This kind of novel is a devil to pull off…and Ms. Karbo has done her job brilliantly.
Reluctantly back home in L.A. after 16 years in Africa, documentary filmmaker Mouse FitzHenry longs for the harsh, teeming jungle life her dark lens took in so lovingly. Wrenched stateside by a family emergency, with her longtime boyfriend/collaborator in tow, Mouse is instantly beleaguered by a...Forward
Tom Spanbauer's first novel in seven years is a rich, expansive tale of love, sex, and heartbreak, covering twenty-five years in the life of a striving, emotionally wounded writer. In New York, Ben forms a bond of love with his macho friend and foil, Hank. Years later in Portland, a now ill...Forward
At age 39, Ariel Gore has everything she's always wanted: a successful writing career, a long-term partnership, a beautiful if tiny home, a daughter in college and a son in preschool. But life's happy endings don't always last. If it's not one thing, after all, it's your mother.
Knock knock.
Her...Forward
The Mary Smokes Boys is a gem. The writing is absolutely terrific and the characters distinct and deftly revealed. And the story is a heart wrecker.
Grey’s mother dies giving birth to his sister Irene and he prays that she will be returned to him so he might protect her from the world as his father did not. This prayer, Grey believes is answered in his sister Irene. He becomes obsessed with protecting her purity and innocence while...Forward
A truly remarkable book!
Thomas Edison holds over 1,000 patents including the light bulb and the phonograph, but he is broke. To the rescue rides the "world's banker", J.P.Morgan, with his offer of almost unlimited cash if the two men will join forces to illuminate America and bring about a revolution in the way the...Forward
This is his best book ever.
Essayistic, narrative, and meditative by turns, Ponteri’s is a beautiful and truly courageous voice.
Married writer Jay Ponteri finds himself infatuated with a woman other than his wife and writes a manuscript to explore his feelings. Discovery of this manuscript understandably strains his marriage. Wedlocked offers readers an intimate, idiosyncratic view of a human institution that can so...Forward
A tender, poignant and courageous narrative – insightful and beautifully written.
In the opening of Holding Silvan, Monica Wesolowska gives birth to her first child, a healthy-seeming boy who is taken from her arms for “observation” when he won’t stop crying. Within days, Monica and her husband have been given the grimmest of prognoses for Silvan. They must make a...Forward
Nadelson chronicles his life in progress with the wry, warm honesty of an old friend catching up.
Beginning in the summer of 2004, Scott Nadelson’s life fell apart. His fiancée left him a month before their planned wedding. He moved into a drafty attic. His car’s brakes went out. He learned that his cat was dying. Over the next two years, he’d struggle, with equivocal and sometimes...Forward
Moving, brave, and unforgettable, this deeply personal book pushes us all further into the light.
In this memoir of fathers and sons, Gregory Martin struggles to reconcile the father he thought he knew with a man who has just survived a suicide attempt; a man who had been having anonymous affairs with men throughout his thirty-nine years of marriage; and who now must begin his life as a gay...Forward
Dora is too much for Sigmund Freud but she’s just right for us – raunchy, sharp and so funny it hurts.
James Bernard Frost has given us the best novel, ever, about this strange underground world of misfits and heroes.
A Very Minor Prophet is the story of how Barth Flynn, a barista swimming upstream against purposelessness in Portland, Oregon, becomes the faithful scribe of Joseph Patrick Booker. Booker is a dwarf preacher who serves Voodoo donuts, Stumptown coffee, and, while his congregation throws PBR cans...Forward
Scott Nadelson writes brilliantly.
The characters in Scott Nadelson’s third collection are living in the wake of momentous events – the rupture of relationships, the loss of loved ones, the dissolution of dreams, and yet they find new ways of forging on with their lives, making accommodations that are sometimes delusional,...Forward
…The sweep of Dr. Zhivago with the Heart of Darkness depth of Joseph Conrad – a staggeringly good book.
In colonial India, at a time of growing friction between the ruling British and the restless Indian populace, a Victorian woman and her young Tamil Indian servant defy convention, class, and heartbreak to investigate what is gained – and lost – by holding life still. Suggested by the life and...Forward
This is the book I’ve been waiting to read all of my life.
This is not your mother’s memoir. Lifelong swimmer and Olympic hopeful Lidia Yuknavitch accepts a college swimming scholarship in Texas in order to escape an abusive father and an alcoholic, suicidal mother. After losing her scholarship to drugs and alcohol, Lidia moves to Eugene and enrolls in...Forward
Little Green is tender and tough, equal parts grit and grace. It’s a riveting and unforgettable debut.
In Little Green, Loretta Stinson’s stunning, redemptive first novel, tragedy leaves Janie Marek orphaned and in the care of her stepmother. The novel opens two years later, in 1976, when Janie, at sixteen, runs away. A ride she’s hitchhiked leaves her on the freeway outside a Northwestern town....Forward
Frank Meeink’s story is inspiring, compelling, and moving. It has the power to change lives.
Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead is Frank Meeink’s raw telling of his descent into America’s Nazi underground and his ultimate triumph over hatred and addiction.
Frank’s violent childhood in South Philadelphia primed him to hate. He made easy prey for a small group of skinhead gang...Forward
The brisk pace, flip tone, and confounding convictions of its 17th-century narrator make the novel feel contemporary.
Sørine, a female dwarf from Denmark, is given as a gift to the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great, during his visit to Copenhagen. Sørine travels to St. Petersburg where she becomes a jester at the Tsar’s functions. She enjoys her new life and falls in love with the Tsar’s favorite dwarf, but...Forward
A taut, brutal narrative … that comes to hypnotize, shimmering like the brilliant sun on the alfalfa fields.
