect match for the decadent decline of the Habsburg Empire. —Tom

Young Adult Book of the Week (October 8, 2024)

When the World Tips Over

by Jandy Nelson

I didn’t realize this was a Young Adult novel when I first picked it up, but I was immediately sucked into this gorgeous, multi-generational tale of a Northern California family that has more than its share of secrets. Told in fairy tales, diary entries, notes, and straight prose from each character’s point of view, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever read. The three children in the Fall family—19-year-old violin virtuoso and human wrecking ball Wynton; heartbreakingly gorgeous and seemingly perfect 17-year-old Miles; and ghost-seeing 12-year-old Dizzy, who sees only the best in everyone—have all been lost since their father left when their mother was pregnant with Dizzy. When they each have an encounter with a mysterious, rainbow-haired young woman, they think that somehow she’s the key to their happiness. But first there is A LOT of complicated family history to unpack. As a reminder that we never truly know everything our loved ones have gone through, this novel will almost certainly be in my Top 10 this year. —Doree

Kids Book of the Week (October 8, 2024)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #106

Aldo: Ghost Dog

by Joaquín Camp, translated by Kit Maude

One day while playing catch, Aldo the dog gets caught in a white sheet hanging from the clothesline. Believing himself to now be a ghost, Aldo isn't too bothered at first. After all, there are some perks, like being able to steal food invisibly (or so he thinks). The whimsical illustrations by Argentinian author and illustrator Joaquín Camp hilariously juxtapose Aldo's narration with the reality of his situation. Will Aldo ever get to reunite with his beloved red ball or is he doomed to "booo!" instead of "woof!" forever? —Haley

New Book of the Week (September 23, 2024)

This Strange Eventful History

by Claire Messud

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 by age and circumstance, but true. Their story, and those of the generations that follow, traces how both beliefs fall apart and hold together over time. It’s Claire Messud’s own family story, told as fiction in decade-by-decade snapshots from 1940 to 2010. Because of that episodic form, and perhaps because its truth makes it less malleable to a novelist’s plotting, it gathers slowly but accumulates toward a powerful sense of connection and melancholy as the family, pushed by ambition, affection, and the forces of history, disperses across the globe, to Greece, Australia, Canada, France, Connecticut, while never quite losing the sense of a lost home, in a country they can’t return to. —Tom

New Book of the Week (September 23, 2024)

The Examiner

by Janice Hallett

Six students of various ages and backgrounds all sign up for a new master's level art class at a university in England. The senior art tutor needs this class to work so it can be added to the university's curriculum going forward. But frictions arise almost right away, and we soon realize there's an undercurrent of...something...but we don't know what. Hallett's novels are always told through snippets of emails, texts, instant messages, etc., which slowly reveal that not everyone or everything is as it seems. I loved two of her previous books, The Appeal and The Mysterious Case of the Apperton Angels, so I assumed I would like this one as well, but I was absolutely BLOWN AWAY by the ending, and how Hallett managed to weave together all the different threads. I'm pretty sure I scared my cats when I loudly exclaimed as the endgame was finally revealed. As a master of misdirection, this is Hallett’s best book yet. —Doree

New Book of the Week (September 23, 2024)

One Day I'll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman

by Abi Maxwell

For anyone who wants to be a trans ally—or who doesn't understand more than the male-female binary—I urge you to read this memoir. The author's young daughter transitioned at age 6 in a conservative town in rural New Hampshire, where the author grew up and thought of as idyllic. But when her daughter, still known as a boy, starts wearing pink tennis shoes to school, it's just the beginning of a years-long trauma complete with school board meetings where the family's supposed friends express fear of this young child using the "wrong" bathroom and talking to other children about gender identity. Already dealing with a school district that won't provide their autistic child with appropriate services, the family walks a tightrope every minute of every day. My family knows many trans people and I thought I understood a little of what they experience, but I was absolutely floored by reading this book. As soon as I finished it, I made a donation to the Trevor Project and bought a Protect Trans Kids t-shirt. —Doree

Old Book of the Week (September 23, 2024)

Phinney by Post Book #116

Swamp Angel

by Ethel Wilson

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, including this slim wonder of a novel from 1954, that have continued to find readers in Canada and beyond. She has a lovely, ironic touch, a great eye for people, and an appreciation of the beauties of the B.C. interior, but what makes this book particularly wonderful is its main character, Maggie Lloyd. When the story begins, Maggie goes by the name of her feckless husband, but quickly she reclaims her former identity and a freedom she once had too, making her way to a lake north of Kamloops where her thrilling competence can find its true expression. It’s a story full of both surprises and satisfactions, a little gem as enjoyable to reread as it is to discover for the first time. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (September 23, 2024)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #104

The Dictionary Story

by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston

Dictionary contains all the words that have ever been read, but unlike the other books, she doesn't tell her own story. So one day she decides to bring her words to life, starting with a hungry alligator--who immediately goes after Donut. Soon Ghost, Moon, and many other characters are pulled into the romp across Dictionary's pages as disaster ensues. Thankfully, young readers will be able to help clean up the mess with a well-known song. A close look at the "dictionary" pages in the illustrations reveals that author Oliver Jeffers has written all his own clever entries, many of which relate to the story ("alligator ... [has] a special fondness for baked sugary snacks"). —Haley

New Book of the Week (August 12, 2024)

A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda

by Carrie Rickey

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 witness (and help create) her transformation into a Frida-esque pop icon of feminist art. In between she lived a life of restlessly eclectic creativity (pushing the boundaries of true and made-up filmmaking and befriending the Black Panthers and Jim Morrison, among many others) and personal consistency (nearly her entire career was headquartered in a Montparnasse studio she bought when she was 23). Varda often played with time and identity in her work; in her first book (and the first Varda bio), Rickey, a longtime film critic, largely plays it straight, bringing order to a life overflowing with invention. —Tom

New Book of the Week (August 12, 2024)

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

by Adam Higginbotham

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 more than three decades of backstory. After his acclaimed Midnight in Chernobyl, Higginbotham has become our laureate of engineering disasters, but this story is also about success, about the awesomely complicated scientific and political project of putting the "most complicated machine in history" into space, as much as it's about the hubris, cowardice, and expedience that led to the disaster. A very human story about the limits of human ambition. —Tom

New Book of the Week (August 12, 2024)

Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

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 of the Earth do to your morning I-5 commute. Six astronauts—two women and four men—from five countries are sharing a nine-month space-station mission; we spend a day with them, a day of sunrises every ninety minutes, of memories of individual earthbound lives, of everyday astronaut tasks, and of continual, skybound wonder. Little plot-wise happens, and the six characters blur into a humanist whole, but that wonder, gorgeously captured, is a breathless, idealistic reminder of what we build such wasteful, dangerous machines to get a glimpse of. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (August 12, 2024)

A Month in the Country

New Book of the Week (July 22, 2024)
Godwin
by Joseph O'Neill
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 a small Pittsburgh firm of tech-writer freelancers. That O'Neill can credibly braid these two stories together—and make the latter drama as compelling as its more glamorous counterpart—is a sign of his particular talent for nailing with graceful irony (as he did in his marvelous novel, Netherland) the wonder, the pettiness, the greed, and the kindness that are all part of our interconnected modern world. He's one of the few writers I always read, and Godwin made me once again glad I do. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (July 22, 2024)
The Rhine Journey
by Ann Schlee
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 not only sets her story in 1851; she seems to transform herself into a lady scribbler of that era. She allows no anachronisms of ideology or tone, understanding that she only has to record women’s daily lives and her modern readers will feel her feminist points more powerfully for having been shown and not told.  Even her sly humor is exactly what you would expect a snarky spinster to indulge in with plausible deniability. Schlee’s writing is precisely calibrated to convey the nuances that carry so much meaning in a repressive atmosphere and her characters—both women and men—are believably (de)formed by the strictures of their times. And she so shrewdly dropped hints to convince me I knew how the story would end, that I was doubly wowed for having been misled. —Liz

Old Book of the Week (July 22, 2024)
Journey from the North
by Storm Jameson
I don’t often read memoirs but this reissue of two volumes by British writer Storm Jameson falls smack dab in the middle of my current literary sweet spot. Born in the small coastal town of Whitby, Jameson was a young adult during WWI, middle-aged during WWII, and so perfectly placed to watch the transformation of Britain from an empire to a European nation. The journey of the title is her move from the Yorkshire middle class to a kind of meritocratic world citizenry. Her prodigious energy of mind and body kept her continually moving house, traveling abroad, writing and speaking for political causes, all while producing a novel a year. Those books are mostly (deservedly?) out of print. But this one, recollections from her Victorian childhood though her Cold War seventies, is so alive with personality and insight that I couldn’t stop turning its 800+ pages—except when she described an emotion, a vista, or an idea so felicitously that I had to sit back and simply admire. —Liz

Old Book of the Week (July 22, 2024)
Phinney by Post Book #115
Illumination in the Flatwoods
by Joe Hutto
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 of the delight of animal curiosity himself. As the young birds imprint on him, accepting him as their parent and protector as they grow into independence, they leave perhaps a greater imprint on him. He records their months together with the quality of observation of Thoreau's journals, but without Thoreau's compulsion to turn every moment into metaphor. He does, though, finally come to some profound philosophical insights himself, about the comparative intelligences of humans and birds and about the eternal nature/nuture debate. And about the capacity for human and animal joy. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (July 22, 2024)
Phinney by Post Kids #103
Rumie Goes Rafting
by Meghan Marentette
Young mouse Rumie and Uncle Hawthorne build a mouse-sized raft from twigs, bark, and ribbons. But when Uncle Hawthorne oversleeps the next morning, it's too hard to be patient and Rumie decides to try out the raft alone. Look out for the fast current and waterfall, Rumie! Author Meghan Marentette illustrates the story with miniatures photographed in the lush forests of Nova Scotia. It's fun to get a peek into the process of making the book on her website (where she battles mosquitoes, shifting sunlight, and weather to get the perfect shot). —Haley

New Book of the Week (July 8, 2024)
Margo's Got Money Troubles
by Rufi Thorpe
A young woman unexpectedly becomes a young mother after an affair with her English professor. As a broke college drop-out with a newborn, Margo's running out of rent money and employment options. She turns to her estranged father—famous in the world of pro wrestling—and OnlyFans in a messy, hilarious, and human attempt at building a life. I especially appreciate the way Margo takes control of her own narrative, partly accomplished by switching between first and third person in the telling of her story.

As Margo puts it, "It's true that writing in third person helps me. It is so much easier to have sympathy for the Margo who existed back then rather than try to explain how and why I did all the things that I did."

There's a great deal of nuance for all the quirk of this novel. For every penis-as-a-Pokemon description, there's a deeper insight into the work involved in sex work. I'm so very here for it. —Anika

New Book of the Week (July 8, 2024)
Husbands and Lovers
by Beatriz Williams
My favorite historical fiction author, Beatriz Williams, is back with her 16th book (not counting her collaborations with fellow authors Karen White and Lauren Willig), all but one of which have interconnected storylines (although you don’t have to have read any of her other books to read this one). A minor character in one book will become a main character in a later book; settings may pop up more than once but separated by decades. Husbands & Lovers is the third book set on New York’s Winthrop Island, this time focusing on Mallory and her teenage son, who needs a new kidney. Mallory reconnects with her former best friend Monk, now a world-famous musician, after ghosting him years before. Alternating chapters introduce us to Hannah, a Hungarian immigrant with a tragic past who becomes a British diplomat's wife in 1950s Cairo. As the connective threads between the two timelines slowly unfurl, we understand how both Mallory and Hannah did what they felt they had to do to save the people they loved the most. —Doree

Old Book of the Week (July 8, 2024)
Phinney by Post Book #115
Pavane
by Keith Roberts
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 leaps forward to 1968 (the year the book was published) to a country that's still strangely ancient, but restless. Some alternative histories settle for the shallow fun of merely outlining a what-if scenario, but the deep beauty of Pavane is that it feels lived in, not explained. The story does build, satisfyingly, toward larger, more overtly historical concerns, but it always stays grounded in the grit of individual lives, and especially in some odd, fascinating professions in that parallel world. With the elegance of its writing and the drama of its ideas, and the list of SF stars who love it—William Gibson, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, George R.R. Martin, among many others—it's incredible that it's such a hard book to find. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (July 8, 2024)
Phinney by Post Kids Book #93
If You Run Out of Words
by Felicita Sala
After a long phone call one day, author/illustrator Felicita Sala's daughter asked her, “Mum, what if you talk so much that you run out of words, and then there won’t be any left for me?” Her daughter's worry developed into a picture book where a little girl asks her father the same question. Dad is ready with an answer: "I'd have to go pay a visit to the Elves' Word Factory." But what if he gets lost in the woods? The father answers his daughter's questions by weaving one fantastical scenario after another as he tucks her into bed. Sala's rich and vibrantly colored illustrations make this a beautiful bedtime book to share. —Haley

New Book of the Week (June 10, 2024)
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
by Jonathan Blitzer
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 further caused by the border's cruelty, are almost unutterable as well. But Blitzer makes a coherent and moving story out of this history, both by tracing the larger political forces across the region and by finding personal stories inextricable from those politics, especially of those, like Juan Romagoza, a Salvadoran health worker who is tortured by his home government, escapes north to work as an activist and clinician in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and returns home to continue his work, who find they can only respond to the crisis with labor and love. In the world Blitzer describes—our world—borders are everything, and are at the same time constantly blurred by the human connections made across them. —Tom

New Book of the Week (June 10, 2024)
Soldier Sailor
by Claire Kilroy
For every mother everywhere, this book is a primal scream of new motherhood. The schizophrenic nature of those early days—when you're bursting with love for this little creature, but also dying inside from exhaustion and trying to figure out who you are in the world now—is brought to acute life as a mother recounts those early years as a bedtime story for her son. With a strained marriage to a clueless husband who doesn’t understand what his wife now does all day, her inability to concentrate on work, a lack of people she feels she can connect with, and the feeling that anyone—literally ANYONE—would be a better mother than her, every mother I know will feel SEEN by this novel. —Doree

New Book of the Week (June 10, 2024)
The Comfort of Ghosts (Maisie Dobbs #18)
by Jacqueline Winspear
I binge-read the first 17 books in Jacqueline Winspear’s historical fiction/mystery Maisie Dobbs series during the pandemic. Somehow, immersing myself in the years between World War I to World War II eased my anxiety about the current situation. Now, Winspear beautifully wraps up the series with The Comfort of Ghosts, as Britain begins to heal after the end of the war in 1945. Maisie discovers her late husband’s shocking secret, loses someone very dear to her, helps another heal, and generally tries to make her world a little more kind. I won’t say any more than that, so you can have the pleasure of discovering this story by yourself. I have loved getting to know this “investigator and psychologist” over the course of the books, and while I’m sad it’s the end (although Winspear says in her author’s note to never say never), I feel that Maisie and her family and friends may now find some peace as they look to the future. —Doree

New Book of the Week (June 10, 2024)
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
by Kevin Fedarko
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 adventure. In that same time, Fedarko, who had worked as a grunt-level river guide on the Colorado, realized that the true way to get to know the canyon was not on the water but by foot, and set out on his own adventure, attempting, with a photographer friend, to become two of the handful of hikers to walk the canyon's full, 750-mile length. To say they didn't know what they were getting into is a massive understatement, and their initial heedless (and life-threatening) haplessness gives their story its Bill Bryson-ish humor. But as their skill, and their respect for the awesome, ruthless territory, increases, it becomes a story of grandeur and humility as well, describing a trek that few have made, and perhaps few should. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (June 10, 2024)
The Wildcat Behind Glass
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 published in Greek in 1963, this beautifully written book has just been re-released in a newly translated edition. Seven-year-old Melia and her older sister Myrto love the stories their grown-up cousin Niko tells them about the adventures of the stuffed wildcat displayed in their family's sitting room. When the girls' carefree summer is disrupted by a new authoritarian regime, suddenly there are secrets to keep and the adults are acting strangely. Even the wildcat is part of the intrigue. Will the new political landscape drive the family apart? The Wildcat Behind Glass poignantly captures a place in time through a child's eyes. —Haley

New Book of the Week (May 27, 2024)

All Fours

by Miranda July

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 capital-N Novel in all the best ways: morally serious, formally surprising and ambitious, and frigging hilarious. Imagine a character somewhat like Ms. July (middle-aged, "semi-famous"), and then launch her into a plot of self-transformation whose first half strikingly resembles an Emily Henry rom-com (driven urban woman connects with small-town hunk) and then shifts into something closer to the rebuild-the-world-from-scratch revolution of Women Talking. Throughout, it's funny, startling, moving, vividly and charmingly weird, and so breathtakingly raunchy it reads like a vegan Sabbath's Theater. Wow. —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 27, 2024)

Good Material

by Dolly Alderton

Your first clue that this romantic comedy is a break-up story is the list that kicks it off: Reasons Why It's Good I'm Not with Jen. Here begins Andy's obsessive wallowing. To be fair, he deserves a good wallow; he was blindsided when Jen ended their relationship with little explanation after four years. At thirty-five, Andy's a struggling comedian who's not always emotionally mature but who is self-aware enough of his toxic traits so as not to be totally intolerable. He copes with the break-up by leaning on his friends (many of them married with kids, almost none of them single), drinking copiously at the pub, phoning it in at his gigs, rebounding with a twenty-three-year-old Gen Z'er, and diving down the rabbit hole of nostalgia again and again. It would be easy to find him exhausting if he weren't written with such levity, but I found him so damn likable and sympathetic even while thinking, you've got to get it together, dude!

