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

The Best of Everything Cover Image

The Best of Everything (Paperback)

By Rona Jaffe
$18.00

I rarely fall this deeply in love with a book. Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything, a classic in its day, is about several young women trying to make it in the male-cominated publishing world of the early/mid 1950s in New York City. It has often been compared to Sex and the City, and these characters do navigate love, friendship, and careers in similar ways. But the most enchanting part of this book is the way it captures a specific moment in American history. 

Picked by Emma
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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
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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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The Brilliant Death Cover Image

The Brilliant Death (Hardcover)

By Amy Rose Capetta
$18.99

So much love for this amazing fantasy that I put off reading for too long. Immediately after I finished The Brilliant Death, I turned back to the beginning and started it again (even though I pretty much never reread books). Yeah, it was that good.

See also: Italian Family dramurders, a brilliant magic system, and genderqueer romance. Please, for your own sake, read The Brilliant Death.

Picked by Avery
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Open Earth Cover Image

Open Earth (Paperback)

By Sarah Mirk, Eva Cabrera (Illustrator), Claudia Aguirre (Illustrator)
$19.99

What an out-of-this-world (pun both intended and not) experience Open Earth is! It's still so rare for books to feature non-monogamous relationships AND queer AND POC characters that this is basically a goldmine. Every character is so unique and the challenged they face are, well, very down to earth and definitely relatable. So much love for Open Earth!

Picked by Avery
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This Is Not a Werewolf Story Cover Image

This Is Not a Werewolf Story (Paperback)

By Sandra Evans
$7.99

This is Not a Werewolf Story, because Raul, our main protagonist, is not a werewolf. A super fun read that features a boarding school, strange woods, a stranger lighthouse, familial mysteries, secret codes, and of being a kid. Oh, and escaping into said strange wood to turn into a wolf every weekend (when all the other kids go home).  What's not to love?

Picked by Avery
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