Books

Leah Sottile likes to follow the fringes of American life.

If you’ve ever thrown a fist to the sky and shouted, “Stupid bird!” then Tacoma-based author Matt Kracht has the book for you – “A Dumb Birds Field Guide to the Worst Birds Ever.”

The cover image on Mary Catherine Starr’s new book says it all: A mother sits on the toilet, head in her hands, as her two young children plead for her attention. “Mom, look at me,” says one. Then her husband chimes in to ask where his keys are.

For the love of books (and all the other wonderful things you can find at the library), Spokane Public Library invites you to get online and share your story of how local libraries have impacted your life.

When my fiancée, Denise, declared themself gender nonbinary and started using they/them pronouns, I didn’t get it. In fact, I fought it. I used grammar, biology, any stick I could grab to argue that humans come in only two genders – thereby proving two disturbing revelations of the 2024 election. One, the power of transphobia. It worked for Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans, who spent $215 million on anti-trans ads ahead of the election. Two, despite our nation’s name (the “United” States) and founding principle (“All people are created equal”), Americans, including me, are prone to disparaging people who are different from us. Not because they’ll do us harm. Just because they’re different.

It’s easy to assume that writing for children is less toiling than writing a novel for the big-brained adults of the world, but having an audience of young learners doesn’t make the task of storytelling any more painless than usual.

We tend to think of Jane Austen as the first great female novelist, whose originality paved the way for creative descendants to dazzle critics and readers. “Jane Austen’s Bookshelf” contends that virtually every part of that sentence is wrong.

When Alia Dastagir became the target of an online mob, a thought gripped her: What if the harassment never stopped? Could she survive it?

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Feb. 22, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana. (Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.) HARDCOVER FICTION 1. "Onyx Storm (Deluxe Limited Edition)" by Rebecca Yarros (Red Tower) ...

Joseph Wambaugh, the master storyteller of police dramas, whose books, films and television tales powerfully caught the hard psychic realities of lonely street cops and flawed detectives trapped in a seedy world of greed and senseless brutality, died Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, California. He was 88.

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Feb. 15, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana. (Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.) HARDCOVER FICTION 1. "Onyx Storm (Deluxe Limited Edition)" by Rebecca Yarros (Red Tower) ...

Maybe it’s not the most sophisticated critical laurel, but Eric Puchner’s new novel, “Dream State,” made me miss my subway stop.

In 1978, Rick Steves had a good thing going at home in Edmonds, Washington – until he blew it up.

Leyna Krow writes what we could call fairy tales for adults.

Given the monastic pacing of Charlotte Wood’s “Stone Yard Devotional,” I suppose it’s appropriate that we’ve had to wait patiently for it. Wood’s fellow Australians have been praising this story about a small abbey of nuns since the novel was published in 2023. Last year, it was a finalist for Britain’s Booker Prize. And now, as though publishing were operating by steam ship, “Stone Yard Devotional” has finally arrived in the United States.

To understand Jules Feiffer the legendary comic mind, one must look to a transformative point in his young adulthood. He didn’t set his early sights on becoming one of America’s greatest satirists. But his powerful creative conscience was sparked by one event and never ebbed across nearly the next eight decades.

Leyna Krow’s newest short story collection, “Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids” delivers on the fabulist elements fans of Krow’s have come to expect from her writing – an octopus love story originally published in The Spokesman-Review’s 2022 Summer Stories, a baby’s twin appearing out of nowhere, a sinkhole that improves everything tossed into it – while exploring complicated family dynamics and climate change anxiety. Instead of looking to Spokane’s past, as she did in her debut novel, “Fire Season,” “Sinkhole” is a return to the “fiction-science” (a term coined by Spokane author Sharma Shields for Krow’s writing specifically) of her first short story collection, “I’m Fine, But You Appear to be Sinking.”

What it means to be good – or not – is the infected wound at the center of Aria Aber’s debut novel, “Good Girl.” The narrator is a forlorn young woman named Nila Haddadi, and the story she tells sounds like a howl of despair transposed into the key of poetic retrospection. Indeed, the fact that this harrowing story recalls events from more than a decade ago provides the only reassurance that the narrator survived her teens.