And then there's Jen's side of the story, which adds a new dimension to Andy's, highlighting problems you (and perhaps Andy) didn't know they had, which is infuriating as well as illuminating because while it takes two people to have a relationship, it only takes one to end it. —Anika

New Book of the Week (May 27, 2024)

A Question of Value: Stories from the Life of an Auctioneer

by Robert Brunk

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 philosophy-in-action of a profession and a passion. But not everyone is as quietly stylish a writer as Brunk, who became an auctioneer in mid-life and built one of the most prominent auction houses in the South, nor has everyone had the good fortune to find a calling that matched his curiosity so well. His tales are about people as well as pieces, presented with some of the value-drama that makes Antiques Roadshow so watchable, but with a real tenderness for his clients and the history their objects represent. His book reminded me most of Thomas Lynch's lovely The Undertaking, both in his similar plain-spoken understanding of life and in the recurring presence of death in these stories of inheriting and letting go. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (May 27, 2024)

Phinney by Post Book #113

Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World

by Leah Hager Cohen

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 rearranges their physical space—putting chairs in a circle, clearing away visual barriers—so they can talk to each other, unimpeded, with the "thick rapport" that Cohen, a hearing person who was raised in their community, so admires and envies. Her book is a blend of memoir and reporting, always aware of questions of inside and outside that are so crucial in Deaf communities, but also willing to let those categories blur to reflect her own complicated identity. A classic of its form since it was published, it reads as fresh and relevant and human now as it must have thirty years ago. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (May 27, 2024)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #101

Mavis the Bravest

by Lu Fraser and Sarah Warburton

Mavis the Bravest's excellent text and illustrations pair perfectly to tell a classic farmyard tale of heroism (with a good dose of silliness). Mavis is a chicken, both in the figurative and literal sense. When Sandra the sheep gets stolen, it's up to Mavis to summon the courage to save her friend. The illustrations of Mavis's expressive face crack me up! This rhyming picture book will make a great read-aloud. —Haley

New Book of the Week (May 6, 2024)

The Manicurist's Daughter

by Susan Lieu

Part family saga, part mystery, The Manicurist's Daughter grips you right from the beginning and doesn't let go. Local author Susan Lieu was determined to publish this memoir when she was thirty-eight, the same age her mother was when she mysteriously died from plastic surgery gone wrong. Lieu's tenacious mother had been the rock that held their extended Vietnamese family together. With no understanding of the circumstances and a family who refused to discuss what happened, Lieu's search for healing over the years led her from a cult to spirit channelling to a one-woman show about her mother. This absorbing and propulsive memoir is a must-read! —Haley

New Book of the Week (May 6, 2024)

The Ministry of Time

by Kaliane Bradley

What happens when an author crushes on a real-life 19th-century polar explorer's photograph? The resulting obsession developed into The Ministry of Time, a book for anyone who has ever wondered what it would be like to talk to someone who lived long ago. The protagonist works for a government program that has time-traveled a sampling of humans from different years of the past to 21st-century Britain. She's assigned to live with and monitor Commander Graham Gore, kidnapped from an arctic expedition in 1847 (think Mr. Darcy plopped into the modern age). This was such a fun read and I enjoyed the thought experiment of how people from different eras would react to the peculiarities of our time period. —Haley

New Book of the Week (May 6, 2024)

Mice 1961

by Stacey Levine

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 words. She's the sort of storyteller who seems to pause in almost every sentence to wonder at the strangeness of the language we live through, and that makes reading Mice 1961 fun. (Its off-kilter style kept me thinking it was one of those novels that limits itself by removing one of the letters, but I checked: all 26 are there.) As for Jody and Mice (and for Girtle, their odd housekeeper/narrator, who "watched the half sisters near-always") it can take some time in this weird landscape to arrange themselves for action, but when one finally decides to go, she goes! —Tom

Old Book of the Week (May 6, 2024)

Mortal Leap

by MacDonald Harris

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, his second, is advertised as a kind of existential story of one man slipping into the identity of another—and it is, fascinatingly so—but (spoiler!) it takes half of a meaty book to get there, after an equally compelling hundred-plus pages of a gritty below-decks sailor's tale that could have been written by B. Traven. It's the messiness of its disparate parts, and Harris's unwillingness to stick to the story you think he's going to tell, that makes this such a compelling and thought-provoking yarn. —Tom

New Book of the Week (April 15, 2024)

The Night in Question

by Susan Fletcher

The Night in Question by Susan Fletcher is a heartwarming—and heartbreaking—exploration of love in later life and the regrets we have about our younger years. Florrie Butterfield recently lost a leg due to an accident, so uses a wheelchair to get around Babbington Hall, a retirement home in England. After what seems to be a terrible accident at the home, Florrie and her gentleman friend, Stanhope, try to get to the bottom of it. That leads Florrie on a journey of forgiveness—for herself and others. This novel has a similarity to Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club in its lovely depiction of friendships (but without that series’ trademark humor) and left me wanting to get to know both Florrie and Stanhope better. I do hope there’s a sequel. —Doree

New Book of the Week (April 15, 2024)

Stag

by Dane Bahr

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 have seen too, if you read Dane's pitch-black first novel, The Houseboat. Dane was always a chipper fellow when he hosted our monthly Dock Street Salon reading series, as he did before moving up to Bellingham, but, boy, the darkness that's sloshing around his imagination! Plenty of it fills this book, haunting Fielding's attempt at retirement with a serial killer at work and a local lawman strangely disinclined to do his job. It turns out western Washington is no country for old men either. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (April 15, 2024)

Phinney by Post Book #112

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

by George V. Higgins

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 with brutal directness. Why is this book, which Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane agree is the greatest crime novel, not even better known? Maybe because its brilliant but sometimes unforgiving reliance on the ambiguities of conversation makes it closer to Dubliners than The Firm. Maybe because Eddie's life of driving up and down the outer freeways of New England and getting drunk at Bruins games carries none of the dark glamour of the best-known crime story of its era, The Godfather. But oh, this book, and all its talk, is still a marvel, fifty years on. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (April 15, 2024)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #100

The Thingamajig

by Rilla Alexander

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 seem to use and with the nonsense words other languages have invented for the same fuzzy meaning, which are all silly-sounding enough that this will make a wonderfully goofy read-aloud, especially for kids who are just waking up to the wonders of words and things. —Tom

New Book of the Week (April 1, 2024)

Table for Two

by Amor Towles

I loved The Lincoln Highway and adored A Gentleman in Moscow, so when the advance copy of Amor Towles’ new Table for Two, consisting of six short stories and one novella, arrived in the bookstore, I snatched it up before anyone else could. Once again, I found myself in love with his writing. Towles is so good at making you care deeply about people doing the tiniest of everyday things: standing in a line, casually chatting with others at the airport or in a bar, the quiet moments that make up a marriage. If I told you that a 37-page story about a man waiting in line was one of the most deeply human and touching things I’ve ever read, would you believe me? If you’ve read Towles’ previous books, you would. Before reading the novella "Eve in Hollywood," I first had to read his debut novel, Rules of Civility, which I had somehow neglected to do. Towles had previously written a short story based on Evelyn Ross (Eve to her friends), a major character from that book, but so many people clamored for more that he finally expanded it to more than 200 pages. Eve is the strongest of women who shows up for her friends when they need her most, and I dearly hope that Towles will find more to say about her in the years to come. —Doree

New Book of the Week (April 1, 2024)

I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

by Lucy Sante

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 declaration that she, feeling "something liquefy in the core of my body," was ready to take a step she had dreamed of (when she allowed herself to) for nearly her whole life: to publicly transition to being a woman. It's a choice not uncommon now, but Sante brings to it the wisdom and regret and exhilaration of a decision made late in life, as well as the wry, frank, chiseled style that has long made her one of my favorite writers. She tells this story in parallel: the cracking of her egg, as the trans phrase goes, in the present alongside a memoir of a bohemian life in which almost anything felt possible, except what she most wanted. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (April 1, 2024)

Sashiko's Stitches

by Sanae Ishida

Sashiko's Stitches is a new picture book from local favorite Sanae Ishida (Little Kunoichi: The Ninja Girl). Sashiko is a little girl with overwhelming fears and worries. One day, her mother teaches her about a style of decorative traditional Japanese stitching also called sashiko, which was originally used to repair fishermen's clothes. As Sashiko begins stitching her fears onto fabric, they weigh less on her heart. This sweet book about using your artistic expression to manage anxiety is brought to life with Ishida's beautiful watercolor illustrations. I'm looking forward to trying sashiko myself! —Haley

Old Book of the Week (April 1, 2024)

The Bluest Eye

by Toni Morrison

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 some of her best-known books, I took that chance to catch up with one I'd missed, her debut. And my god, what a debut, and what an experience to hear it in the author's voice, recorded decades after she wrote it. The precision of her language, the surprises of her choices at every turn (which only feel inevitable after she has made them), her persistence in fully inhabiting each of her characters, even the most reprehensible: all of these are heightened by the resonance and sheer delight of Morrison's reading. A revelation! —Tom

Order the audiobook of The Bluest Eye from our partners at Libro.fm

New Book of the Week (March 18, 2024)

James

by Percival Everett

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 attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." You get the feeling Twain and Percival Everett might have gotten along fine. Everett has made a career out of upending narratives and skewering literary expectations; by his standards, Everett plays this one, a retelling of Twain's classic from Jim's perspective, pretty straight; plenty is upended (Jim reads Voltaire on the sly, and joins a real-life minstrel troupe), but there might be a moral or two in it, and some dead-serious philosophy-in-action. It'll make you want to read Huck Finn again; it's so good it'll also make you want to read James again. —Tom

New Book of the Week (March 18, 2024)

Burn Man

by Mark Anthony Jarman

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 he's better known for his stories." And here those stories are, 21 of them gloriously collected from four decades of writing. It is an intense experience to read them all in a row, because they are each so intensely packed. The comparisons to two of Jarman's heroes (and mine), Denis Johnson and Barry Hannah, are inevitable, for their funny, fragmented brilliance, their simmering (often more than simmering) violence, and their portraits of men (usually) at the fraying ends of various ropes. You won't find much more firepower per square inch in any other book this year. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (March 18, 2024)

Phinney by Post Book #111

A Woman in the Polar Night

by Christiane Ritter

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 she does, spending the full, dark winter in a tiny hut with her husband and a young Norwegian friend, who admitted later he was looking forward to watching her lose her mind. She keeps her sanity, grounded by her good humor and the constant tasks required to survive, but it's as if she found a whole new mind in that year, broadened by the isolation and the fierce elements. It's a spare and beautiful book, bright in its vision against the months of darkness it records. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (March 18, 2024)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #99

Pretty Ugly

by David Sedaris and Ian Falconer

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 Russell Hoban's wonderful Little Brute Family—and turns it, literally, inside-out. Some readers (and some grown-ups) will likely be disturbed; others might find the wicked horror and odd sweetness just suited to their taste. —Tom

New Book of the Week (March 4, 2024)

Ordinary Human Failings

by Megan Nolan

It opens with the typical hook: a missing child. Tom Hargreaves, newbie tabloid hack, takes the bait and is formulating lurid headlines before he even gets to the scene. He plies the suspect’s family with money, alcohol and fake sympathy, but fails to elicit a tale black and white enough for newsprint. I won’t lie—I was reeled in too. But while Tom’s hopes of a scoop are dashed, readers are served something just as compelling and far more satisfying. Your fingers will itch to flip pages but slow down to absorb Nolan’s assured style and deep insight. Most impressive of all are her characters: ordinary—but very particular—people, who with just a few twitches of fate end up in out-of-the-ordinary circumstances. This remarkable second novel may be small, but it is dense with humanity—real human beings as well as all-embracing compassion. And it’s earned the first spot on my Top Ten of 2024. —Liz

New Paperback of the Week (March 4, 2024)

We Are Too Many

by Hannah Pittard

I love this (kind of) memoir for satisfying the inappropriate curiosity I so often feel when the relationships of people I actually know end. Pittard spills all of the tea about the demise of her marriage, which culminated in her husband's affair with her toxic best friend. It's a raw and creative account of betrayal with a story structure that includes hypothetical and imagined dialogue as well as remembered conversations. I was up all hours of the night listening to the audiobook (narrated by the author!) and it was an intimate experience: like being on the phone with a friend needing to verbally process the end of life as she knew it. —Anika

Old Book of the Week (March 4, 2024)

Operation Heartbreak

by Duff Cooper

Attention all Anglophile WWII buffs: you do not want to miss McNally Editions’ reissue of this fantastic 1950 novel! It’s the life story of a type of Englishman who—although born on January 1, 1900—really belongs to the 1800s, written by a very different type of Englishman who was in almost every room where it happened during the first half of the 20th C. Cooper was a soldier, politician, diplomat, historian, etc., who finally decided to try his hand at fiction and—surprisingly or unsurprisingly—produced this absolute gem. Cunningly crafted, elegantly styled, it’s both delightful and poignant. Now, I know that many of my fellow buffs are also espionage geeks. And while the title and short prologue may clue you into the plot’s set-up, I promise it will not spoil your reading pleasure. Even though I knew where things were heading, this brilliant little book still won the next spot on my 2024 Top Ten list. —Liz

Old Book of the Week (March 4, 2024)

Phinney by Post Book #110

Perma Red

by Debra Magpie Earling

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 iron filings (she's "the girl we had all stood taller for," says one admirer). Does it do her much good to be so desired, and pursued by three flawed suitors? No, quite the opposite, but the same life force that draws these men toward her (and will likely draw you, the reader, as well) carries her (and you) through this story of pain and violence, set during a brutal winter on Montana's Flathead Reservation in the 1940s. —Tom

New Book of the Week (January 23, 2024)

Interesting Facts About Space

by Emily Austin

Emily Austin's debut, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, was easily my favorite book of 2021, so I approached her sophomore novel with excitement as well as trepidation. There's a lot going on in the blurb for this one: a phobia of bald men, a true crime and space obsession, dysfunctional family stuff, queer dating, mental health. Before I started reading I worried it was trying to do too much or that it would be quirky for quirk's sake, but I was quickly reassured by Austin's execution. She crafts a flawed, lovable protagonist in Enid, who is driven by fear and loyalty and a desire to belong. Emily Austin is my favorite voice of the Millennial generation, capturing what it's like to be a mess while trying in earnest to do the best that you can. —Anika

Old Book of the Week (January 23, 2024)

Phinney by Post Book #109

Father and Son

by Edmund Gosse

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 to make Father and Son both a moving and a cracking read over a century later are a) the character of his father, Philip, who attempted to reconcile his scientific learning (he was a famous naturalist: a friend of Darwin and the popularizer of the aquarium) with what he saw as the literal truth of Genesis and for whom his son continued to feel great affection despite their break, and b) Gosse's dry wit, which makes this story a delightful as well as a tragic one. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (January 23, 2024)

Time to Make Art

by Jeff Mack

It's time to make art! But the young girl in this picture book has a few questions first. "What should I use to make art?" "Paint" says painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. "Wood" says carver Ellen Neel. "Stone" says an ancient stone sculptor from Teotihuacán. Can art be something you eat? Something useful? Nothing at all? Each famous and lesser-known artist across history answers her questions through the lens of their own art. I loved this diverse introduction to art for a young audience (and I learned a lot too)! (Age 2 and up) —Haley

New Book of the Week (January 8, 2024)

Mercury

by Amy Jo Burns

Seventeen-year-old Marley drives into the tiny town of Mercury with her mother, who never lets them settle into a new place for long. But Marley immediately falls in with the Joseph family, as the girlfriend to first one brother, then another, and as a sort of surrogate mother to the whole family. Circumstances keep Marley tied to the town and the Josephs, as everyone simultaneously depends on her for nearly everything in their lives and takes it for granted she’ll always be there. When the Joseph boys’ mother comes to her for help, Marley has to weigh family obligations with what is morally right. It’s a heartbreaking yet also uplifting story of families, love, betrayal, and how we can love people even though we don’t understand their choices. —Doree

New Books of the Week (January 8, 2024)

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 latest by Nobel laureates who each turned 83 last year, and each told by a woman in middle age about an affair with a man named in the title. From those similarities, though, they become almost opposites: Ernaux's memoir recalls her own affair, proudly hungry, with a man young enough to have been her son, while in Coetzee's novel, a married Spanish woman is pursued, against her bemused reluctance, by a Polish concert pianist old enough to be her father. Each book is spare and exact and insightful enough on its own to set up reverberations inside its tiny space; set next to each other, they echo back and forth almost infinitely. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (January 8, 2024)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #97

Truffle: A Dog (and Cat) Story

by David McPhail

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 the story doesn't move fast enough. Truffle has only a few more pages than the usual 32, and just a few more words than most, but it takes its time, much like Truffle himself, the best-dressed dog in his village, who has retired to leisure after becoming a dog of some means. His story is a sweet, and surprising, and patient one, and I enjoyed it almost as much as I enjoyed his well-tailored outfits. (Ages 1 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 28, 2023)

Prophet Song

by Paul Lynch

When I finished this year’s Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song, I felt that I hadn’t simply read it—I had lived it. The story follows Eilish Stack, a middle-aged working mother who’s trying to maintain the life she knew while a newly-elected Fascist regime cracks down, an insurgency intensifies, and civil war brings Ireland to collapse. Although billed as political dystopia, similar situations have happened before—are happening now—all over the world. Lynch said that he wanted to create a work of “radical empathy” and as Eilish moves through stages of disorientation, anxiety, terror, and grief, his poetic style evokes the physicality of her emotions, compelling you to share them and join her journey. Warning: this book demands an intrepid reader. The trip is harrowing but rewards you with keen insight into humanity and history and maybe even the resolve to help make it never have to happen again. —Liz

New Book of the Week (November 28, 2023)

The Mystery Guest

by Nita Prose

Fans of Nita Prose’s delightful debut novel The Maid have had to wait almost two years for a sequel, but I’m happy to report it was worth the wait. Molly Gray is now Head Maid at the high-end Regency Grand Hotel, where her exacting attention to detail is put to good use as yet another murder mystery unfolds. But this time, Molly has a connection to the victim that she’s not sure she should reveal. As she uncovers clues to the killer, she once again has to remember her past to understand her present. Just like in the first book, alternating chapters describe more about Molly’s upbringing by her patient, loving Gran. This book is more direct about Molly being on the spectrum, and just how poor she and Gran were. Containing even more emotional heartbreak and healing than The Maid, The Mystery Guest will definitely be on my Top 10 list this year. I just loved it—and I can’t wait for the next sequel. —Doree

New Book of the Week (November 28, 2023)

Strong Female Character

by Fern Brady

I was already predisposed to liking Scottish comedian Fern Brady's memoir on account of enjoying the hell out of her presence on Taskmasker (a British comedy panel game show) and her stand-up comedy special, Power & Chaos. Upon learning of her autism diagnosis, I admired her celebrity all the more. And when I found out she'd written a book about living undiagnosed for most of her life? I knew I had to read it, and I'm so glad that I did. As implied by the title Strong Female Character, Brady's account of navigating her neurodivergence in a myriad of contexts—family life, school, relationships, work—is told through a specifically female lens; for example, at sixteen a psychiatrist told Brady she couldn't be autistic because she was making eye contact and had a boyfriend. Now, post-diagnosis, she writes to make sense of her experiences with newfound language and research and the result is candid and funny while many of the anecdotes she shares are vulnerable and heartbreaking. I recommend this regardless of whether it's the first time you've heard of Fern Brady. Even having already read it myself, I'm looking forward to giving the audiobook a listen just so I can hear her tell it again in her own voice. —Anika

Old Book of the Week (November 28, 2023)

