If you’ve been paying attention to literary news over the last few months, you know that Rachel Cusk’s new novel, The Life of M, is supposedly a roman á clef about Natalie Portman. Cusk was suppose…

If you consider yourself to be a sci-fi fan and you haven’t read Harlan Ellison’s short story about an artificial intelligence at the end of human history, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” you …

Anand Giridharadas’s latest book, Man in the Mirror, is a sharp left turn from his most recent two books, The Persuaders and Winners Take All. While Giridharadas became widely known for the broad s…

Edge of the Circle Books carries titles relating to just about every major belief system, from Wicca to Nordic mythology to Afrodiasporic faiths and more.

Murder Bimbo, Rebecca Novack’s paranoid thriller novel, features a textbook case of an unreliable narrator. The unnamed protagonist tells us the same story, three different ways. The basics of the …

I’m a ride-or-die reader of R.F. Kuang, which is to say I will read everything that she publishes just about as soon as it is available to read. She’s earned my fandom by being fearless in her care…

Taylor Tomlinson is my favorite working stand-up comedian. She’s a genuinely funny person who excels at crowdwork and spontaneous jokes, but the thing that really appeals to me is her writing. Her …

Batman: The Animated Series was probably the last TV show I fell in love with as a teen. I was still in high school when it came on the air, and I made it a point of landing in front of the TV ever…

This Saturday, September 26th, I’ll be interviewing Garth Stein and Miranda Mundt about their graphic novels at the Bainbridge Island Book Festival. Stein is the writer of Cloven, a series of graph…

Hildur Knútsdóttir’s debut, The Night Guest, is the kind of cagey thriller that begs you to read it in a single sitting. That’s how I read the book, and Knútsdóttir rewards antsy readers who are ru…

Like Love and Happiness, Angel Down is a novel told in one long gallumphing run-on of a narrative. Love and Happiness is a single paragraph, and Angel Down is a single breathless sentence, chopped …

After the debacle that was Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern movie, I never thought I’d be excited about another Green Lantern adaptation again. It doesn’t help that the comics have long since fallen in…

It’s not an original thought to point out that I was absolutely insufferable in my 20s. Most of us were—especially if we devoted our life to artistic pursuits. I look back on myself in those years …

This one is special. I effortlessly fell into Chloe Benjamin’s novel Under Story. There’s not much of a plot to begin with—a woman arrives at an Antarctic research base. She is a scientist but she’…

For 65 years, one storefront in the heart of Pike Place Market has been continuously devoted to bookselling.

From a nonfiction book by Emily Wilson to titles praised by Barack Obama and Conan O'Brien, there's much to read this September.

Fairy tale retellings aren’t typically my bag. They often topple over into cutesy-poo productions that wind up being nothing but stories about stories. So ordinarily, I would have left the YA graph…

My friend Clinton gave me some old paperback curiosities a while back and I finally read the first in the stack: Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story of McDonald’s, written by Max Boas and Steve Chain. …

I’ve enjoyed lots of Cory Doctorow‘s novels, but my favorite Doctorow is the cultural critic, the passionate believer in technology who is continually disappointed by the ways that the greed and eg…

I finally read Caro Claire Burke’s blockbuster novel Yesteryear, a buzzy book about a tradwife influencer who finds herself transported back in time to those “simpler days” that tradwife culture is…