Kim Hooyboer is the general manager of Third Place Books Seward Park. When she's not reading with her cat, Kim co-hosts the industry podcast Drunk Booksellers with Elliott Bay bookseller Emma Nichols.
Listen, I get it. Buying things on Amazon is just so easy. But Danny Caine, bookseller extraordinaire, makes a compelling and heartfelt case for why you should break your Amazon habit. It's not just about your favorite local independent bookstore (though we love you too!), but also about the future of our economy, the safety of our workers, and the freedom to live in a world dictated by us, not Bezos. Grab a copy for yourself and another for you mother-in-law who keeps buying you Amazon gift cards.
In a world increasingly dependent on digital technologies, there's been a small but determined shift back toward the physical. Sax discusses the revitalization of bookstores (and adjacent industries such as Moleskine and Shinola journals, indie magazines, tabletop boardgames, and vinyl records) without falling back on the cloying nostalgia that tends to accompany "death of the book" think-pieces.
One of my favorite young adult books now has a fantastic graphic novel adaptation! When Juliet leaves the Bronx to take an internship in Portland with a famous (white) feminist author, she is forced to confront white bias in the feminist movement whilte growing into her own identity as a queer woman of color.
One of the most incredible works of literary non-fiction I've ever read, Machado's poetic memoir tracks a relationship from its giddy beginnings to its toxic end. Along the way, Machado examines the intricacies of queer relationships, the loneliness of the abused, and--ultimately--the universal desire to love and be loved.
An intimate and instrospective portrait of a young relationship. Normal People deftly explores the connections that prevail despite break downs in communication and understanding. Rooney absolutely nails the human condition in this quiet novel.
Griffith, the Seattle-based author of bestselling fantasy novel Hild, has given us a compulsive literary thriller and an important contribution to disability literature in this breathless new novel.
Seattle's Civic Poet Anastacia-Reneé delivers a powerful and necessary portrait of black womanhood in this dynamic collection of poetry. Her poems are unapologetic and raw, sprinkled with deft wordplay and startling turns-of-phrase. She weaves together various strands of identity -- black, woman, mother, queer -- to create a collection that is truly required reading.
When an unarmed black teenager, Kahlil, is shot and killed by police during a traffic stop, his childhood best friend, Starr, is the only witness to his death, aside from the cop who killed him. After Khalil’s death, Starr is thrown into a world in which hashtags bring recognition but not justice. She is forced to confront the reactions and inactions of white society and the reality of the injustice that plagues black life in this country. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this fictional story is a poignant and necessary exploration of police brutality and racism in today’s America.
When a media-celebrity-turned-tyrant ascends to prominence, he brings about the apocalyptic destruction of our world. Only an elite class of the human race is able to escape the catastrophic effects on our planet, fleeing to a pseudo-life on a space-station, where their individuality and sexuality are strictly regulated by the fascist regime. Within this societal pressure, a movement is born in which heroes burn and bodies become the ultimate artistic canvas. Lidia Yuknavitch depicts a world that is both uniquely alien and terrifyingly close to home in this phenomenal re-imagining of the Joan of Arc story.
In a poor Jamaican community, Delores peddles souvenirs to tourists at the market while her eldest daughter, Margot, works at the nearby resort, peddling paradise to men with money and burying her own desires. Margot’s younger sister, Thandi, carries the weight of the family’s hopes for a brighter future, yet she sees salvation not in the elite school her family can barely afford, but in the skin-whitening remedies that promise a new life. Dennis-Benn’s brilliant debut novel illuminates the sexism, racism, and classism of the region while blazing with lyrical and narrative profundity.
As the internet becomes an increasingly integral part of our daily lives, there is an unprecedented ability to collect and examine large swaths of data about how we think, act, and portray ourselves, both on and off-line. Rudder, one of the founders of the dating site OkCupid, deftly parses through the mass amounts of data that is regularly collected by our online actions to demonstrate how we perceive ourselves and others, how disparate our actions are from our words, and what big data can tell us about human nature.