Phinney by Post Book #107

N by E

by Rockwell Kent

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 never lost his wry, can-do spirit, or the restless curiosity that led him to keep leaving behind his successful artistic career in New York for the most remote parts of the world. For all the fame of Kent's wood-cut illustration style (on display in this lovely book as in a legendary edition of Moby-Dick), he is an equally elegant writer, good-humored and observant, with a Thoreauean taste for turning physical description into metaphor, and thereby into philosophy. And he's at his best, as a storyteller and perhaps even as a sailor, when things go wrong—as they certainly do. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (November 28, 2023)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #95

Proof

by Ben Clanton and Andy Chou Musser

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 fashion a warm and lively friendship with a little cloud named Ploof. By the end of the book you will indeed, as Ploof asks, want to give that blob of moisture and high five and a hug. —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 14, 2023)

The Liberators

by E.J. Koh

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 swallow. It's a what-if story: what if we could flourish outside of history? Or, more particularly, what if these specific characters, four generations of Koreans and Korean Americans, could live without the borders and partitions that their lives have wrapped around, like vines on a trellis? You get glimpses, from Koh's visionary language and their own moments of connection; it's a story whose title is ironic, but not despairingly so. —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 14, 2023)

Same Bed Different Dreams

by Ed Park

Worth the wait. By that I mean both the time since I first read a preview copy of this novel (nine months or so ago) and the time since Ed Park last published one (fifteen years). A prolific magazine profile artist, he hasn't exactly been silent since his dark comedy of office life, Personal Days, appeared, but it's been longer than I'd like since he's allowed himself such an outpouring of fictional creativity. And what an outpouring it is. Over the course of over 500 pages, Park introduces a beleaguered everyman laboring for a corporate tech juggernaut called GLOAT (nobody is sure what that stands for, but it can't be good), and then introduces him to a secret manuscript that reveals either a bizarre conspiracy theory or an illuminating truth involving almost every politician and pop culture character of the last century. Abounding with Pynchonesque paranoia and possibility. Same Bed Different Dreams is a rollicking three-ring circus that brings past, present, and future together under one massive, multicolored tent. —James

Old Book of the Week (November 14, 2023)

The Girls

by John Bowen

This little reissue, originally published in 1986, lured me in with its gorgeous Edward Gorey cover art, and then I couldn't help but stick around. Set in the mid-1970s in the Midlands, it begins with the cozy domestic life of "the girls" Jan and Sue, well-known in the village for their elderflower wine and artisanal cheeses. The two run a quaint shoppe and travel to craft fairs to sell their wares. It's all very cottagecore and relationship goals until Sue grows restless and books herself an extended trip to "find herself" and, meanwhile, Jan finds comfort in the company of a fellow craft fair vendor. However, once Sue is back, the couple find themselves as happy as ever—and expecting a child! I'll admit, at this point, I hesitated to go on, knowing that something must go terribly wrong. After all, the blurb on the back cover boasts murder! Why, I wondered, can't we just have nice things? With trepidation, I continued reading as cozy turned to dark and clever, reminiscent of my favorite Shirley Jackson novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. What a gem!

TLDR: Cottagecore. Lesbians. Murder. —Anika

New Book of the Week (October 30, 2023)

The Fraud

by Zadie Smith

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 rival of Dickens, and the once-celebrated Tichborne case, in which a man appeared to claim the fortune of a missing nobleman. But it is really the story of two other true—and usually secondary—figures: Eliza Touchet, Ainsworth's cousin and housekeeper, and Andrew Bogle, a black Jamaican servant who stood as one of the Tichborne claimant's main witnesses. And the real drama comes less from the story's public events, or from Smith's brilliance and language, which spark on every page, than the encounter of these two sensibilities: the thoughtful, liberal, and often brilliant Touchet, who chafes at injustice and the limits to her own freedom as a woman, and the equally thoughtful Bogle, whose life and testimony test the limits of Eliza's sympathies. —Tom

(I listened to the audiobook, superbly narrated by the author, via our partners at Libro.fm.)

New Book of the Week (October 30, 2023)

I Must Be Dreaming

by Roz Chast

I’ve heard it said that other peoples’ dreams aren’t interesting, but I’ve never agreed with that! I love hearing about dreams, particularly if they’re Roz Chast’s. In I Must Be Dreaming, the combination of Chast’s imaginative dreams, paired with her expressive and often goofy-looking characters had me in stitches. —Haley

Old Book of the Week (October 30, 2023)

I Could Read the Sky

by Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke

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 evocative effect as John Berger and Jean Mohr's A Fortunate Man (one of my favorite Phinney by Post picks), in this case pairing Pyke's photographs of Ireland and Irish people with O'Grady's novel of the often brutal, but not unjoyous, life of an Irish migrant laboring in England. O'Grady's story is individual—particular labors, a particular love, particular sadness—but made collective by its spare language, its sense of fellow feeling with other migrant workers, and most of all by Pyke's photos, portraits both individual and collective of joy, weariness, hope, and perseverance. I imagine reading this many times, each time letting the words or the pictures take the lead and then returning to the other. —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 16, 2023)

Monica

by Daniel Clowes

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 of detailing the most banal varieties of human grotesquerie, and he is both a more sturdily traditional storyteller than most of his fellow indie-comics visionaries and utterly willing to turn his story inside-out on a dime (e.g. the stunning but fully earned twist in this book's final frame). Monica is a mature work in the very best way, full of the perspective of lives lived and dreams found and dashed, and I would say it was the best in his wonderful career, if Ghost World wasn't such a stone-cold masterpiece. —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 16, 2023)

Beijing Sprawl

by Xu Zechen, translated by Jeremy Tiang and Eric Abrahamsen

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 outskirts, the city still looks unapproachably distant, like "a tropical rainforest of tall buildings and the glow of neon lights." At night they paste up ads for his uncle's fake ID business; by day they try to sleep and go up on the roof to play cards, drink beer, and share stories about the brutal, lonely, and yearning lives of their fellow migrants, which in the telling of Xu Zechen, through Muyu's eyes, reminded me of nothing so much as the terse violence and fettered humanity of Isaac Babel's Cossack tales. —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 2, 2023)

Dayswork

by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

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, making their way, as we all did, through the stir-crazy days of the early pandemic, but it's really the story of the heroic and tragic life of Herman Melville, and the death and afterlife of his work in the minds of readers, told through tiny facts from his life and from the century and a half he has remained alive for those who care about him. I'm not sure how to explain that this collection of facts, hung loosely on a story of married life that is hardly a story at all, manages to be the funniest and sweetest and most moving book I've read all year, but it is. I loved it so much. —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 2, 2023)

The MANIAC

by Benjamin Labatut

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 book, The MANIAC can be read as pure truth, but the factual narrative Labatut assembles is as artfully composed and strikes to the heart as powerfully as fiction does. His main protagonist is the polymathic scientific genius John Von Neumann, who fathered most of the important technologies of the 20th century, including the hydrogen bomb and the computer (the novel's title derives from the acronym for one such early device). The range of his accomplishments is vast, but their cumulative effect is terrifyingly amoral. The tantalizing promise of artificial intelligence that Von Neumann pioneers appears in the end more like an existential threat. Nevertheless, one man, filled with a hopeless heroism, defends humanity as bravely as an anonymous protestor facing down a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Altogether unique, The MANIAC is both direct and deep, a novel of astonishing intellectual heft that moved me nearly to tears. It's a masterpiece. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

Old Book of the Week (October 16, 2023)

Phinney by Post Book #106

Ru

by Kim Thúy

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 of Thúy's story, as if she's holding it at arm’s length and inspecting it like a jeweler, and under such a distant eye a moment of generosity can seem not much different than one of cruelty; a small pleasure sits next to a vision of horror, poverty alongside wealth, often within the same life. It’s a book of memory as well as of becoming, but one memory is of a waiter she met when she returned to Vietnam as an adult, who, by treating her as a foreigner, no longer Vietnamese, reminded her she can’t possess all her identities at once. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (October 16, 2023)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #94

Grand Old Oak and the Birthday Ball

by Rachel Piercey and Freya Hartas

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 of tours in mind), this story of the planning and celebration of a birthday bash for a very old tree comes with sprightly, readable rhymes and a philosophical sense of time, as it follows the seasonal cycles of a single year while inviting the awe toward a living being that has seen five hundred of those years. (Ages 0 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 2, 2023)

Father and Son

by Jonathan Raban

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 adapts to the permanent effects of, a stroke at age 68. It covers much less ground, but Raban's own journey is the more harrowing and compelling of the two, as this famously curious and curmudgeonly writer and traveler, who transplanted himself from Britain to the north slope of Queen Anne Hill in 1990 and spent the rest of his life there, including a dozen semi-immobile years after his stroke, struggles to reclaim his independence. A book full of affection for his daughter and a more distant admiration for his father, it is most of all a testament to the power and endless interest of a life of reading and writing. —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 2, 2023)

Old Enough

by Haley Jakobson

Friendship is the heart of this coming-of-age campus novel. As Savannah embarks on her sophomore year of college, proudly out as bisexual, she's happy to be making new connections and cultivating community when her childhood best friend Izzie announces her wedding engagement. Sav greets this news with surprise and dread, and it gradually becomes clear she's not simply outgrowing her old friendship; she's grappling with unaddressed trauma from her past involving Izzie's older brother. Jakobson respectfully tends to the issue of sexual assault, with an emphasis on healing, and she manages to infuse Sav's story with plenty of queer joy. It's a quick, big-hearted read that enjoyably captures that young adult era in life where you think you're finally grown and know everything while you're obviously still figuring out who you are and who you want to be. —Anika

New Book of the Week (September 18, 2023)

The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

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 the crash of 2008, but its roots go deeper than that, in bewitchings and betrayals that are unearthed as their family ties unravel and are tightened again. With his capacity to inhabit each family member's hopes and humiliations in turn, you could see Murray as an Irish Jonathan Franzen, but he's a looser stylist, more willing to ride the voices of his characters, although all the time he's orchestrating their drama in an almost old-fashioned, and quite wonderful, way. —Tom

New Book of the Week (September 18, 2023)

This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America

by Navied Mahdavian

"We were in search of adventure.

A place we could own land and start a family.

The Millennial dream."

This Country is a beautifully illustrated story of two artists—a documentary filmmaker and a teacher/cartoonist—who buy six acres of land in remote, central Idaho after being priced out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Instantly, I felt immersed in Navied Mahdavian's new life, where he and his wife are determined to be self-sufficient homesteaders living in a 280-square-foot cabin. The two start out charmingly inexperienced with rural living and hardships, such as weather, which becomes most apparent during their first winter, when they must rely on the helpfulness of neighborly strangers. Unfortunately, as Mahdavian and his wife make great strides toward establishing their home in this place—by reopening a local movie theatre, planting an impressive garden, and conceiving a child—the local culture challenges them with its own traditional ideas of what an American is and should be. —Anika

Old Book of the Week (September 18, 2023)

Phinney by Post Book #105

Instead of a Letter

by Diana Athill

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 this was the first in a series of memoirs she published in a late-blooming writing career. It's often summed up by a particular tragic incident that happens off-stage (in fact, it hardly happens at all) midway through the book, but really it's the story of Athill coming to understand herself, through years of happiness, great sadness, and happiness again. And what's best about this superb book is the thrillingly crisp but good-humored frankness with which she writes, sparing no one, least of all herself. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (September 18, 2023)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #93

My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat

by Sandol Stoddard Warburg, illustrated by Remy Charlip

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 while they might be your friend, they aren't yours. And, by the way, that goes for people too. (Ages 2 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week (August 14, 2023)

Kairos

by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hoffman

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 summary does full justice to this subtle and humane novel. More than anything it is the story of two vivid, individual people caught in time—historical time and their own mismatched, contingent lifetimes—and if their story happens to resonate with the national drama they find themselves part of, as it so brilliantly does, that just adds to its particular, personal depth. It's romantic and a bit austere, it's lovely and brutal, and it's the best novel I've read in quite a while. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (August 14, 2023)

The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957–1965

by Sam Stephenson

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—together or separately—on the same night. And there are few windows on that scene as wonderfully illuminating as this one, the distillation of tens of thousands of photos and thousands of hours of tape W. Eugene Smith recorded at his Midtown apartment, an all-night hangout and jam-session spot for musicians and artists and hangers-on for nearly a decade. Stephenson spent almost that long curating those photos and tapes into this beautiful, recently rereleased book, which grounds the highest of art in the dust and debris of everyday life. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (August 14, 2023)

Phinney by Post Book #104

The Lost Traveler

by Sanora Babb

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 one of our most popular recent selections, and now we're presenting a book about her teen years, when her dreaming and scheming father tried to support the family as a professional gambler in small-town Kansas. It was published earlier, as fiction, and it's a darker story, but it makes a fascinating pair with An Owl as two portraits of a family struggling to survive together and destined to break apart. And together they reveal Babb as a great 20th-century American writer who is just now finally starting to get her due in the 21st century. —Tom

YA Book of the Week (August 14, 2023)

All Alone with You

by Amelia Diane Coombs

Angsty loner Eloise would much rather be spending her time gaming than logging volunteer hours at LifeCare—an elder care service that's at odds with her social anxiety—but that's what her guidance counselor says she has to do if she wants a scholarship to her dream school. Along with fellow volunteer Austin, Eloise resigns herself to weekly visits keeping an old woman company. It's a prospect made much more nerve-wracking (but all the more intriguing) when Eloise learns the old woman in question, Marianne Landis, is the famous former frontwoman of the Laundromats—and that she can be every bit as prickly as Eloise. At first, Eloise is annoyed by Austin's perpetual cheerfulness but eventually she warms to his sunshine-y persona and the two of them become friends outside their shared LifeCare shifts. It's a sweet, slow-burn friendship-turned-romance, and the Seattle setting is fun, with lots of invented locales mixed in with actual places, especially with the music scene tie-ins. —Anika

Kids' Book of the Week (August 14, 2023)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #92

ABC and You and Me

by Corinna Luyken

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 Northwest picture-book artists) of people of all sizes forming all the letters from A to Z are inclusive and ingenious, and nearly realistic! (You'll have to be a pretty advanced yogi to pull off "C" or "F," but it'll be fun to try.) (Age 0 and up) —Tom

New Book of the Week

Rocky Mountain High: A Tale of Boom and Bust in the New Wild West

by Finn Murphy

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 supposed hemp boom in his adopted state of Colorado. First he buys a chunk of farmland, then he spies a niche in processing the plants others are growing, and finally he loses his shirt (or, rather, a big chunk of his retirement funds). But he has a pretty great time along the way—he's a serial entrepreneur who loves the challenge and the chaos of a new venture—and you will too. As in The Long Haul, he's a lively and astute analyst of class in America, and an infectious (but clear-eyed) enthusiast for the stress and thrills of small business, even when that business goes belly up. —Tom

New Book of the Week

The Laughter

by Sonora Jha

As someone who opts to read few books written by straight white men, I'm the kind of reader Dr. Oliver Harding—a 56-year-old white male English professor who fears becoming obsolete and who would definitely make a point of capitalizing White here—would balk at. And yet, I agreed to trust Jha and spend approximately 300 pages inside his head, where I was privy to all his unsavory thoughts and opinions, as well as his inappropriate lust-fueled obsession with a younger female colleague: Ruhaba Khan, a bewitching Pakistani Muslim law professor. I found myself equal parts fascinated and repulsed by Oliver as he ingratiated himself to Ruhaba by way of her 15-year-old French-Muslim nephew, Adil. Set on a Seattle university campus in the days leading up to the 2016 election, The Laughter reads like a modern-day Lolita in academia. It's a masterclass in pacing, tension, and beautiful writing. Wow! —Anika

New Book of the Week

The Little Village of Book Lovers

by Nina George

If you loved Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop, as I did, you’ll remember Jean Perdu created his floating bookstore, Literary Apothecary, after reading a life-changing novel about love, written under a pseudonym. George’s new novel, The Little Village of Book Lovers, is that novel, which George says she wrote after many readers asked about that fictitious novel. It’s about all the different kinds of love—romantic, platonic, familial—and one young girl with the gift to see where Love itself touched each person, a mark that only she can see on their lips, shoulder, or perhaps hands. While Love laments that it doesn’t actually control love, because its siblings (such as Fate, Fear, Chance, Death, and Logic), each have their own influences on people, orphaned Marie-Jeanne spends her life using books to bring together people she believes are destined to love each other. The Little Village of Book Lovers will leave you dreaming of a trip to France to find the perfect book and, perhaps, love. —Doree

Old Book of the Week

Phinney by Post Book #103

Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America

by John Langston Gwaltney

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 crossed over into general use in American English. The conversations he shares have those same qualities: even though he was an academic anthropologist, Gwaltney came to his speakers not as some neutral outsider but as a friend and a fellow black American, gaining their trust through shared bonds of "kinship and amity." The results are vivid, individual, thoughtful, and frank, self-portraits of solidarity and ingenuity and of weariness and frustration. As one of his respondents puts it, "I have grown to womanhood in a world where the saner you are, the madder you are made to appear." —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week

Phinney by Post Kids Book #91

Maurice

by Jessixa Bagley

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 every other Parisian in her story) and his accordion, which, I imagine, has that same sweetly melancholic tone. It's a story with some sadness but a lot of love, which will fill your own heart the way a sweet and sad song does. (Ages 2 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

by Jane Wong

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. But this isn't the sort of memoir that draws a bright line between an immigrant, East Coast past and an educated, assimiliated, West Coast future: It twists and turns and digresses and remembers, full of ghosts and ex-boyfriends, of dragon fruit and fish-head soup and Lunchables. And at the heart of it all is Jane's mom, still commuting an hour each way to work the USPS night shift in Jersey, and still sending daily advice from afar. Her daughter's book is a spiky, angry, hungry, silly, sweet love letter to her and a manifesto for her own love of language and her right to use it. —Tom

New Book of the Week

The Postcard

by Anne Berest, translated by Tina Cover

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 before. (A third child, Berest's grandmother, evaded deportation and survived.) Berest uses this real postcard to tell her family's true story as fiction: bohemians and entrepreneurs, eager to assimilate before the war, and, for the survivors after the war, eager—or at least encouraged—to forget. Berest's style in imagining her family's lives reads like a postcard itself, painted in bright, simple strokes, though she doesn't flinch in presenting the brutal facts (familiar but necessary to retell) of their destruction. The more unfamiliar side of the story comes in the second half, when she sifts through the murk of willful postwar forgetfulness to discover the truth of her family and of that mysterious message. —Tom

