An Interview with Stacey Levine

Stacey Levine is the author of My Horse and Other Stories, which won the PEN/West award, the novel Dra– and the novel Frances Johnson, which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her fiction has appeared in Fence, Tin House, Yeti, Denver Quarterly, and The Fairy Tale Review. She has also written for [...]

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Summer Booknotes from Our Staff

A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles (McSweeney’s) Sayles has written a stunning, epic, panoramic, historical novel that reminds me of the writing of Dos Passos. Beginning in 1897, and spanning a five-year period, Sayles captures the era which includes the Yukon gold rush, a white insurrection in North Carolina, and the U.S. imperialist [...]

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Summer Booknotes from Our Staff

Good Fish: Sustainable Seafood Recipes from the Pacific Coast by Becky Selengut (Sasquatch) Fish and shellfish, the author suggests in this beautiful cookbook, are as seasonal as produce, and we need to think about them in the same fashion, bringing ourselves closer to the food source. With that in mind, and a few uncomplicated tips [...]

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Summer Booknotes from Our Staff

Bright Before Us by Katie Arnold-Ratliff (Tin House) Katie Arnold-Ratliff creates a superb debut novel, depicting her characters with wit and depth. Francis Mason, an elementary schoolteacher, becomes tossed between past and present, real and imagined, after the discovery of a dead body on a field trip—a body Francis believes to be his high school [...]

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Booknotes from Our Staff

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor (Viking) In the wake of many young adult books that feature kids with magical powers, Okorafor’s voice is a refreshing standout. Sunny is an American-born child of Nigerians who have moved back home to West Africa. She is unique in many ways, one of them being she is an “Akata,” [...]

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Booknotes from Our Staff

Funeral for a Dog by Thomas Pletzinger, trans. by Ross Benjamin (Norton) Funeral for a Dog is a puzzle, a slowly unraveling mystery that my brain kept worrying even after I’d closed the last page. Daniel Mandelkern is an ethnologist working as a journalist for an uncompromising editor—his wife. When she sends him on assignment [...]

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Who Do I Recommend This To?

I have a dilemma. I recently finished Rotters, a fantastic young adult novel by documentary filmmaker and author Daniel Kraus. Rotters tells the story of Joey Crouch—a young man who loses his mother and is forced to move in with his absentee father in a small Ohio Town. Joey knows nothing of his father. All [...]

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Booknotes from Our Staff

The Moral Lives of Animals by Dale Peterson (Bloomsbury) The argument is that morality is a biological evolution rather than a learned social idea—an evolution that was selected long ago—meaning that we aren’t the only species capable of moral reasoning. The reader is introduced to dolphins who respect the catches of other dolphins, vampire bats [...]

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Authors of May

May is upon us, and it has decided to bring along a little sunshine as well. In addition to those long-desired rays of light, this month brings to the bookstore a group of wondrous wordsmiths, and don’t forget — on Sunday May 8th we celebrate mothers everywhere with Mother’s Day. On May 2nd we welcome [...]

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