Seward Park

Third Place Seward Park is a general-interest bookstore featuring new and used books with a used-book buying counter open seven days a week. We opened our doors in May of 2016 in the Seward Park neighborhood of south Seattle. Our Seward Park location continues the Third Place mission of providing a gathering space for its community by hosting over 200 events a year, including:

  • nationally-touring authors, such as James McBride, Marc Maron, Phoebe Robinson, and Timothy Snyder
  • local authors, such as Anastacia Renee, Shaun David Hutchinson, and John Medina
  • weekly kids song and story times with PJ Library (every Thursday at 11am)
  • monthly reading by The African-American Writers' Alliance (second Monday of every month at 7pm)
  • monthly Story Time for Grown Ups (third Sunday of every month at 7pm)

. We also host five monthly book clubs:

Third Place Books Seward Park shares a space with Raconteur, a full-service restaurant and cafe, as well as a bar serving craft cocktails and beer. Drink specials are available from Raconteur during book clubs and author readings.

Throughout the year, Third Place Books Seward Park hosts Give Back Fundraisers that have raised thousands of dollars for our local schools and community organizations. For information and to schedule a Give Back Fundraiser, see our informational page.

Latest Staff Picks

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Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living Cover Image

Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living (Paperback)

By Todd McLellan
$19.95

Highly satisfying. Arguably one of the best coffee table books ever published. 10/10.

Picked by Avery
Antwerp (New Directions Pearls) Cover Image

Antwerp (New Directions Pearls) (Paperback)

By Roberto Bolano, Natasha Wimmer (Translator)
$10.95

Perfect for finishing in an afternoon, this pocket sized paperback is a pure page-turner. Written in his mid-twenties, these are compressed fragments of Bolano's fictional universe. Perfectly avant-garde, puzzling, and mysteriously readable. I could read this one again and again. 

Picked by Colin
A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism (Discovering America) Cover Image

A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism (Discovering America) (Hardcover)

By Paul Youngquist
$27.95

While "Space Is The Place" by John Szwed may be the "definitive Sun Ra biography", Youngquist takes a closer look at the wide range of Sonny Blount's creative output --from music to visual art, film, public performance, poetry and activism --as well as the social backdrop in front of which Sun Ra's interstellar offerings played out. Highly recommended for fans of afrofuturism, jazz, mythology, and anyone with a general interest in history. This book is important! 

Picked by Colin
A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel Cover Image

A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel (Paperback)

By Marlon James
$17.00

Marlon James creates a Dhalgren-like world, full of turbulence and rife with pop culture references -- ever shifting scenarios occupied by characters with ice-cold patois. As Meticulous as it is expansive. 

Picked by Colin
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Eve's Hollywood Cover Image

Eve's Hollywood (Paperback)

By Eve Babitz, Holly Brubach (Introduction by)
$17.95

I hadn't lived until I had lived vicariously through Eve Babitz in the Los Angeles only she can describe --full of seduction, LSD, and celebrity rendezvous. Delightful! Babitz is among my favorite writers of prose. A fun summer read.

Picked by Colin
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My Heart Cover Image

My Heart (Hardcover)

By Corinna Luyken
$17.99

What makes a good picture book? Is it brilliant rhyme, beautiful illustrations, a perfect story?

Well, My Heart is all of those (& more), and in my opinion, as essential of an addition to the shelf as Seuss, Sendak, or Silverstein.

Also: Check out Corinna's first, The Book of Mistakes!

Picked by Avery
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Sabrina Cover Image

Sabrina (Hardcover)

By Nick Drnaso
$27.95

Sabrina is the story about how the family and friends of a young woman deal with her gruesome and highly-publicized kidnapping and its aftermath. More obliquely, Sabrina is about how easily tragedy can be exploited in the internet age, and how disputatious conspiracy theorists have clawed their way into the mainstream public discourse when it comes to these tragedies, often providing “alternative” explanations for them that add a whole new dimension to the pain of the families. This story is brilliantly wrought, beautiful, and told with subtlety and sobriety. It deserves the high praise it has been getting.  

Picked by Emma
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Crudo Cover Image

Crudo (Hardcover)

By Olivia Laing
$21.00

Crudo is the debut novel of Olivia Laing, a culture writer for The Guardian, and author of three previous books of nonfiction. The main character of this novel is an amalgam of the dead avant-garde writer Kathy Acker and Laing herself. At forty years old, “Kathy” is about to get married for the first time to a famous poet thirty years her senior. Unfolding all around her in real time is the political chaos and profound strangeness of the Brexit/Trump era, all mediated and experienced through the social media she engages with compulsively. This book is a stylistically bold and clever negotiation of vulnerability, independence, aging, and politics in the bizarre cultural epoch we are living in.

Picked by Emma
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Swimming Home: A Novel Cover Image

Swimming Home: A Novel (Paperback)

By Deborah Levy
$15.00

Swimming Home is about a family vacation in the French Riviera that gets interrupted by a strange visitor named Kitty Finch. Kitty unstable and seemingly starving herself. She is an amateur poet and an amateur botanist who paints her nails green. And she has an uncanny ability to bring out the darkness in this family. In this novel, Deborah Levy explores the precarious space between creativity and insanity. Her writing is penetrating and deeply evocative. She has an acute sense for detail, creating a novel that somehow has a tone that is both languid and manic. The way that the novel deals with desire-- as a timeless, carnal, healing, and simultaneously dooming force, is what ties it all together. 

Picked by Emma
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