Old Book of the Week

Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education

by Sybille Bedford

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 more culture than money, and spent her childhood shuttled among parents and friends in Germany, London, Italy, and, most memorably, a small town in the South of France. The characters and incidents in this story are too deliciously varied and interesting to list; her character has a genius for befriending her elders, which means she witnesses the messy lives of adults far before she is one herself. Her style is exquisite, and her assessments of others and herself are incisive but generous. With her adolescent perspective, this wonderful book reads like a series of Henry James novellas (this Maisie knows a lot), until her brilliant mother's hunger for morphine turns it into something by Zola. —Tom (I listened to the audiobook, superbly narrated by Sian Thomas, via our partners at Libro.fm)

Kids' Book of the Week

Need a House? Call Ms. Mouse!

by George Mendoza and Doris Susan Smith

First published in 1981, Need a House? Call Ms. Mouse! was recently re-released for a new generation by the New York Review Children's Collection. The animals flock to architect Ms. Mouse because she knows how to design a home that will suit each of their unique needs. For instance, Cat wants a house with plenty of places to nap, while Rabbit needs room to store his harvest. What would suit Lizard better than a rooftop solarium where he can bask in the sun? Then it's on to designing a recording studio for Spider and an astronomy tower for Owl. Anyone who loves a detailed cross section illustration of a cozy home will need to add this charming classic to their collection. (Ages 1 to 6) —Haley

New Book of the Week

The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

by Michael Finkel

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 Breitwieser, a Frenchman who, with his girlfriend Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, pulled off an incredible series of thefts—over 200 in the eight years before he was first caught in 2001—at small museums across Europe, would like to be thought of: as an artist, or rather as a collector of exquisite taste and skill, who stole not for profit but for love. Finkel's account of Breitwieser's crimes is equally skillful, a deliciously detailed account of both his thefts and his pathological drive to continue them beyond any point of reason. He sweeps you up in Breitwieser's audacious capers without ever quite romanticizing him or forgetting the costs of his compulsion. —Tom

Old Book of the Week

Phinney by Post Book #102

Absolute Beginners

by Colin MacInnes

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, you likely also knew MacInnes's 1958 novel, the source for all of the above, which has never really crossed over to our side of the Atlantic, despite being somewhere between The Catcher in the Rye and On the Road in its teen spirit and love of outsider culture. Our unnamed narrator is 18 and the sweetest pornographer you'll ever meet, an eager, knowing, and infectiously charming tour guide to the youth culture that's taking over postwar London and to the immigrants, queers, and fellow jazzers he considers his people. His sweetness will be tested by the end of his story (by organized attacks by white gangs based on the Notting Hill Riots); whether it survives, or whether it should, I'll leave for you to decide. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week

Phinney by Post Kids Book #90

We Were Tired of Living in a House

by Liesel Moak Skorpen and Doris Burn

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 life on remote Waldron Island in the San Juans, is just the illustrator for this one, but it's a similarly charming tale of kids making their own creative way in the out of doors, full of her sweetly ramshackle illustrations. (Age 1 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week (June 5, 2023)

Red Team Blues

by Cory Doctorow

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 near-future science fiction like Little Brother, but his newest tale is a California noir set firmly in the world we live in now, in a Bay Area shared by homeless camps and crypto money launderers. Navigating between them is Martin Hench, a charming lone-wolf operator who has made a very good living as a swashbuckling forensic accountant (three words that may never have appeared together before) still on top of his game at age 67, whose latest job brings a giant windfall and a whole lot of trouble. Doctorow giddily weaves his tech expertise and strong opinions into a tight and twisty tale that will almost leave you thinking you know as much as he and his hero do. —Tom

New Paperback of the Week (June 5, 2023)

The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

I meant to read this when it came out last year in hardcover, I swear. It had great reviews and an even better premise—marine biologists of the near future discover that a deep-water octopus species has developed intelligence, language, and culture. This phenomenon obviously must be studied and, humans being what they are, exploited. The book got pushed to the bottom of my pile, though, until the paperback arrived and slapped me in the face with this spectacular cover. Such a fun novel for all kinds of readers: SF fans, thrill riders, nature lovers, science geeks, and you, probably. —James

Old Book of the Week

Edinburgh

by Alexander Chee

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 Night), and reading this book, with its almost impossibly elegant density of language and its searing emotional content, you can understand why his novels might take time to come into being. Beauty is in many ways its subject (it's the story, at least at first, of Fee, a boy who finds his voice as a choir singer), and also its style, but it also enacts a cycle of trauma, in which abuse, and the anguish it causes, is both repeated and escaped (though not without consequences), in a story that seems both intensely personal and thrillingly mythical. —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 22, 2023)

Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began

by Leah Hazard

An excellent companion to Rachel E. Gross's Vagina Obscura and Liz Stromquist's Fruit of Knowledge. With warm, witty writing, thorough research, and inclusive language, journalist-midwife-mother Leah Hazard illuminates the history and science of the uterus throughout its various stages of life. Each chapter's focus feels important, delivering fascinating insight into periods, pregnancy (labor, caesareans, loss), and health (menopause, hysterectomies, uterine transplants!, synthetic wombs). This book left me wanting more in a good way. —Anika

Old Book of the Week (May 22, 2023)

Ex-Wife

by Ursula Parrott

I’m discovering that, even more than historical fiction, I love reading stories written during the particular era in which they are set. The combination of the author’s first-hand knowledge and the reader’s hindsight makes for a richly layered literary treat. This best-seller was published mere months before the stock market crash of ‘29 and Parrott’s contemporaries no doubt commiserated with the characters’ disillusionment with a mostly theoretical sexual freedom. But as our heroine Patricia learns that endings are also beginnings, I found this unexpectedly moving novel more hopeful than wistful. I also realized that while the 1950s may have spawned “teenagers”, Flappers were the first women to experience a life stage that we now gratefully take for granted: young singlehood. So put on Rhapsody in Blue, mix yourself a gin fizz or four, and soak up the spirit of twenty-somethings in 1920’s NYC. —Liz

Old Book of the Week

Phinney by Post Book #101

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

by Ellen Ullman

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 feels dated at all—Ullman foresaw many things (the gig economy, crypto bros), but for the most part she wasn't trying to predict the future, just observing the strange new life she was at the heart of. And her writing has aged well too because of how close to the machine she was: not a literary outsider to the tech world but an engineer herself, hunting for that elusive, elemental satisfaction when the machine finally does what she had been asking it to. It's rare to have someone who loves working with machines so much who is able to tell us why. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week

Phinney by Post Kids Book #89

Sometimes It's Nice to Be Alone

by Amy Hest and Philip C. Stead

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 alone, but with friends like hers, who each give her the space to continue to be herself while enjoying their companionship, it also can be nice to have someone nearby who understands you. (Ages 1 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 8, 2023)

No Two Persons

by Erica Bauermeister

Erica Bauermeister was one of my favorite local authors even before I began working with her daughter-in-law at Phinney Books. The author of The Scent Keeper (one of my favorite novels ever) and House Lessons: Renovating a Life (a memoir that will strike a chord with anyone who's ever remodeled a home) now writes about how a book can deeply affect a disparate group of people in No Two Persons. A young woman spends years writing a novel that she HAD to write, because her soul demanded it. When she sends it out into the world, we see how it changes people in both subtle and profound ways. A literary assistant coping as a new mom, an actor trying to be more than a pretty face, a teenager, an artist, a bookseller, and a host of others interact with the book in different—and meaningful—ways, proving that no two people ever read the exact same book. This beautiful, heartbreaking, inspiring book will definitely be in my Top 10 this year. —Doree

New Book of the Week (May 8, 2023)

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder

by David Grann

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 the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z) and the horror-filled tale of the Wager, a British warship sent to attack Spanish treasure ships on the far side of South America. First typhus, then scurvy, then a shipwreck while rounding Cape Horn, which in turn led to murder, cannibalism, mutiny, and—with the help of multiple groups of indigenous locals—the ultimate return to England of a tiny fraction of those who began the voyage. From those survivors' contradictory accounts of misery, betrayal, and survival, Grann has woven a rousing story that doubles as cautionary tale of the folly of imperialism. —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 8, 2023)

The Story of a Poem

by Matthew Zapruder

How does a poem get made? If you are looking for a straightforward, IKEA set of instructions, you won't find them here. Zapruder's memoir is, in part, an account of drafting, and redrafting, and redrafting again a poem that becomes almost unrecognizable from its origins, but it is much more about the life in which that redrafting takes place, of a marriage, of his sobriety, of friendships and poetic influences, of our political time, and, especially, of parenting his young autistic son, whose relationship to language is so different—but equally intense—from his own. His poems and his memoir both have an almost disarming and intentional simplicity, as if he's trying to sift his words until he reaches the most basic, and honest, expression. —Tom

New Book of the Week (April 24, 2023)

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

by Claire Dederer

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," but perhaps that makes a book like this even more necessary. It's the opposite of the quick takes we're used to: she turns her subject over and over, looking at it, and herself, and ourselves—the people who make art and the people who love it—from every angle. It's the first book of hers that likely won't be shelved in "Memoirs," but it's still deeply (and, as always with her writing, appealingly) personal, and ultimately a moving examination of why we love art, and why we keep loving it. I'm tempted to call this the last word on the subject, but her passionately open-ended approach makes clear that there's no such thing. —Tom

New Book of the Week (April 24, 2023)

Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You

by Lucinda Williams

"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 backseat 'bout four five years / Lookin' out the window / Little bit of dirt mixed with tears"—you can't have one without the other. Williams does write about her rambling, art-filled childhood, as the daughter of a self-medicating mother and poet father, and also her decades of gigging before her slow-burning career finally took hold, as well as the series of smart-but-troubled men she was drawn to before she found a keeper there too, all with the kind of plain-spoken and tender sense of the past and her own self that will surely evoke her twangy blues chords in the background. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (April 24, 2023)

Phinney by Post Book #100

Sphere: The Form of a Motion

by A.R. Ammons

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 another, it's presented as a single sentence, and it's mostly (but not always) conceptual rather than personal. You might not find a doorway in right away, but when you do, you might get swept away, because the beauty of the book is, as the title hints, in its movement, its turning and swinging from big ideas to small ones, from the galatic to the microscopic, from high-falutin' language to earthy words. There's something welcoming but also breathtaking in the whole performance: as I've sometimes declared, if I have a religion (which I don't) it's this book. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (April 24, 2023)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #88

Meet Frank

by Mavis Lui

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! What should he do? Put on a disguise to fit in? But the kids he meets are happy to know him as his green, boxy self. Frank is adorable, and so are his new friends. (Age 0 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (April 10, 2023)

In Memoriam

by Alice Winn

In her assured debut, Winn accomplishes the mission of historical fiction with wide-ranging research, emotional depth, and a dash of derring-do. WWI buffs will recognize details and themes, all presented seamlessly and in powerful ways: the carnage of the Somme seen through the eyes of a German machine-gunner, reproduced newspaper lists of the dead that the reader scans just as anxious civilians did. The heart of the novel is the relationship between two students as one follows the other from boarding school to the trenches. Winn conjures the intensity of teenagers in love and war, yet she knows that—like the soldiers who had periodic rests away from the front—readers need to recuperate too. An interlude set in an officers’ prison camp provides respite by showcasing her humor and storytelling panache. I can’t think of a better introduction (especially for Gen Z—now the same age as the soldiers) to what was once called the War to End All Wars. And I can’t wait to see what Winn does next! —Liz

New Book of the Week (April 10, 2023)

White Cat, Black Dog

by Kelly Link

White Cat, Black Dog is Kelly Link's first book since winning a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2018, and it is well worth the wait. The seven short stories in this collection are loosely inspired by fairy tales such as "The Musicians of Bremen" (in "The White Road," a troupe of performers travel across a post-apocalyptic United States) and "Snow-White and Rose-Red" (a graduate student takes over a mysterious house-sitting gig deep in the Vermont woods in "Skinder's Veil"). Link truly is one of the most imaginative writers I've ever read, and White Cat, Black Dog already has a guaranteed spot on my top ten books of 2023 list. Saturated in wonder, these absorbing tales will keep you on the edge of your seat as you're reading and stay in your mind long after you've finished the book. —Haley

New Book of the Week (April 10, 2023)

The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape

by Katie Holten

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, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Macfarlane, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Richard Powers, Zadie Smith, and sixty more authors voicing their ideas poetically, scientifically, fictionally, and personally. What's even better is that the artist selecting and overseeing this collection, Katie Holten, has allowed them to express themselves in a format never seen before. She's created an alphabet of trees into which she's transliterated every piece—you read them in the sheltering shade of a unique paper forest. OK, maybe that's a touch hyperbolic, but still, it's a sublime effect, gorgeously executed. —James [from the Madison Books newsletter]

Old Book of the Week (April 10, 2023)

Portis: Collected Works

by Charles Portis

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 the tuxedo-like dust jackets and creamy, Bible-thin pages of the Library of America, and it is a sheer delight to me that this month that honor has been granted to the true American weirdo Charles Portis, whose entire output of five novels, plus some true and made-up ephemera, fits into this handsome, compact volume. Turning folks on to the rambling joys of Portis is one of the best parts of my job: I usually start them with The Dog of the South (probably the funniest book I own) and many converts return for more with a zealotry rivaling my own, but now you can just cut out all that back-and-forth and get everything all in one fancy package, and save a few bucks in the meantime. You will not be sorry. —Tom

New Book of the Week (March 27, 2023)

Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them

by Tove Danovich

Reading Under the Henfluence is a lot like hanging out with your most enthusiastic and knowledgeable chicken-loving friend. You're sure to be entertained and to learn something—even if, like me, you're the crazy chicken person in your own social circle—as Danovich takes you beyond her backyard to a hatchery in Iowa, a national poultry show in Ohio, and even to the island of Kauai, where the ubiquity and beauty of wild chickens reignited my own childlike love for the animals. With passionate reporting in every chapter, and compassion on every page, this book will make you appreciate how long-lived and deeply entrenched the human-chicken relationship is and compel you to consider what our responsibility is to these delightful and often misunderstood birds. —Anika

New Book of the Week (March 27, 2023)

Big Swiss

by Jen Beagin

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 a small New York town where everybody knows everyone, and she has fallen in love with one of the patients, whom she has nicknamed, not incorrectly, Big Swiss, by the sound of her voice—she might be more discreet, but she is anything but. Her blurting is your gain, especially when it turns out that Big Swiss, in person, has plenty of her own emotional chaos to spread, since it gives Jen Beagin the chance to spin out one comic riff after another, in a story that piles on plenty of embarrassing entanglements but also turns out to involve more tenderness—and more bees and mini donkeys—than you might expect. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (March 27, 2023)

A Rage in Harlem

by Chester Himes

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 tales beginning with this one. They've become known for the rough-justice Harlem detectives, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Jones, they feature, but in their first appearance the duo is almost overshadowed by a whole host of characters: con men and suckers, gangsters and sweethearts, and preachers and undertakers as wise to a buck as any of them. It's a blood-spattered and delightfully cynical tale, but somewhere in its noir heart you almost believe in its original title, For Love of Imabelle, a tribute to the savviest operator of them all. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (March 27, 2023)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #87

Our Fort

by Marie Dorléans, translated by Alyson Waters

"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 tall grass, they get caught in a surprising storm, and they end the day with cups of dandelion tea. It's a lush, slightly scary, and ultimately sweet story of friendship and the first fruits of independence. (Age 1 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (March 13, 2023)

Just a Mother

by Roy Jacobsen, translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw

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 of what it is to be alive," and referred to the small Norwegian island that is his main setting as "the bedrock on which our fiction section is built." The subtle understatement that gives his work such power is evident in the very title of his most recent novel, which again centers on Ingrid Barrøy, now the matriarch of an ever-changing clan. As she and her family cope with the aftermath of a world war and a shift from subsistence to prosperity, Jacobsen traces their progress with expert grace. Every development in their lives arrives so naturally that the reader feels a momentary shock, then a sense of satisfying inevitability. For us at Madison Books, this may be the publishing event of the year. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

New Paperback of the Week (March 13, 2023)

Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage

by Rachel E. Gross

“The history of medicine was filled with 'fathers'—the father of the C-section, the father of endocrinology, the father of ovariotomy—but, ironically, there were no mothers.”