It is early 1950s Idaho and the season of the chinook – a warm February wind that blows across the flat cookie-sheet plains from the wrong direction. It brings arid earth and hard times, marking the end of childhood for thirteen-year-old Jake Weber and the beginning of trouble for his family....Forward
Name five books and/or authors we all need to read? Poe Ballantine’s exquisitely funky 501 Minutes to Christ.
Poe Ballantine’s second collection of personal essays follows in the tradition of Things I Like About America. Stories range from "The Irving," which details Mr. Ballantine’s diabolical plan to punch John Irving in the nose after opening for him before an audience of 2,000 that launched the...Forward
Stunning. Coming of age is seldom registered as disarmingly as it is in Leaving Brooklyn.
With this erotic, exquisitely written novel, Lynne Sharon Schwartz confirms her status as one of our most daring and accomplished writers. Leaving Brooklyn is a book with and about double vision, and it brilliantly travels the boundaries between the visible and the hidden, conformity and...Forward
Clown Girl is more than a great book. Clown Girl is its own reality.
In this darkly comic novel, Clown Girl lives in Baloneytown, a neighborhood so run down and penniless that drugs, balloon animals, and even rubber chickens contribute to the local currency. Against a backdrop of petty crime, Clown Girl struggles to find her place in the world of high art; she has...Forward
Unlike any other recent American novel in the freshness of its approach and vision.
Toby Olson’s PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel Seaview follows its main characters, Allen and Melinda, across an American wasteland to return Melinda to her childhood home on Cape Cod; Melinda is dying of cancer and hopes to reach the seaside where she was born before her end comes. Allen earns...Forward
The stories in Scott Nadelson’s The Cantor’s Daughter seethe with psychological insight.
These stories capture Jewish New Jersey suburbanites in moments of crucial transition, when they have the opportunity to connect with those closest to them or forever miss their chance for true intimacy. In "The Headhunter," two men develop an unlikely friendship when Len Siegel, a recruiter,...Forward
Poe Ballantine is a writer with a keen ear and a blistering wit.
"It's impossible not to be charmed by Edgar Donahoe (Publishers Weekly)," and he’s back for another misguided adventure. When Edgar is expelled from college for drunkenly bellowing expletives from a dorm window at 3:00 am, he hitchhikes to Colorado and trains as a cook. A postcard arrives from...Forward
A rich and ingenious novel that succeeds brilliantly.
Teddy Maki is a Japanese-American jazz musician trapped in Tokyo and dragged into the Japanese army after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Thirty years later, Maki is a big star on Japanese TV, but wrestles with the guilt he’s been carrying since the war. This all-new edition of Soldiers in Hiding...Forward
A resplendent novel examining life in Seattle in the early 20th century.
Peter Donahue's debut novel Madison House, which won the 2005 Langum Prize for Historical Fiction, chronicles turn-of-the-century Seattle’s explosive transformation from frontier outpost to major metropolis. Maddie Ingram, owner of Madison House, and her quirky and endearing boarders find...Forward
Fascinating, humorous, and wise … it deserves its place on bookshelves along with other Northwest classics.
Michael Strelow weaves the story of a town and its mysteries in his debut novel, The Greening of Ben Brown, an Oregon Book Award Finalist for fiction 2005. Ben Brown, the protagonist, becomes a citizen of East Leven, Oregon, after he recovers from an electrocution that has not killed him but has...Forward
A beautifully written book. Impossible to put down.
This intense and compact novel crackles with obsession, betrayal, and madness, and was an Oregon Book Award Finalist for fiction 2005. As the narrator becomes fixated on his best friend’s girlfriend, his precarious hold on sanity rapidly deteriorates into delusion and violence. This story can be...Forward
A lovely, impressionistic book … idiosyncratic, entertaining, vulnerable and unpretentious.
Award-winning Australian journalist Mark Mordue invites you on his world trip that ranges from a Rolling Stones concert in Istanbul to talking with mullahs and junkies in Tehran, and from a cricket match in Calcutta to an S&M bar in New York, in addition to many points in between. Mordue chronicles...Forward
…A substantial, serious, and intelligent contribution to contemporary Jewish American writing.
Scott Nadelson’s interrelated short stories are graceful, vivid narratives that bring into sudden focus the spirit and the stubborn resilience of the Brickmans, a Jewish family of four living in suburban New Jersey. The central character, Daniel Brickman, forges obstinately through his own...Forward
A clear-eyed, compassionate, and rewarding book.
D'Arcy Fallon offers an irreverent, fly-on-the-wall view of the Lighthouse Ranch, a Christian commune she called home for three years in the mid-1970s. At eighteen years old, when life's questions overwhelmed her and reconciling her family past with her future seemed impossible, she accidentally...Forward
A wry and ergoty experience.
Set against the decaying halls of a San Diego rest home in the 1970s, God Clobbers Us All is the shimmering, hysterical, and melancholy account of eighteen-year-old surfer-boy orderly, Edgar Donahoe, and his struggles with romance, death, friendship, and an ill-advised affair with the wife of a...Forward
A modern-day Kerouac.
Poe Ballantine's risky personal essays are populated with odd jobs, eccentric characters, boarding houses, buses, and beer. He takes us along on his Greyhound bus journey through small town America (including a detour to Mexico) exploring what it means to be human. Written with piercing intimacy...Forward
A remarkable anthology.
The events of September 11, 2001, their myriad repercussions, and our varied and often contradictory responses to them have inspired this collection of West Coast writers’ responses to the terrorist acts. By virtue of history and geographic distance, the West Coast has developed a community...Forward
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