Rachel E. Gross is basically Ms. Frizzle for adults when it comes to exploring female anatomy. Each chapter is a deep-dive into the science, history, and wonder of women's bodies that goes beyond reproductive function. Particularly interesting are the accounts of women scientists and their personal and professional experiences in a male-biased (and let's face it, phallus-obsessed) medical industry, from Dr. Helen O'Connell's discovery that the clitoris as we knew it prior to 1998 was merely the tip of the iceberg and Dr. Patty Brennan's enthusiasm for duck vaginas to Dr. Ghada Hatem's charitable clitoral reconstructions for victims of genital cutting and finally Dr. Marci Bowers' surgical artistry in creating neovaginas for fellow transwomen. Women's healthcare has historically been plagued by ignorance and disinterest, but Vagina Obscura gives me reassurance that we're moving toward a future where, quite the opposite from languishing in obscurity, the female body can finally be not only understood, but respected and celebrated. —Anika

Old Book of the Week (March 13, 2023)

Phinney by Post Book #99

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago

by Mike Royko

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 famous mayor by its most famous newspaperman is not the mega-bestseller it once was. But it still makes for great reading: think of it as a pint-sized companion to Robert Caro's massive The Power Broker, an analysis of how urban power was gathered and—more crucially—held, written while the Boss was still Boss. Like the best newspaper columns, it's a masterpiece of concision and invective, but Royko kept enough perspective on his subject that it remains fresh and relevant over fifty years later, as Chicago decides on its next mayor. —Tom

Kids' Book of the Week (March 13, 2023)

The Moth Keeper

by K. O'Neill

There are some graphic novels that use illustration simply to tell a story and others where every panel is a work of art. The Moth Keeper is definitely in the latter category, full of sumptuous oranges and purples to reflect the color palette of its desert setting. I'd highly recommend this new middle-grade graphic novel by Tea Dragon Society series author K. O'Neill to anyone who appreciates a well-built fantasy world and loves to pore over gorgeous illustrations. The book's main character, fox-like Anya, is proud to be the next Moth Keeper of her nocturnal desert village. Her important job is to care for the Moon-Moths that pollinate the village's magical night-blooming tree. But does she have what it takes? You can practically smell the night-blooming flowers wafting off the pages of this beautiful graphic novel. (Ages 8 to 12) —Haley

New Book of the Week (February 27, 2023)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

Usually when a book I haven't read takes off into the stratosphere of popularity, I just let it soar and move on to books that could use more care and feeding. But all the raves for Zevin's novel, which came out in July but only in recent months has become the most popular book in our store, tempted me to try it myself (via the audiobook, narrated, just right, baudiobooky Jennifer Kim and Julian Cihi). And, yup, I liked it too! As you may have heard, it's a story of two (really three) friends, whose partnership as "true collaborators" may or may not survive the many obstacles they (and Zevin) put in their own way, and it's also (fascinatingly and convincingly to a mostly non-gamer like me) a story that takes it for granted that video games are at least as creative and as meaningful a form for storytelling as the kind we sell here. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (February 27, 2023)

Giovanni's Room

by James Baldwin

Giovanni's room, it turns out, is tiny, squalid, and dark, far from the center of Paris, and without a phone. Our narrator, an American named David, spends just a few months there with his lover Giovanni, but it feels like a lifetime, and in a sense he'll remain there as long as he lives. Baldwin, as a writer and thinker, has been as present as ever in recent years, but It had been decades since I had read his fiction, and Giovanni's Room is beautiful and terrible, an expression of the difficulty of loving between two men in a particular time and place—Paris in the '50s—but also of the difficulty of loving at all. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (February 27, 2023)

Phinney by Post Book #98

The Assault

by Harry Mulisch, translated by Claire Nicolas White

The Assault is a war story, but the assault of the title is not, as I'd always imagined, a classic war-movie siege but rather a single incident, with many reverberations, that takes place far from any battlefield. It's also, as Liz first described it to me, a murder mystery, but our main character, Anton Steenwijk, twelve years old when the assault takes place, is the most reluctant detective since Oedipus, spending the following decades, which sweep by in leaps in this short, graceful, hauntingly lonely novel, avoiding the truths that eventually are placed in front of him like fate. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (February 27, 2023)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #86

What's Sweeter

by June Tate

The pleasures in Tate's debut picture could hardly be simpler—"a letter from a friend," "the soft spot behind a cat's ear"—and what's sweeter than celebrating life's small moments with your small people? But there's something about Tate's pacing, her charmingly imperfect illustrations, and some of her more oddball choices—"a turtle eating a salad"—that elevate her book from mere sugar into a bedtime favorite. (Ages 1 to 4) —Tom

Old Book of the Week (January 30, 2023)

Phinney by Post Book #97

Love's Work

by Gillian Rose

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 weight. Rose, a philosopher by profession, doesn't waste words, and among the things she doesn't tell you, until halfway through the book, is that she is dying. She's writing with urgency, but you sense that she wrote, and lived, with this clipped, exact intensity her whole life. There are sentences and paragraphs so packed with meaning I'm still sorting them out, but I never lose my faith in the clarity of her intention, or my joy at the force of her thinking, especially about those two central elements, love and death, that give life, and her "desperately mortal" life in particular, its greatest meaning. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (January 30, 2023)

Turtle Diary

by Russell Hoban

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, until this month, that was not actually the case. I expected a wry and quiet tale of two lonely people who decide to do something oddly momentous (free sea turtles from a London aquarium), and that is indeed what I got, but no summary and no second-hand report can do justice to the specific strangeness, the specific sadness, and the specific joy of their small adventure, which manages to be thrillingly life-changing and crushingly anticlimactic, all at once. Fans of the modest charms of recent Phinney favorite Leonard and Hungry Paul should pick this up pronto, but expect a few more prickles. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (January 30, 2023)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #85A

Animal Land Where There Are No People

by Sybil and Katharine Corbet

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. It makes a great Hole in the Park." (I hope so!) If not, I recommend you acquire this little book, a collaboration between Sybil Corbet (a four-year-old), who described the animals, and her mother, Katharine, who drew the pictures and whose age at the time is not reported. It was first published in 1897, when children, apparently, were as kookily creative as they are now and at least some mothers could match them, and it was recently reprinted by a great little outfit in Philadelphia named 50 Watts Books. (Age 1 and up) —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (January 30, 2023)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #85B

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 promising title of How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen. So why did it take me so long to track down a copy? I don't know, but when I finally did, it exceeded even my highest expectations, from the captain's preposterous (but somehow believable) sporting competitions to the spot-on anarchy of Quentin Blake's illustrations. And as for its sequel, A Near Thing for Captain Najork, which we also happily have in stock, all I will say is that it features a jam-powered frog as well as the arm-wrestling exploits of Tom's Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong Najork (she recently married the captain). (Ages 5 to infinity) —Tom

New Book of the Week (January 16, 2023)

Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory

by Janet Malcolm

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 fragmentary memoir instead, built around the memories (and the gaps) evoked by a series of everyday family photos. Famously unsparing and elegant in her profiles (like the deliciously ruthless In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer), she is much the same when writing about her family, Czech emigrés who barely escaped the Holocaust, and their mostly emigré friends. She's wittily rigorous in her assessment of their faults and charms, and of the limits of what she can recall. She reveals herself too, but only up to a point, cheekily withholding at times in a way she never would have in describing one of her reporting subjects. It's wonderful, and leaves you wanting more. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (January 16, 2023)

The Hopkins Manuscript

by R.C. Sherriff

I’m fine with all sorts of grim reading material but apocalypse stories are just TOO stressful. That said, if it’s set in an English village and written by the author of The Fortnight in September, I’ll give it a go! When Sherriff wrote this “cosy catastrophe” in 1939, with war looming, it reflected the anxieties of its readers. But an intriguing foreword (do not skip!) sets the groundwork for something more far-reaching. The literary device also defuses any unbearable dread. You know the worst has happened and can relax and enjoy what follows: the titular manuscript, in which Edward Hopkins records his experiences from the time he learns of the moon’s imminent collision with the earth until he can no longer hold a pen. He’s a bit of a pompous fool and an amateur poultry breeder, all of which provide regular doses of humor to take the edge off his eerie tale. But in the end, his apprehension of the Cataclysm and its repercussions transforms him into an endearing and enduring Everyman. It's the first book that I know will be in my top 10 books of 2023. —Liz

Newish Book of the Week (January 16, 2023)

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

by Kikuko Tsumura

Post-burnout, a 36-year-old woman moves back in with her parents and attempts to find employment that won't demand so much of her. With the help of an agency, she tries on five different menial jobs, from surveillance to copywriting the fun facts printed on cracker packages. In an optimistic twist on the trope of the soul-sucking day job, no matter how mundane the position, our protagonist can't help but become emotionally invested in her work ... and brush up against the familiar feeling of overwhelm, which leads her on to the next. As a member of the Burnout Generation, I found this book to be boring (in the best possible way), quietly funny and strange, and deeply relatable. —Anika

Newish Book of the Week (January 16, 2023)

The Book of Unconformities

by Hugh Raffles

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 solidity and stability of geology and geologic time. But even there he finds fissures and discontinuities, visiting a series of evocative locations from upper Manhattan to the remote Arctic and tracing the ways human history has, often tragically, built itself around the more patient, but still moving, history of stones. If you love the way writers like W.G. Sebald and Robert Macfarlane connect the personal to the strange vastness of our world, you will gladly follow Raffles on his journeys (which, unlike Sebald's, are thoroughly footnoted). —Tom

New Book of the Week (January 2, 2023)

Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan

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 wonderful book—he never left. Nearly 40 years her junior, this aspiring writer from a middle-class black family in Indiana became her student, protégé, friend, and confidant, and a part of the brainy, gossipy world that swirled around the New York Review of Books, while his pals his age, like Luc (later Lucy) Sante, Jim Jarmusch, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, were creating their own scene downtown. His memoir is a tender and sharply observed tribute to Hardwick's fierce brilliance and a stylish journal of his messy and ambitious young life as a reader and writer. It's hard to imagine a book better engineered to my particular obsessions than this one, but its beauty and wisdom are also what made it my favorite book of the year. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (January 2, 2023)

Phinney by Post Book #95

Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay

by William W. Warner

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 graceful and curious book about ingenuity, both of the watermen of the Chesapeake Bay (they are nearly all men in his telling), who have to divine the yearly and daily patterns of the bay to draw a living out of the water, and of their quarry: the blue crab, which occupies the same iconic position in that estuary as the salmon does in ours. And like the salmon, the crab, and the industry built around it, has been in decline, but Warner wrote in a time of relative plenitude, which reads now as a warning, and an expression of lost joy. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (January 2, 2023)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #84

Luminous: Living Things That Light Up the Night

by Julia Kuo

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 between fact and imagination with her, well, luminous illustrations and her two strands of text, one simple and evocative and suitable for any age and one denser with data about her undersea subjects, perfect for older, info-hungry kids. (Ages 1 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 14, 2022)

Body Grammar

by Jules Ohman

Sometimes, though rarely, I will read a book and feel like I'm watching a movie as I read. Reflecting on this beautiful funny sweet melancholy moving book, I experienced something rarer still: feeling like the story I read was a life I got to live, among characters who felt like real people. Lou had planned to stay in Portland post-graduation, but after a freak accident that was "the worst thing that's ever happened to her" she changes her mind, finally giving into modeling recruiters who have been hounding her for years. While she's catapulted into this new, glittering career and world—which gave me satisfying America's Next Top Model vibes—she's reckoning with questions of who she is and what she wants, the girl and friends she left behind, and the trauma that put her on her current path. —Anika

New Book of the Week (November 14, 2022)

The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City

by Nicholas Dawidoff

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 bestsellers on baseball, country music, and his own family, brings an understanding of the forces that have made this story familiar but, most valuably, eight years of patient reporting that make this story—of the murder of a 70-year-old black man, who came to this northern city in the Great Migration, and the coerced confession of a teenager who spent nine years in prison before being exonerated—personal and movingly particular. It's a tale of injustice far more than justice, and of a young man who finds himself in prison, and who has to find himself again outside of it. It's a book dense with the regrets and the small victories of lives forged in conditions of fleeting opportunity and daily violence. —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 14, 2022)

Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius

by Nick Hornby

As a teenager in the ’80s, the music—the very existence—of Prince had a profound effect on me. Purple Rain (the movie, as well as the album) totally blew my mind. Seeing him in concert in 1985 was a highlight of my life (as was visiting his home and studio Paisley Park in Minnesota this past summer). So when a preview copy of this slim volume by Nick Hornby came into the store, I snatched it up before anybody else could. Hornby—a super fan of both Prince and Charles Dickens—makes some convincing arguments about parallels between the two men, despite the fact they weren’t alive at the same time. Hornby delves into details of their early lives, relationships with women, ambitions, and how they approached the business end of their work. It’s a fun book that made me want to listen to Prince’s music on repeat—and possibly pick up a copy of Oliver Twist. —Doree

New Paperback of the Week (November 14, 2022)

The Complete Eightball 1-18

by Daniel Clowes

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!—find a new one in the rack, for $2 or $3 of my hard-earned grad-student stipend. Three decades later (!), it's as glorious as ever, full of creepy nightmares, bitter invective, grotesque weirdos, and possibly the greatest lettering in the history of human communication. Ghost World, first serialized here, is justifiably recognized as Clowes's masterpiece, but seeing it in its original setting, alongside one-off gags, comics self-satire, and other nearly-as-good long-form tales, makes it even more miraculous. This might be my desert-island book, if it didn't make me feel so bad about people that I'd never want to return to society. —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 31, 2022)

Lonely Castle in the Mirror

by Mizuki Tsujimura, translated by Philip Gabriel

I picked up Lonely Castle in the Mirror knowing nothing beyond the back-cover copy, and I think that's the best way to approach this puzzle of a fantasy novel. Thirteen-year-old Kokoro spends her days alone in her room, too traumatized to return to junior high after a bad experience with the other students. When her mirror lights up one day, she discovers it's a portal to a mysterious castle. Six other junior high students have also been called to the castle and assigned a quest: to find the key to a room that will grant the finder one wish. This very special book twists and turns and had pierced me through the heart by the end. If you want to cry your eyes out (in a good way), read this book! Fans of The House in the Cerulean Sea will find similar themes of connection and friendship here. While we have Lonely Castle in the Mirror shelved in our adult fantasy/sci-fi section in the store, I'd also recommend it for young adult and even middle grade readers. —Haley

New Book of the Week (October 31, 2022)

The Hero of This Book

by Elizabeth McCracken

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 it 99% is—visits London, a city she had recently visited with her late mother, and walks around by herself and remembers—is reminded of—her marvelous, stubborn, private, outgoing, tiny, generous, misshapen, funny, opinionated, brilliant mother. It's a book of adjectives more than story, and as if in tribute to its hero, just about every sentence in the book is odd and beautiful. And if, when you get to the end of the book, you don't quite know what happened, do what I'm doing (with even more pleasure than the first time): read it again. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (October 31, 2022)

Phinney by Post Book #94

Young Man with a Horn

by Dorothy Baker

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 music—a white boy, specifically, who finds himself in the black musical tradition of jazz, though the book manages to avoid many of the clichés such stories have made familiar. Like Beth Harmon on the chessboard in Walter Tevis's The Queen's Gambit, Rick Martin is an orphan driven to perfect a talent that seems to fall out of the sky, and like Tevis, Baker builds her story, and Martin's half-inarticulate interior life, from the simplest of language. It's a moving and spacious portrait of passionate (and destructive) creativity, and of friendship too, between RIck and his other true love: his fellow players. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (October 31, 2022)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #82

Farmhouse

by Sophie Blackall

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—wallpaper, old dresses—she found in the ruins, research into the family that had lived there for generations, and her own imagination, she has created a portrait of a place, and a family, over time that feels like an immediate classic. (Age 1 and up) —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 17, 2022)

Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers

by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green

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 double-edged claim to fame—as the daughter of the composer of big hit after big hit, Richard Rodgers. But after reading Shy, you'll know her as the most entertainingly dishy memoirist you can imagine. From an early age she knew everybody, from (of course) Oscar ("Ockie") Hammerstein to Mae West to her longtime boss Leonard Bernstein to her longtime best pal Stephen Sondheim, and she tells you exactly what she thought about each one of them—and, equally hilariously and unsparingly, about herself as well. ("Reader, I slept with him," is a frequent refrain.) And along with the delicious dish, you get a fascinating portrait of a woman building a creative career and constructing a life in the shadow, and the gilded cage, of fame. —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 17, 2022)

Singer Distance

by Ethan Chatagnier

Singer Distance by Ethan Chatagnier is not a sci-fi novel, despite the presence of crop circles and the fact that scientists of Earth have been communicating with Mars for nearly a century. Instead, this is a novel about loneliness, choices, and love (of people, but mainly of math). When four MIT grad students believe that one of them has finally solved the most recent (yet three-decades-old) mathematical proof that beings on Mars carved into the red planet’s surface, they embark on an epic road trip to Arizona to carve their answer into the Earth. When Mars answers, one of the four—brilliant mathematician Crystal Singer—disappears, driven by her obsession to understand Mars’s latest proof. Her boyfriend struggles to understand her state of mind and the choices she made. This beautifully written debut novel is a love letter to science and exploration, and will change the way you look at the stars—and possibly those you love. —Doree

New Book of the Week (October 17, 2022)

A Career in Books

by Kate Gavino

A Career in Books is a real treat: a substantial graphic novel full of wisdom, heart, and humor. The story centers on three best friends, fresh out of college and living together in New York. Each roommate is struggling with a different aspect of navigating the publishing industry as a young Asian American woman. Nina is the go-getter editorial assistant at a large publishing house, whose ambitions often exceed the reality of an entry-level position. Silvia works for a privately funded one-woman publisher, but dreams of writing her own book. Meanwhile, music-loving Shirin has a position at a university press, but isn’t even sure if working in publishing is what she wants to do. Meeting their neighbor, a nonagenarian Booker Prize–winning author whose books have mostly gone out of print, changes the course of each woman’s life. Author Kate Gavino has drawn on her own experience working as an editorial assistant to fully flesh out this story and its characters. —Haley

Old Book of the Week (October 17, 2022)

Shadows on the Rock

by Willa Cather

This work of historical fiction, set in Quebec in 1697-98, is a quiet charmer. By that time, the early, renowned explorers, fur traders, and missionaries were passing away and their deeds spun into the lore of the 100-years-young French colony. Instead, the story focuses on the town apothecary and his young daughter, arrived from Paris eight years earlier. Their home is an oasis of European comfort but the highlights of their year—a moonlit picnic with a sea captain’s talking parrot and unpacking a crèche from across the ocean—reflect both the New and Old Worlds. The family’s experience echoes that of Cather’s other pioneers, and more faintly, today’s immigrants. While reading, I felt like we’ve almost come full circle: the next chapter is when we resettle to other planets or galaxies! The novel opens and closes in October, and painterly renderings of autumn at that latitude—the golden foliage, gray rock, and silver mist—bookend a feel-good yet thoughtful tale that’s perfect as winter closes in. —Liz

New Book of the Week (October 3, 2022)

The English Understand Wool

by Helen DeWitt

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, the most brilliant novelist going right now, and she puts all of her talents—for inhabiting people whose genius doesn't fit the world, for finding just the right word (no matter the language), and for inserting her stiletto into the fattiest parts of corporate culture—to work in this marvelously constructed story of a young woman raised to certain standards, which she finds useful when her life takes a sudden turn. It's one of the first set of New DIrections' yummy new line of Storybooks—slim volumes to be read in one sitting—and it's been flying from hand to hand among our staff and in my family ever since we got it. It's that kind of book. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (October 3, 2022)

Phinney by Post Book #94

A Simple Story: The Last Malambo

by Leila Guerriero

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 plainest of language, of the National Malambo Competition in the small Argentinian town of Laborde, and of one charismatic competitor, Rodolfo González Alcántara. Roldolfo has little to say—he lets his dancing, which expresses a thrilling passion while abiding by the strict rules of the Malabo, speak for him—and Guerriero follows his lead, practicing an austere style that, through its very restraint, somehow evokes the furious yearning of her subject. —Tom

Paperback of the Week (October 3, 2022)

Five Decembers

by James Kestrel

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 throwback of sorts too, a stripped-down, hard-boiled World War II tale, but with a bit more heart than the coldest tales of Hammett and Cain. Joe McGrady is a Honolulu cop, and the first December of the story is 1941, so you might think you know where the story is going, but his war years are spent on a goose chase of his own, leading him into a lonely obsession that, if you're like me, you'll spend a few late nights staying up to get to the thrilling end of. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (October 3, 2022)

Good Night, Little Bookstore

by Amy Cherrix and E.B. Goodale

Book lovers everywhere will adore this sweet picture book in the rhyming style of Goodnight Moon. We travel around a cozy bookstore saying goodnight to the bookstore cat, customers' forgotten items, and other familiar bookshop sights. Eagle-eyed readers will enjoy scanning the shelves for clever covers based on real books. Charming illustrations and text would make this a lovely gift for any child or bookish adult. (Age 1 and up) —Haley

New Book of the Week (September 19, 2022)

So Happy for You

by Celia Laskey

As a newlywed who showed a screening of the horror comedy Ready or Not at my wedding reception, I couldn't read this one fast enough. Set in a dystopian near future where the wedding industrial complex has gotten even more out of control thanks to government involvement, the pressure for women to marry and stay married has skyrocketed. To this end, wedding charms have been gaining in popularity, from sage and garlic bouquets and 100-foot-long bridal trains to stranger and much more dubious options. In So Happy for You, Robin, a 34-year-old lesbian, reluctantly becomes maid of honor to marriage-obsessed Ellie, and it's no surprise that by the time the wedding weekend finally arrives Robin's loud opinions and lack of filter are clashing with Ellie's increasing desperation for everything to go her way. Ridiculous and darkly funny, it was wild to see what lengths these two were willing to go to. —Anika

Old Book of the Week (September 19, 2022)

O Caledonia

by Elspeth Barker

While reading O Caledonia, I thought an apt subtitle would be: Portrait of the Spinster as a Young Girl, even though our protagonist is found murdered—at age 16—on the first page. Janet definitely has the quirks and qualities which—in her upper-class, 1950s milieu—brand her as a potential spinster. But it was more that I was reminded of some British women who often wrote about that demographic so cruelly expanded by WW1. Barker’s intelligence has the micro/macroscopic focus of Sylvia Townsend Warner—Janet could have been her generation’s Lolly Willowes! And her hilarious grasp of human peculiararity reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor. There’s even a whiff of Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm in the ramshackle family castle and its weirdest residents. Despite these echoes, the book is as singularly bewitching as its heroine. And don’t fear that its opening portends mystery and tragedy. Just as Janet refuses to conform, her story breaks all bonds of literary expectation. —Liz

Kids Book of the Week (September 19, 2022)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #81

The Twins' Blanket

by Hyewon Yum

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 girls now, but I'm not sure that many readers know about it (except for twins, perhaps). I think it's a classic—for anyone, twins or not—about the frustration and love with the one you're closest to. (Age 1 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (August 15, 2022)

The Last White Man

by Mohsin Hamid

“One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.”

Kafkaesque from its opening line, Hamid's novel feels simultaneously fantastical and familiar. In this world, everyone's white skin turns to dark, inevitably, though not all at once, and people react accordingly: confusion, denial, anxiety, conspiracy, violence. This beautiful book feels incredibly timely, with parallels to pandemic life and our nation's continued reckoning with the injustices of systemic racism. Through Anders and Oona, Hamid shows us, intimately, and with rather hypnotic prose, how people are transformed by experience, made different by context, not only as they transition from white to black but as their lives change in other, perhaps more predictable, ways. —Anika

New Book of the Week (August 15, 2022)

Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

Think: Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, but sapphic and romantic. Leah returns home to her wife, Miri, from a deep-sea research mission that was only supposed to last three weeks. But after six agonizing months of absence, the Leah who has returned is as mysterious to Miri as the circumstances that kept her away. Foreboding and beautifully written, answers are divulged like slow drips of water from a leaking faucet. —Anika

Old Book of the Week (August 15, 2022)

Winter Love

by Han Suyin

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, telling, with exquisite precision, the story of a love affair between two medical students in wartime London. Mara, already married, is glamorous amid the drab rationing; Bettina, known as "Red," the narrator, is "mousy" by her own description, but driven and attractive in her own way. The writing is breathtaking in its exactness and in its sudden revelations of beauty and doom, in an affair brutally corralled not only by the social enforcement of who could love each other, but by one character's inability to love at all. —Tom

[My enjoyment of the audiobook—available from our partners at Libro.fm—was heightened by the equally precise narration by Lucy Scholes, who, wonderfully, is also the editor at McNally Editions who has done so much to bring neglected women writers back into print.]

Kids Book of the Week (August 15, 2022)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #80

What Feelings Do When No One's Looking

by Tina Oziewicz, illustrated by Aleksandra Zajac, translated by Jennifer Croft

"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 Zajac's drawings and Tina Oziewicz's concise and evocative descriptions—"Calm pets a dog," "Nostalgia sniffs a scarf"—you and your small readers will likely recognize them in yourself and all around you. (Ages 1 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (August 1, 2022)

Ma and Me: A Memoir

by Putsata Reang

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 they settled in Oregon, Put became the most restless of her children, eventually traveling the world as a journalist (at the Seattle Times among many other places) and finally marrying an American woman, which her mother couldn't bear. Reang's memoir is a compelling story, told with both humor and pain, of their bond and their break, of the duty to family and heritage that Reang often embraces at the same time that she claims her independence, and of two fiercely loving and tireless women carrying the weight of tradition and trauma. —Tom

New Book of the Week (August 1, 2022)

Homesickness

by Colin Barrett

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 something that Barrett is especially good at. His stories, set mostly in County Mayo, a place of towns and farms where everybody, for better or worse, knows each other, are stories to be sure, with.a twist here and an epiphany there, but what makes them so wonderful is everything in between: the banter, the indirection, the texture of daily life, the weary knowingness of people so familiar to each other that they might have stopped paying attention to who they really are. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (August 1, 2022)

Phinney by Post Book #91

Proud Shoes

by Pauli Murray

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 as an Episcopal priest. But Proud Shoes, written in the '50s when barriers to her race and gender made it hard, despite her sparkling qualifications, to earn a living, is the story of the people that came before her, two in particular: her grandfather, who grew up in a free-black community near Philadelphia but chose to settle in the South after fighting for the Union, and her grandmother, the half-acknowledged daughter of a white man and a woman enslaved by his family. It's a complex, and indeed proud, legacy, told equally with the sly wit of family gossip and the earnestness of her grandfather's idealism. It's a great American story. —Tom

New Book of the Week (July 18, 2022)

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

by Ed Yong

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 encyclopedia of such wonders, altering and expanding our understanding of the world around us by showing it through the eyes, ears, noses, and many far stranger instruments of dozens of the animals we share the planet with. From the hundred primitive eyes a scallop uses to scan its surroundings, to the star-nosed mole's fingerlike appendage, to the bumblebees that detect not only ultraviolet markings on flowers invisible to us but also their electrical fields, Yong (who somehow wrote this book while also being the Atlantic's Pulitzer-winning COVID correspondent) does indeed make the world seem immense, full of patterns and languages we can't sense, and which our noisy, bright civilization often unwittingly obliterates. Your eyes (and ears and nose, etc.) will widen in appreciation on every page. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (July 18, 2022)

The Wall

by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Shaun Whiteside

I made the mistake of beginning The Wall on the first day of a trip, and throughout the week my mind was constantly drawn back to thinking about the book and wondering what was going to happen next. On a visit to a cabin in Austria, our protagonist wakes to find an unbreakable invisible wall separating her from the town and countryside beyond. This may sound like a sci-fi plot, but the wall is merely a device in a quiet tale of isolation and survival. If she wants to live, the narrator will have to push her strength and wits to the limits. Though originally written in 1963 (and translated from German), The Wall feels timeless. This is a book that I will keep turning over in my head for a long time and sharing with anyone looking for a recommendation. —Haley

Kids Book of the Week (July 18, 2022)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #79

Little Witch Hazel: A Year in the Forest

by Phoebe Wahl

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 her a picture-book star, and they are a perfect match for her nurturing, inclusive, weird, and funny tales, which, in this case, might be what you'd get if you transplanted Frog and Toad to a Northwest forest commune. (Age 2 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week (July 4, 2022)

Also a Poet

by Ada Calhoun

This is my favorite kind of non-fiction book—a failure. Which is to say that it isn't a biography of the influential mid-century poet Frank O'Hara, although it's full of biographical detail and wise analysis of his life and work. It also doesn't offer definitive answers about the fraught relationship between distant fathers and their underappreciated offspring, although it provides a perfect example in the form of the uneasy rapport between art critic Peter Schjeldahl and his dutiful, accomplished daughter, Ada Calhoun. It does succeed brilliantly at bringing these elements together, as the author relates her attempts to resuscitate the project her father abandoned almost fifty years ago. It sent me back to O'Hara's Lunch Poems, and to Schjeldahl's collection Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, and it made me glad that failures of one kind can be triumphs on other terms. Brava, Ada. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

New-ish Book of the Week (July 4, 2022)

Sandfuture

by Justin Beal

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 of the Seattle-born architect Minoru Yamasaki, known to us as the designer of what is now the Pacific Science Center but best-known to the world for two since-destroyed structures: the Pruitt-Igoe public housing in St. Louis and the World Trade Center. Around and through Yamasaki's courageous, tireless, sometimes tragic life, Beal—an artist and, by the evidence of this first book, a writer—threads erudite but approachable meditations on architectural failure and success, on the flooding of Hurricane Sandy, on his wife's migraines, on the health of cities and buildings, and more. My brain was working, happily, on every page. —Tom

New-ish Book of the Week (July 4, 2022)

Men Who Feed Pigeons

by Selima Hill

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 about particular men, or kinds of men, some loved, some hated or feared, many both. They are delightfully direct, sometimes disturbing, and often disarmingly hilarious, in a way I can only compare to Dorothy Parker, or maybe Phyllis Diller. To give you an idea, here's an entire poem, called "My Life as a Pair of Crocs": "I try to look both earnest and adorable / like surgeons' crocs before they're sprayed with blood." I like these poems a lot. —Tom

New Book of the Week (June 20, 2022)

Diary of a Film

by Niven Govinden

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, places his narrative in the uneasy but alluring conversational space between people, but what his story (built from the unpromising bones of a master filmmaker presenting his latest picture at a European festival) reminds me most of, in its generosity, its easy-going, wide-ranging intellect, and its savvy and immersive celebration of creative work, is The Conversations, the wonderful dialogue between the writer Michael Ondaatje and the film editor Walter Murch. I was swept away by this brilliant and humane little book—it's my favorite novel of the year so far. —Tom

New Paperback of the Week (June 20, 2022)

The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

Told from dual perspectives—from Benny and from "the Book" itself—young Benny's story begins when his father is killed in a senseless accident and he begins hearing the voices of inanimate objects. Much to his dismay, his mother, Annabelle, finds comfort in collecting random items to excess, and the situation soon spirals out of control. However, Benny takes refuge in the library, where things are mostly quiet. Ozeki's latest novel is a compassionate exploration of mental health and our attachment to things; her authorial voice is wise and warm, and like a good meditation, it invites you to slow down and pay attention. This book made me feel validated as a book hoarder and observer of the universe. —Anika

Old Book of the Week (June 20, 2022)

Phinney by Post Book #90

Aranyak: Of the Forest

by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay

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 eyes Melville’s ironic masterpiece “Benito Cereno” is told. And his story, of being sent from the metropolis of Calcutta to manage the remote, forested estates of a friend's family, is a fairly shapeless one, built on anecdotes rather than a traditional narrative. But those wide eyes make for a compelling story nevertheless, as he recalls, with a melancholy hunger, the natural beauty of the jungle and the people who wrest an unfathomably meager living out of it, even as he fulfills his assignment to clear the forests for development and thereby destroy the things he has come to love. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (June 20, 2022)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #78

Lizzy and the Cloud

by the Fan Brothers

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 the room they need, even when they grow. The last turns out to be the hardest of all for Lizzy in this lovely and poignant story about taking care and letting go, illustrated with all the exquisite beauty we've come to expect from Terry and Eric Fan. (Ages 2 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week (June 6, 2022)

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?

by Seamas O'Reilly

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, against the backdrop of the violent Troubles in their Northern Irish city of Derry, also manages to be about dinosaurs, his goofy and loving father, the largest and best-documented home-taped VHS archive in the known universe, and growing up the ninth of eleven children in an Ireland where families didn't get that large any more. Only after finishing did I realize that O'Reilly first found fame with his viral Twitter thread about meeting the President of Ireland while on ketamine, which, in its nerdy embrace of life's absurd embarrassments, turned out to be an excellent preview of how warm, charming, and, yes, laugh-out-loud funny his first book would become. —Tom (download the audiobook from our partners at Libro.fm)

New Book of the Week (June 6, 2022)

The Men

by Sandra Newman

In 2019, Sandra Newman published a novel, The Heavens, that landed on my year's best list, a book that "asks profound questions about what kind of world we want to live in and what lengths we'll go to change it." She's asking those questions again, with more insistence, in The Men, which is a virtual lock for this year's best list. It posits an inexplicable disaster in which all men (everyone with a Y chromosome, that is) vanish overnight, not a wholly original trope, but one that Newman handles expertly—she has anticipated and resolved with satisfaction whatever doubts one may have about that premise. Her dystopia is as sharply described and gripping as classics by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Emily St. John Mandel, but it advances beyond those works before all is said and done, taking a turn into literary territory that feels altogether new. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

Old Book of the Week (June 6, 2022)

Annihilation

by Jeff VanderMeer

VanderMeer has created such an atmospheric and foreboding landscape in Area X, and I found myself drawn deeper and deeper into it by the beauty and mystery there. Instead of seizing up with dread or shouting at our protagonist, the biologist of the twelfth expedition, to stop, turn around, and go back when encountering the strange and horrifying, I was eager to stay on her heels and inside of her head. I love a good slow burn and unreliable narrator, particularly when I can tell that even if I don't know exactly what's going on—and especially if the protagonist doesn't—I'm certain the author does. While I'm more than satisfied with Annihilation as a standalone novel, I'm excited to dive into the next installment, to venture further into Area X and embrace more of what I don't and can't know. —Anika

Young Adult Book of the Week (June 6, 2022)

Exactly Where You Need to Be

by Amelia Diane Coombs

Sometimes I pick up a book and I just know we're going to get along. This sweet YA novel ticked so many of my boxes. Positive mental health rep? Check. A post-graduation road trip with surprising diversions along the way? Check. A supportive best-friendship founded on shared love for a murder podcast? Check and check. There's also a swoony friends-to-lovers romance. But what I loved most about this big-hearted, adventurous summer romp was the powerful message at its core: that having OCD like Florie (or anxiety like me!) doesn't mean you have to live a small, sheltered life. Venturing outside of your comfort zone is how you grow. —Anika

New Book of the Week (May 23, 2022)

This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

I was already a fan of Emma Straub’s fiction before I picked up This Time Tomorrow, but now I’m a superfan. This time-travel fantasy was pitch perfect: sweet without being cloying, sad without being a tear-jerker, detailed without being too detailed. My words don’t do the book justice. But know that this book is a homage to living out your high school fantasies, a love letter to the '90s in New York City, and a deep dive into a stellar father-daughter relationship. As soon as I finished, I loaned this novel to a friend, who handed it back to me a week later and said, “You were right, this was perfect.” —Nancy

Old Book of the Week (May 23, 2022)

Fruit of Knowledge

by Liv Strömquist, translated by Melissa Bowers

This punchy work of graphic nonfiction reads like the best of stand-up comedy in its presentation of the feminist history of "the female genitalia." It highlights the absurd and infuriating; for instance, the actual size of the clitoris wasn't discovered until 1998! Filled with delightful illustrations and fun facts (that are admittedly not always super fun in content but always entertaining in delivery), this book is every bit as humorous as it is educational. I learned so much about how religion, science, and language have shaped our understanding of sex and gender and bodies—and not all of it is infuriating! A good bit is actually encouraging and empowering. Have you ever heard of "menstruation envy"? Neither had I! Everyone should read this. —Anika

Old Book of the Week (May 23, 2022)

Phinney by Post Book #89

Canada Made Me

by Norman Levine

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 to find a publisher there. And you can see why: Levine has no time for postwar boosterism and, perennially short of money himself, is drawn to failures, to the rough country's shabby boardinghouses and sour beer halls, with a plain-spoken spirit of observation that might remind you of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. A book like this stands or falls on what it sees, and for that quality alone I found it a thrilling page-turner. I kept wanting to see what he would see next. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (May 23, 2022)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #77

Tiny Cedric

by Sally Lloyd-Jones and Rowboat Watkins

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 that what starts out as a fable about petulant tyranny turns into a tale of chaotic adorableness, as even this grumpy despot learns to love. Your littlest readers will likely enjoy the chaos, as well as the sweet ending. (Ages 2 to 5) —Tom

Old Book of the Week (May 9, 2022)

The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service

by Laura Kaplan

Engaging and informative from the first page, The Story of Jane details the experiences of many women involved with Chicago's underground abortion service in the years leading up to Roe v. Wade. These accounts are as inspiring as they are cautionary, full of hard work and determination as well as great personal and legal risk. This book feels woefully relevant at present, with the flaws in America's healthcare system exposed and stretched by the pandemic and the Supreme Court's recently leaked abortion opinion draft. The members of Jane went beyond the necessity of providing referrals and abortions; they counseled the women who sought services, empowering and educating them so that they could make the most informed decisions about their own bodies. Yet, it surprised me when Jane didn't consider Roe vs. Wade to be an unequivocal victory; I hadn't realized the law's limitations: the way it fails to center women, and uterus-having persons, as Jane envisioned by continuing to focus on the rights of physicians, viewing patients as objects rather than subjects of medical treatment. Absolutely eye-opening. —Anika

New Book of the Week (May 9, 2022)

Vladimir

by Julia May Jonas

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. As our story begins, our narrator, self-described as an "oldish white woman in her late fifties," has the title character, a hot young English department hire with a hot new novel and an even younger wife, tied up and asleep in a chair, where she can admire his beauty undisturbed. From there, Jonas spins out a tale of campus adultery that is both familiar and slyly subversive, thoroughly witty and almost as cheeky as its cover and opening promise. —Tom

New Book of the Week (May 9, 2022)

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century

by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken

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 spaceship on a planet that isn't Earth. The book is built of short, oblique statements made by the ship's crew—some human, some humanoid—and from them you can build the bones of a story about the increasingly disastrous events that unfold there, but what is far more striking is the strange tenderness they evoke, on both sides of the human/nonhuman divide. When I came to the last statement I turned back to the beginning and read them again, in part out of the (pleasurable) mystery their incompleteness evokes, in part to experience again the odd and delicate emotions they stir up. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (May 9, 2022)

The Midwich Cuckoos

by John Wyndham

I tend to avoid sci-fi, but when I heard that John Wyndham—a grandparent of the genre—had written a novel considered an example of “cozy catastrophe,” well, resistance was futile. Along with the English village setting, the characters, dialogue, and sensibility of The Midwich Cuckoos definitely qualify as cozy, but the author referred to his work as “logical fantasy.“ It’s less about plot (which is spare but well-built) than the questions it raises. Published in 1957, the story evokes the preoccupations of a community just freed from the threat of Fascism, and now deep in the Cold War. Alas, the conundrums posed are ones western democracies are still pondering. Modern Library has just reissued The Midwich Cuckoos and four other Wyndham novels (all with creepy-cool covers and intros by contemporary writers) and I can’t wait to read more of these brainy entertainments. —Liz

New Book of the Week (April 25, 2022)

Spear

by Nicola Griffith

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 hold us until the main course arrives. Set a world much like Hild but embracing the magic of the Arthurian legends that grew from the same era, Spear is a lively and delightfully queer tale of love, adventure, and swordplay that uses the mythic traditions of Camelot, as well as the everyday details of life in medieval Britain, to imagine a young woman full of life and fire. —Tom

New Book of the Week (April 25, 2022)

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss

by Amy Bloom

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 so legally, as he and Bloom learned, remains nearly impossible in America in his situation, but In Love is the story of how they were able to, a how-to as well as an elegy written with the wit, honesty, and character insight readers will know from Bloom's brilliant fiction. Bloom writes like a messier (she would say more Jewish) Ann Patchett, with a voice that brings her full humor and worldly competence to bear on a dilemma that confounds (but ultimately affirms) both qualities. It's a beautiful and necessary little book. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (April 25, 2022)

Phinney by Post Book #88

They

by Kay Dick

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 certainly full of light and beauty and friendship. Largely unnoticed when it came out in 1977 and largely forgotten since (before its recent reissue by the new McNally Editions), Dick's slim novel unfolds as a series of episodes in which the unnamed and ungendered narrator (to whom the title applies as it does to the anonymous mobs) visits artistic friends as they evade, with varying success, the encroaching threats. The writing is sharp and evocative; the mood is both heartening and horrifying. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (April 25, 2022)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #76

Emile and the Field

by Kevin Young and Chioma Ebinama

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 director of the Smithsonian's African American museum, sure is. In his debut for kids he captures the lonely wonder of a curious child in nature with a spare, slyly rhythmic beauty that, along with Ebinama's warmly pensive watercolors, make his Emile a sweet successor to Ezra Jack Keats's Peter, both of them making their angels in the snow. (Age 2 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (April 11, 2022)

Lessons in Chemistry

by Bonnie Garmus

Elizabeth Zott is my new hero. As a scientist in the 1960s, she has to contend with ingrained sexism not just in the world in general, but especially in the world of science, where her male colleagues routinely ask for her input yet never give her credit. Those same men relentlessly comment on her looks (yes, Zott rhymes with hot); then they fire her for being unmarried and pregnant. So, what does she do? She somehow stumbles into hosting a daytime cooking show on a local TV station. But she doesn’t pander to her audience of housewives. Oh, no. Instead, she teaches them science (using only the scientific words for, say, salt and vinegar, and explaining how different types of chemical bonds work in baking). And along the way, she ushers in a nationwide revolution of women standing up for themselves and their brains and their future. Throw in intense personal loss, a dog that understands and responds to hundreds of words (that dog deserves his own book, so I’m crossing my fingers for a sequel!), and a daughter who is beyond precocious, and you get a novel that is smart, funny, heartbreaking, maddening, and inspiring. And one that I just can’t stop thinking about. In fact, it’s my favorite novel from the past year. —Doree

New Book of the Week (April 11, 2022)

Writer in a Life Vest: Essays from the Salish Sea

by Iris Graville

From 2018-2019 Iris Graville served as the first writer-in-residence aboard the Washington State Ferries, spending a couple days a week writing on the route that travels between Lopez, Orcas, Shaw, and San Juan islands. The subtitle for her book Writer in a Life Vest: Essays from the Salish Sea is quite literal, as much of the book was either written on the water or inspired by Graville's residency. These entries span the gamut of subject matters, from the story of a ukulele jam aboard the ferry to poetry to an imaginary interview with Rachel Carson and Greta Thunberg. Graville's main focus is the health of the Salish Sea's ecosystem, including the plight of the orcas (I particularly enjoyed "O is for Orca: An Alphabetical Excursion through Orca Whale Characteristics"). Writer in a Life Vest is a love letter to the beautiful place we call home. —Haley

New Book of the Week (April 11, 2022)

Eyes of the Rigel

by Roy Jacobsen

Those of you (and there are many) who've encountered the previous volumes of the Barrøy Chronicles, The Unseen or White Shadow, will not need me to say anything about this new book other than It's here! Come buy it and read it! For those of you who aren't yet familiar with Roy Jacobsen's stories of the indefatigable Ingrid Barrøy and her clan: They're here! Come buy them and read them! Set during the middle decades of the 20th century and centered on a remote Norwegian island occupied by fishers and farmers, they're written with the terse directness of Hemingway (but without any of his outdated machismo), tracing the development of an entire society on an intimate, individual scale. A child opens her eyes to a life wider than her traditional family circle, a young woman feels the ripples of a world war lapping against her shore, and now a new mother must cope with aftermath of a conflict that's divided her nation. Jacobsen's novels are absolute bedrock for Madison Books, foundation stones on which our fiction collection is built. I said of the first of them that "I don't think I've ever read anything that better touched the essential truth of what it is to be alive," and that assessment has only been reinforced with each new release. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

Old Book of the Week (April 11, 2022)

Phinney by Post Book #86

The Third Policeman

by Flann O'Brien

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 of 'black air,'" are the least strange thing about it. This story of a murder in the Irish countryside, and also of a box of money, and many bicycles, and more than three policemen, and possibly more than three dimensions, is both one of the funniest and one of the most disturbing books I've read, and also one of my very favorites. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (April 11, 2022)

The Shame

by Makenna Goodman

Comparison is the thief of this artistic, anti-capitalist, homesteading young mother's joy when she starts comparing the mundanity of her own lived life in rural Vermont to the highlight reel of her NYC-dwelling doppelganger's digital one. I love a good existential crisis, and Alma's inner monologuing is golden, filled with angst and humor and wisdom. Quick and intense, The Shame is just as all-consuming as the feeling of shame itself. —Anika

New Book of the Week (March 28, 2022)

You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe

by Rebecca Brown

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 little book of wonderful and moving coherence. In four essays, "Spring," "Summer," "Fall," and "Winter," she moves lightly from myth to memoir to Melville to the Monkees, evoking the traditional annual rhythms of life, death, and rebirth but also those times when you fall out of step with the seasons. It's both deeply personal and deeply communal, and possibly just the kind of stories you need to believe too, as the sap of springtime starts to rise. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (March 28, 2022)

South Riding

by Winifred Holtby

Here’s the pitch: a soap opera about local government with hints of Middlemarch and Peyton Place. Well. You’d forgive a publisher for taking a pass, but this 1937 novel was an instant bestseller, adapted for film and TV, and has never been out of print (though it's not always easy to find in the U.S.). The secret ingredient is the author herself. Holtby was a native of Yorkshire (location of the fictional South Riding) and a well-known progressive journalist-activist. Chapter by chapter, she moves from the Shacks to Maythorpe Hall, focusing on residents who are never entirely heroic or evil or foolish. The marquee romance may echo the Janes (Eyre/Austen), but Holtby was an expert on the plot twist. As she was writing, she knew she was dying of kidney disease—her most tender portrayals are characters who share that fateful perspective. Her final novel is often called a “beloved classic” because in both challenging and comforting herself, Holtby did the same for generations of readers. —Liz

Audiobooks of the Week (March 28, 2022)

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

by Patrick Radden Keefe

The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup

by Evan Hughes

My reading (and listening) usually jumps from subject to subject and style to style, but when I recently finished The Hard Sell, Hughes's thorough evisceration of the executives behind Insys Therapeutics, a (briefly) billion-dollar pharma startup built on the aggressive marketing of a single addictive pain drug, I wanted to stay with the subject, and immediately followed it with Keefe's rightfully acclaimed account. The Hard Sell is compelling and infuriating, but Empire of Pain is a masterpiece, a patient and rich profile of three generations of Sacklers, full of brilliance, ambition, and greed, in which Oxycontin, the pill that made them billions while leading many thousands to addiction and death, doesn't appear until halfway through the tale. A riveting and authoritative new classic in one of my very favorite genres, white-collar true crime. —Tom

[Order the audio downloads of Empire of Pain and The Hard Sell from our partners at Libro.fm]

Young Adult Book of the Week (March 28, 2022)

Lawless Spaces

by Corey Ann Haydu

Corey Ann Haydu is one of my favorite YA authors, and I eagerly snagged an advance copy of this novel-in-verse as soon as I laid eyes on it. In Lawless Spaces, Mimi, fifteen-turning-sixteen, grapples with her self-image and her responsibility to represent herself as the right kind of girl. She has the sort of body people feel entitled to comment on, and sometimes just entitled to, full stop. It's the same body her mother had, and her mother before her. When she turns sixteen, Mimi's mother gifts her a journal to write in; it's a family tradition—or perhaps a family curse. In writing her own nuanced experience for herself instead of writing captions on photos to an impersonal and sometimes cruel internet following, Mimi begins to uncover and investigate her own hurt. In reading the stories of the women who came before her, she unearths generations of trauma: written down but left unspoken. This gorgeously complex story kept me up reading all night—dare I say, like a teenager?—and made me ache, cry, and hope. (14 and up) —Anika

New Paperback of the Week (March 14, 2022)

Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

I'm often skeptical when new books I haven't read yet are compared to books and media I've already consumed and loved; I've too often been disappointed before by promises unfulfilled. That said, I've seen Sorrow and Bliss compared to Sally Rooney's Normal People, Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, and Fleabag and I give these comparisons an emphatic nod. It is smart, funny, and sad without being depressing. Martha is wonderfully self-aware and woefully self-sabotaging as she muddles through life with an undiagnosed mental illness that affects everyone who loves her, particularly her husband and sister, but herself most of all. —Anika

Old Books of the Week (March 14, 2022)

Phinney by Post Books #87

The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939

by Ella K. Maillart

All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey

by Annemarie Schwarzenbach

The story is so good it took two people to tell it. In the summer of 1939, with war on the horizon, two women, seasoned journalists and travelers, decided to drive themselves from the mountains of Switzerland to the mountains of Afghanistan, looking for an alternative culture to the corruptions of Europe, or just a change in their own lives. The books they wrote about their journey are fascinating, partial, and much better when read together: Schwarzenbach's dispatches (collected long after her early death) are compact and philosophical, while Maillart's account overflows with context and judgment, both historial and personal, including the morphine addiction of her traveling partner and the tension and affection between them (none of which Schwarzenbach mentions). Together, they make a compelling portrait of two intrepid women, and their encounters with traditional cultures in the middle of change. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (March 14, 2022)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #75

Mina

by Matthew Forsythe

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 and her sweet but overly trusting dad combine into what will surely be one of our favorite picture books of the year, and not only for its mid-story punchline, which makes me laugh every time I turn back to it: "The problem," says the doctor mouse, "is that these squirrels are definitely cats." (Ages 2 to 5) —Tom

Old Book of the Week (February 7, 2022)

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

by Elizabeth Taylor

Within a few paragraphs, I knew I was in good hands. The hands of a writer at the top of her game, exhibiting perfect control without apparent effort. The story is set in late-1960’s London and follows the still estimable Laura Palfrey (we assume she was once estimable from her handful of memories of married life in Burma) as she settles into the Claremont Hotel as one of its elderly residential guests. Her routine livens up when, on one of her forays outside, she befriends Ludo Myers, a would-be writer the same age as her grandson. The humor—understated zingers, “bits” of comedy gold—is perfectly balanced with a tone of, I won’t say sadness, but an acceptance of the fact that one’s way of life has died and one is merely waiting to follow. I don’t think I truly understood the term “bittersweet” until I finished the last paragraph. Elizabeth Taylor is my new literary crush and I plan to read one of her novels each month, like savoring treats from a box of exquisite chocolates. —Liz

New Book of the Week (February 7, 2022)

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

by Kim Fu

It’s rare that I find a book of short stories that really works for me, but when an advance copy of this collection showed up with local author Kim Fu’s name on it, I had a good feeling. I was lucky enough to attend two different readings where Fu performed new work: first, at Hugo House, and again, here at Phinney Books. I was struck by her voice and imagination, both of which translate beautifully to the page. Each of the twelve stories is well-written, wonderfully surreal, and distinct. I felt particularly moved by the stories that explore the consequences of possible near-future technologies—"Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867," "Time Cubes," and "Twenty Hours" (think: Black Mirror, but infused with more hope and curiosity than cynicism and dread)—and the ones that read like modern creature myths: "June Bugs" and "Bridezilla." It’s hard to pick a favorite, and that makes it all the easier to recommend. —Anika

New Book of the Week (February 7, 2022)

The Christie Affair

by Nina de Gramont

I love to read novels about libraries, bookstores, or authors, especially if there’s a kernel of historical truth in there. Nina de Gramont’s new novel, The Christie Affair, imagines what really happened when Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days in 1926. After a massive manhunt across England, Christie reappeared in a hotel, claiming she didn’t remember what happened. The Christie Affair imagines that time from the point of view of her husband’s mistress. Why did his mistress, who didn’t love Archie, put in motion a plan that took years to see to fruition, to steal him away from Agatha? And what exactly happened to Agatha in those 11 days? Did she really not remember, or was she simply trying to reclaim her life? The best novels find a way to make every character sympathetic in some way, to help the reader understand why they made less than honorable choices, and I found myself alternately rooting for different characters throughout the book. The book left a deep impression on me, still echoing months later. —Doree

New Book of the Week (February 7, 2022)

Freud's Patients: A Book of Lives

by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

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 portraits of 38 men and women who underwent psychoanalysis with the Great Man. Freud's greatness has been questioned for decades, but few critiques could be as quietly devastating as this one, made all the more effective by the deadpan style with which Borch-Jacobsen, a longtime Freud scholar and UW professor, wields his scalpel. He gives little time to Freud's famous (and apparently fanciful) case histories of his patients, instead telling their life stories in a way that nearly always reveals the utter failure of Freud's treatment. An incomplete but merciless portrait of Dr. Freud, it doubles as an intriguing view into the hothouse of wealthy Jewish Vienna at the turn of the previous century. —Tom

New Book of the Week (January 24, 2022)

When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West

In the relative quiet at the end of the year I caught up with one of the most acclaimed books of 2021 (including by James at Madison Books when it came out in October). I suspected it would be right up my alley, and indeed it was. In chapters that read at first like essays and then increasingly like fiction, Labatut elegantly traces the lives and ideas of some of the 20th century's most prominent physicists and mathematicians. But those elegant tales lead again and again into horror, both in the personal lives of these obsessive thinkers, which span the most murderous decades of the century, and in the consequences of their ideas. Reading of their struggles to push the margins of our comprehension, you feel like you are standing at the edge of the abyss that faced one of his subjects, the German astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild, who, while dying at the front in World War I, madly solved equations that led to an unthinkable conclusion: the existence of black holes. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (January 24, 2022)

A Pin to See the Peepshow

by F. Tennyson Jesse

There’s a literary True Crime wave cresting in 2022 and it is Meta: teeming with books of all types that dissect our long obsession with the genre. Centuries before Penny Dreadfuls were condemned for corrupting Victorian youth, Executioner’s Tales were providing grim titillation. In the modern era, True Crime began using the lenses of psychology and sociology to focus on the “why” of a crime. And by replacing moralizing with “science,” it became horribly easy to see oneself as the victim or—gulp—the accused. In this 1934 novel based on an infamous 1922 murder case, crack storytelling and rich historical detail reanimate accused murderer Julia Almond and the rigidly patriarchal middle-class milieu which incubated the deadly act. Her tale gains intensity as the scene shifts to the courts and those same prejudices pervert justice and compound the crime. Long out-of-print, this cult classic has just been reissued in the British Library Women Writers series and is recommended for those who can’t get enough period crime series from the BBC. —Liz

Old Book of the Week (January 24, 2022)

Phinney by Post Book #85

Act One: An Autobiography

by Moss Hart

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, and his story of how he rose, through lucky breaks and setbacks, from poverty in the Bronx to hit plays and major prizes, is charming, funny, and as brilliantly observed and constructed as any script he wrote. But you don't have to be a theater kid to love it: the book's final third especially, the story of his first Broadway production, is an edge-of-your-seat thriller that shows just how much sweat, anxiety, and ingenuity goes into putting on even the fizziest of farces. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (January 24, 2022)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #73

The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess

by Tom Gauld

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 had two children made out of wood? In the hands of Gauld, who you may know from his Snooty Bookshop postcard set, the result is a tale told with all the lightness, heart, and adventure you could hope for in 32 pages. (Age 2 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week (January 10, 2022)

I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home

by Jami Attenberg

I could not stop reading Jami Attenberg’s new memoir I Came All This Way to Meet You, and that is exactly how I like to read books. I read this one, in its entirety, on Boxing Day. I loved Jami’s honest voice, how she owns that she came into this world to be a writer. I didn’t even mind that this book is a memoir in essays, with no overarching narrative storyline. But it’s not the arc I was reading for: I read for Jami’s descriptive writing and her compelling, strong voice. As soon as I finished, I went out and purchased her latest novel. This book is perfect for people who love memoirs, or Lily King's novel Writers & Lovers, and I won’t be surprised if this one ends up on my 2022 top ten list (even though I cheated and read it at the end of 2021). —Nancy

New Book of the Week (January 10, 2022)

The Maids

by Nita Prose

For fans of 2018’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, I give you The Maid by Nita Prose. Protagonist Molly Gray is also ... different. She’s exceedingly good at her job as a maid at the high-end Regency Grand Hotel, where her daily goal is to return each room to “a state of perfection.” But she sees the world as very black and white. To the reader, she’s clearly on the spectrum, although most of her co-workers just think she’s kind of weird. That outsider status makes her an easy target for being taken advantage of by so-called friends, as she gets sucked into a murder mystery at the hotel. But, as in Eleanor Oliphant, there is so much more to Molly than what co-workers and hotel guests see on the surface. And as Molly slowly reveals her back story, the reader is soon rooting for her story’s ending to be perfection. —Doree

Kids Book of the Week (January 10, 2022)

Living with Viola

by Rosena Fung

We can all use a reminder to be gentle with ourselves, and Living with Viola by Rosena Fung showcases this in a beautifully illustrated middle grade graphic novel. Lovable sixth-grader Livy Tong struggles with social pressure, friends, and the negative voice in her head (personified in the imaginary character Viola). Perfect for fans of Raina Telgemeier and Victoria Jamieson, Living with Viola is a great kid-friendly message about living with and managing anxiety. (Ages 8 to 12) —Haley

New Book of the Week (December 13, 2021)

Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan

The only thing more impressive than an author conjuring a realistic world and three-dimensional characters from thin air is when they manage to do so in only 114 pages. Let's peer for a moment into the snowglobe world Claire Keegan has created in Small Things Like These. We're in a rural town in 1985 Ireland, where coal merchant Bill Furlong and his wife Eileen are stretching their meager finances to provide a happy Christmas for their five daughters. The festive touchstones of the season are all present: snow, lights, baking, choirs singing carols, but the book focuses on Bill's personal revelations about his family and the community. In just a few words, Keegan so beautifully depicts this setting and the completely real character of Bill that I was far from ready to say goodbye after a mere 114 pages. —Haley

New Book of the Week (December 13, 2021)

The Radical Potter: The Life and Times of Josiah Wedgwood

by Tristram Hunt

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 rapidly changing England, as one of the leading entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution, as well as a free-thinking supporter of abolition and the French Revolution (even as he built his ceramics business by catering to aristocratic luxury tastemakers). Hunt captures the man's energy and charm, with a museum curator's particular eye for both the engineering and marketing brilliance that made him the Steve Jobs of his day and made Wedgwood one of the first global brands. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (December 13, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #84

I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem

by Maryse Condé, translated by Richard Philcox

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, the one with perhaps the least measure of reality is Tituba, the slave accused of witchcraft about whom little is known, not even whether she was Native American or African. Into that space leaps the Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé, imagining a life both tragic and joyful for Tituba, in which her time in Salem—no more tragic than the rest of her days but far less joyful—is a forgettable interlude compared to her time before and after on her home island of Barbados. It is, as Tituba says, a "bitter, bitter story," but Condé, much like her hero, is a high-spirited, life-loving, sharp-elbowed storyteller. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (December 13, 2021)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #70

Time Is a Flower

by Julie Morstad

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 appreciation of one of the most basic, but most mysterious, elements of our lives: time, whether it moves slowly or quickly, whether it makes your hair grow or a mountain turn, gradually, into a pebble. It's one of my favorite picture books of the year. —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 15, 2021)

Matrix

by Lauren Groff

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 and longing, into the space of a short, lyrical novel. But Groff's Marie is not a modest farmer in rural Indiana but an ambitious abbess in 12th-century England, who is both a visionary writer (based in that respect on the poet Marie de France, of whose life little is known) and a brilliantly competent administrator, who transforms her visions into a powerful, fortified, all-female institution whose ever-growing prosperity both protects her subjects and endangers them. As a portrait of admirable, ancient power, I was reminded of another superb novel, Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. —Tom

New Paperback of the Week (November 15, 2021)

Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused

by Melissa Maerz

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 attention to detail. If you at all agree, you will likely devour Maerz's oral history, which quotes nearly everyone involved in its production to recreate how this odd miracle—a teen stoner comedy that can hold its own with the best of Altman and Renoir—happened. The answer comes, in part, from Linklater's stubborn and sometimes devious vision, but also from the people he brought together to inhabit and enlarge that vision. Some became stars, and some, for reasons tragic or inevitable or intentional, didn't, but there's a sense among all of them that, for one day at this fictional Texas high school, they all shone equally. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (November 15, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #83

An Owl on Every Post

by Sanora Babb

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 away. "This place is like a grave," he says when they arrive, and he's not far off. Their time there is often grim, with failed crops, desperate loneliness, and the meagerest of rare pleasures. But somehow, Babb, without shorting their misery, or romanticizing it either, makes of those years something quietly magical, through her attention to place and personality, to the wonders of this strange, inhospitable terrain and the people who manage to survive it. It's a beautiful book about coming of age on the very edge of existence. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (November 15, 2021)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #71

The Camping Trip

by Jennifer K. Mann

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 Ernestine's first camping trip, away from her home and her dad. Filled with the pleasures of planning, packing, and camaraderie, as well as the manageable anxieties of a night in the dark far from familiar comforts, Mann's friendly ink-and-collage illustrations will offer welcome recognition to young camping veterans and an appealingly approachable adventure to Ernestine's fellow neophytes. (Age 3 to 6) —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 1, 2021)

The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

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 at the desperate edge of American life, and his second holds on just as hard. His short sentences come at you with a declarative velocity, and his characters push themselves with a similar urgency, even when they are stuck, churning and feeling like they are getting nowhere, like Corey Goltz, the teenage son of a single, ailing mom on the outskirts of Boston, trying to find a father figure and a foothold in a cruel world. If this book had a smell, it would be a gym mat after a long day of mixed martial arts training sessions. Luckily, it doesn't, but you may find yourself needing a shower, or a long, brooding walk, after it's done. —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 1, 2021)

LaserWriter II

by Tamara Shopsin

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 shop in Manhattan in the 1990s, I mean that is exactly what it is about. No love story, no grand metaphors or broad social commentary. But like Arbitrary Stupid Goal, Shopsin's wonderful memoir about her family's Greenwich Village diner, it's a funny, heartening portrait of a small business that, while it lasts, operates as a refuge both for honest, creative work and for a city's misfits. It may make you pine for the lost art of printer repair. —Tom

New Book of the Week (November 1, 2021)

Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph

by Jason Fulford

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 full evidence in his latest book, which gives new meaning to the term "photographic negative." Many books will tell you what photos to take, but few will consider what not to take. But this isn't a book of strict rules: he's gathered alphabetical entries from dozens of fellow artists about subjects they try not to shoot, for ethical ("People Praying") or aesthetic ("Anything at 1 P.M.") reasons, or from boredom ("Men with Snakes") or anxiety ("Faces") or disgust ("Feet"). One avoids "Asking Permission," another photos taken "Without Asking Permission." It's a loose and challenging book of personal, idiosyncratic choices that will provoke you to think about any creative choice you might be faced with. —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 18, 2021)

The Last Taxi Driver

by Lee Durkee

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? Lou drives a cab in northern Mississippi, shuttling the poor and rich and sick and drunk between bars and lousy motels and detox facilities and emergency rooms and fast-food jobs for a charismatically vindictive and chiseling boss, tempering his road rage with doses of Bill Hicks and Buddhism and pining over the one time he got to teach Shakespeare to frat boys before getting fired. Full of incidents so grimly bizarre they must have come from Durkee's own time behind the wheel, The Last Taxi Driver is a bitterly funny tour of the American underbelly, led by a guide as beset by demons as any of his passengers. —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 18, 2021)

The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

Annabelle and her son Benny have a lot to deal with, emotionally and otherwise. Her hold on her job is tenuous while her accumulating piles of stuff have a choking grip on their household; he's suffering the usual teenage indignities, compounded by voices in his head that definitely aren't normal; and they're both suffering the loss of Kenji, the easygoing husband and father who used to glue the cracks in their small family together. Author Ozeki lets each of them tell their own tale, binding them back together in heartwarming fashion with a wonderfully accessible metafictional conceit: allowing her book to speak for itself." —James [from the Madison Books newsletter]

Old Book of the Week (October 18, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #82

The Fortnight in September

by R.C. Sherriff

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 seaside are the highlight of their somewhat drab and dutiful lives, and require for their success all the foresight and organization of a military campaign. Do they succeed? Well, I hope I won't give the game away entirely by saying that this 1931 novel, recently brought back into print, has joined The Women in Black and Leonard and Hungry Paul as our favorite recommendations for readers looking for heartening and delightful books about life's most modest, but hard-won, victories. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (October 18, 2021)

Phinney by Post Kids #70

Hardly Haunted

by Jessie Sima

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, this lonely house learns, reluctantly, to embrace its nature, but will it find someone willing to make it a home? (Ages 2 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (October 4, 2021)

Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

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 characters are the Hildebrandts, a family of six in suburban Chicago in December 1971, each of them vivid and flawed, thwarted by their own essence but capable, possibly, of change. A suburban Christian youth group (which gives the novel its name) may not sound like a promising subject for a 592-page novel, but in Franzen's hands it's rich and fertile ground, not just for satire but for a fully populated world of actions and consequences that left me looking forward to the rest of the trilogy that Franzen has said will follow. —Tom

New and Old Books of the Week (October 4, 2021)

Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of Ghost Stories

by Sarah Perry, Max Porter, et al.

These Our Monsters: The English Heritage Book of New Folktale, Myth, and Legend

by Sarah Hall, Paul Kingsnorth, et al.

This is the time of year when we seek out stories to touch something primitive in us—we want to revisit the things that scared us years ago, and dig up those that have scared people through the ages. Most of all, we crave the sensation of fear, whether it’s a shiver or a gasp or—for me—a queasiness that signals dread. To satisfy this perennial hunger, English Heritage (the organization that oversees nationally important sites) commissioned two anthologies. In one, top-notch authors crafted ghost stories in historic settings; in the other, they fashioned tales around figures of legend. Time periods, styles, and messages vary, but all triggered that peculiar feeling in the pit of my stomach. They also gave me an itchy Google-finger. But instead of typing in a search box, I merely flipped to the enlightening endnotes. Both books are the perfect package for any combination of: History Buff, Anglophile, Chill-seeker. Warning: You can try to savor these sixteen stories, but you might end up gobbling them like that bag of fun-size Snickers I imagined was for the trick-or-treaters. —Liz

Old Books of the Week (October 4, 2021)

All Systems Red and Artificial Condition

by Martha Wells

After multiple customer recommendations for Wells's Murderbot Diaries series, I finally jumped in, and after two books I'm hooked. The books' slim size (most of them just 160 quick-turning pages) give a hint of Wells's great gift: her lightness of touch, which manages to drop you into a fascinating future world—and introduce you to a particularly fascinating main character—with just a few deft strokes. Your guide is a manufactured, near-human security android—a Murderbot, as it calls itself with typical grim humor—which has quietly gone rogue by hacking its own control system. There's plenty of action, and a gradually unfurling plot, but the best attraction is the bot itself, a drily funny and affectingly earnest and awkward machine (imagine Marvin the Paranoid Android, but with the Terminator's combat skills) that would really rather be bingeing on downloaded entertainment serials but feels obligated, by ethics and curiosity, to get to the bottom of a deepening mystery. —Tom

New Book of the Week (September 20, 2021)

Palmares

by Gayl Jones

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 central idea, Palmares is the story of Almeyda, a Black slave girl who takes her freedom, but it has none of the linear structure we might associate with such a story. In keeping with the complex and fluid racial conditions of colonial Brazil, Almeyda's path is meandering and deeply episodic, as faces come in and out of her life and return, as she waits passively and often silently and then, when possible, takes action. Jones doesn't hold the hand of her reader, but she offers the greater gift of immersing you in a time and place utterly unlike ours, but full of its echoes. It's a one-of-a-kind visionary journey. —Tom

New Book of the Week (September 20, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #81

Distant Fathers

by Marina Jarre, translated by Ann Goldstein

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 home within their minority religious community of Waldensians. And from this memoir, which came out in Italian in 1987 but was just translated into English this year, you feel as though she even felt an outsider to herself and her own history, which she holds and examines at arm's-length distance in a brilliant style that might remind you of Phinney favorite Annie Ernaux. She doesn't trust her own memories, but she knows they are all she has. She turns them over in her mind, and from sentence to sentence you have no idea where she will turn next, and you feel that she doesn’t either. It's quite thrilling. —Tom

New Book of the Week (September 20, 2021)

Insignificance

by James Clammer

The blurb for this describes it as "a plumber's Mrs. Dalloway," which I think is just about right. It's a beautifully handled interior monologue of a fictional tradesman's day, and the narrative intimacy Clammer achieves alone makes this a fascinating novel. His hero's day is not an ordinary one, though, which makes the book's title all the more ironic. Our noble plumber is unexpectedly confronted by his long-estranged son and must relive the crisis that nearly destroyed his marriage and family, making for an altogether thrilling read. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)

Kids Book of the Week (September 20, 2021)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #69

Moon Pops

by Heena Baek, translated by Jieun Kiaer

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 builds intricate and evocative dioramas that make each page feel almost three-dimensional, and her story, about a melting moon turned into popsicles on a hot night, is equally ingenious. (Ages 2 to 5) —Tom

New Book of the Week (August 23, 2021)

The Killing Hills

by Chris Offutt

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 know what a thoroughly enjoyable and modestly masterful writer he is. The Killing Hills is advertised as his "first crime novel," but it's of a piece with his previous book, the wonderful Country Dark: a young man comes home from war to Kentucky and puts his skills, and his country know-how, to use in righting wrongs. In this book, it's as if Offutt has written a Lee Child novel, with an almost superhumanly savvy, two-fisted hero, but grounded it in the local details and drama of the Appalachian hollers he knows so well. It's a brisk, refreshing drink, straight from a mountain spring. —Tom

New Book of the Week (August 23, 2021)

Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

by Jonny Sun

I am often in the process of reading multiple books at once. The trick to this, I think, is to pick books that are different enough from each other: light vs. heavy, fiction vs. nonfiction, long vs. short. Some books are hearty meals. This book is a satisfying snack, especially if you’re one for emotional comfort eating—er, reading. Sun’s bite-sized, bittersweet essays about productivity, anxiety, plants, and family are an excellent excuse to sit down and slow down, to indulge in the wistful and melancholy for a few minutes a few times a day. I finished Goodbye, Again feeling thoughtful and calm ... and contemplating whether it would be wise to adopt another houseplant. —Anika

New Book of the Week (August 23, 2021)

Mrs. March

by Virginia Feito

Holy moly, this is quite a novel! It's like watching a train wreck; you can’t stop it, you know it's going to be awful, yet you can’t look away. Mrs. March, as she is called throughout, is “in her head” once she hears that her well-known author husband, whose work she never bothers to read, has based a character in his latest book on her. The trouble is that character is a “whore,” as Mrs. March can only whisper to herself. All of the childhood trauma that she’s managed to bury is brought back to the surface by this trigger, upending her sheltered, privileged, structured New York City life. To watch her devolve is disturbing, yet strangely fascinating. This is an amazing character study. —Cindy (from the Madison Books newsletter)

New Book of the Week (August 9, 2021)

Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975

by Richard Thompson

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, and they (like me) will find many rewards in his first memoir, written with the late Scott Timberg. Parading neither the cryptic dodges of Dylan's Chronicles or the dishiness of Keith Richards's Life, Beeswing is, like its author, straightforward, drily funny, and self-deprecating, while being honest as well about the ambition behind his and his teenage bandmates' invention of British folk rock, as they came of age in the intense, crowded years in the wake of Dylan and the Beatles. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (August 9, 2021)

Phinney by Post Book #80

Nights Below Station Street

by David Adams Richards

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 giant of a man, a mechanical genius whose bad back keeps him from working, and, for most of his life, a colossal drinker, which he would not like to be any more. His story is at the heart of Nights Below Station Street, but he's surrounded by family and friends who seem equally frustrated at how hard it is not to be who they are, all described with the warm but unsentimental humor that makes it easy to understand why Richards's many novels about the Miramichi region of New Brunswick have made him a major figure in Canada, even though few readers south of the border have been lucky enough to discover him. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week (August 9, 2021)

Phinney by Post Kids Book #68

Ship in a Bottle

by Andrew Prahin

Cat and Mouse live in the same house, and things are good, with a few exceptions. Mouse wants to eat gingersnaps, and Cat wants to eat Mouse. Mouse wants to lie in the sun, and so does Cat. After eating Mouse, that is. So Mouse loads up the ship-in-a-bottle on the mantel with gingersnaps, rolls out the window into the river, and sets sail for a new place to live. She encounters storms, gingersnap-stealing seagulls, and stomach-rumbling hunger before settling into a quiet home, surrounded by new friends. Plot summary isn't the way to appreciate a picture book, of course. Author-artist Prahin's perfectly simple story achieves its greatest impact through some of the clearest, most colorful, and loveliest images I've seen in a while. (Ages 2 to 7) —James (from the Madison Books newsletter; we love this one too!)

New Book of the Week (July 26, 2021)

Filthy Animals

by Brandon Taylor

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 Midwest. But that's not to say you'll feel comfortable there, because Taylor makes a specialty of discomfort, of putting his characters in the most excruciatingly awkward and revealing situations. Sometimes it's their willingness to go along with what others want of them that puts them there, sometimes it's their own unruly desires (and often it's both), but you know that when his characters are being pushed messily beyond whatever conception they had of themselves (or you had of them), then Taylor has you right where he wants you. —Tom

Old Book of the Week (July 26, 2021)

Laidlaw

by William McIlvanney

Even if you only occasionally visit the crime genre, you’re acquainted with the depressive, philosophical, highly capable but unconventional police detective. But that vast brotherhood springs from a few common ancestors. When award-winning Scottish novelist McIlvanney turned to crime-writing in the 1970s, he created Jack Laidlaw—a man so dour even his best friends find him too much to take sometimes—and became the patriarch of Tartan Noir. And while Mcilvanney may not be the originator of hard-boiled banter, he was one of its most fluent practitioners. In a story set among the gangsters and wanna-bes of working-class Glasgow, there is only one scene of physical violence. Action unfolds through conversation—each discussion an improvisation with the brutal finesse of a prize fight. Recommended for fans of Benjamin Black and Dennis Lehane. —Liz

P.S. Laidlaw is the first of a trilogy so revered by McIlvanney’s literary descendants that bestseller Ian Rankin has completed a Laidlaw prequel that McIlvanney left unfinished, coming this fall.

Paperback Book of the Week (July 26, 2021)

Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

by Ben Goldfarb

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 his entertaining survey of the history and the current state of human-beaver relations is make a hard-to-refute case that these squat gnawers are one of the most crucial natural engineers we have, and adding them to an ecologically damaged landscape can often be the most efficient way to bring balance back to nature. This is not one of those books that reveals the hidden intelligence of an unsung animal—we know how smart beavers are! Rather, it shows, via profiles of Beaver Believers across the world, how smart we could be if we just let them do their job. —Tom

New Book of the Week (July 12, 2021)

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

by Joshua Cohen

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-town Corbin College. And for its first half it is a more-or-less-well-behaved campus comedy of Jewish assimilation and petty academic maneuvering. Then Benzion Netanyahu, a possible professorial hire who Blum, as a fellow Jew, has been asked to host and vouch for, arrives with his wife and three incredibly badly behaved children, including 11-year-old Benjamin, and chaos, to say the least, ensues. Or, to put it in Philip Roth terms, a book that read like Goodbye, Columbus suddenly turns into Portnoy's Complaint. Is this an authentic portrait of a "very famous" Jewish family? (Cohen claims he based it on an actual incident.) An allegory of some kind? An impish goad? All I know is it was entertaining, funny, and provocative, and I might need to read it another time or two to decide. —Tom