Fiction

  • Tiny people, big adventures

    Sometimes, especially at night when the world is dark and quiet, I hear strange noises in my house. Rhythmic little taps that fade to nothing. The squeak of a cupboard opening in an empty room. A faint sound like distant voices coming from up near the eaves, where no human ought to be. My first… Continue reading

  • Mean, Rainy Streets

    Weary of the weather? And its only January? Try this: turn up your trenchcoat collar against the wind, snap down your fedora to the rain, put some moody jazz on your iPod, and pretend you’re the star of your own film noir. Seattle is a great setting for hardboiled crime. Here are some Northwest crime titles to get… Continue reading

  • A few of our Fiction staff’s favorites from 2008

    The time between December 26 and January 1 is always pretty meager when it comes to news. I try to avoid TV news, radio shows and newspapers that fill their time and pages with their “look back at the year” and “top ten this” and “top ten that” features. Yet I absolutely canNOT resist any… Continue reading

  • The Women

    “Anger and resentment can stop you in your tracks. That’s what I know now. It needs nothing to burn but the air and the life that it swallows and smothers. It’s real, though – the fury, even when it isn’t. It can change you… turn you… mold you and shape you into something you’re not.… Continue reading

  • From the Page to the Screen: Revolutionary Road

    Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road is a novel that has been lauded by critics and adored by other writers, but it has not garnered the same attention it deserves from readers. Sure, readers keep discovering Yates, but he doesn’t get the same kind of name recognition as other American writers like John Updike and John Cheever.… Continue reading

  • Staff Favorites: Dogs and strays.

    Travels with Charley: In Search of America, by John Steinbeck If this book doesn’t make you want to take a road trip, I don’t know what will. The first paragraph so completely captures the urge to travel that I feel profoundly moved every time I read it. At age 58, Steinbeck sets out to rediscover… Continue reading

  • Loving in Limbo

    In the movie Wristcutters: A Love Story we find Zia, played by Patrick Fuget, who is severely depressed after his girlfriend breaks up with him and decides to commit suicide by slitting his wrists. Too bad the pearly gates are not his afterlife, but rather a rundown desert limbo with fellow suicide committers. When Zia finds… Continue reading

  • Historical Fiction

    OK, I admit it, I know more about history from reading novels than from reading nonfiction.  But what’s wrong with that?  If you read novelists who are sticklers about historical accuracy, you can enjoy a good story, immerse yourself in a different time, and learn something in the process. Unlike some readers who never want to… Continue reading

  • The Secret Lives of Authors: Literary gossip

    What does it mean to know a lot about writers’ personal lives? That I am a literary snoop?  Why is it that I can remember that Jean Korelitz Hanff is married to poet Paul Muldoon, that the mother of  YA author Margo Rabb died at a young age of cancer, that Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman… Continue reading

  • Some books we’re thankful for.

    Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote Capote’s first published novel displays thoroughly his skills at poetic description. This is a story of illusions from the inner self of Joel, a sensitive young man, as he copes with the strange household that becomes his home. Coming from New Orleans, he passes through Biloxi and with… Continue reading

  • Book review: The Iron Hunt by Marjorie M. Liu

    By day, Maxine Kiss is a super-powered demon hunter with inhuman strength and intricately tattooed, armor-plated skin. By night, the tattoos peel away and become a pack of deadly demons standing between Maxine and the creatures from across the Veil. When the veil drops, it’s up to Maxine and her demon “boys” to round up… Continue reading

  • See the world from a different point of view: Read a book by an animal

    Woof! Woof! Miaow! Miaow! Books with talking dogs and cats are as numerous as feathers on a hen. Witness Sight Hound by Pam Houston or Caroline Alexander’s Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition: The Remarkable Journal of Shackleton’s Polar-Bound Cat. Our canine and feline companions are forever sticking their little wet noses into criminal investigations, as well.… Continue reading

  • The End of the Alphabet, by C.S. Richardson

    While checking in a batch of library materials recently my attention was caught by a little book and on a whim I checked it out. It was a novella by C. S. Richardson entitled The End of the Alphabet, and while I was drawn initially to its theme of travel my interest was held by… Continue reading

  • Combining noir and urban fantasy

    In A Kiss Before the Apocalypse by Thomas E. Sniegoski, Death goes missing and the angels turn to the one person with the unique skill set they need to find him. Remy Chandler is a private investigator living in Boston and he isn’t all that surprised when some of God’s worker bees show up asking… Continue reading

  • Sea Monsters

    The Telegraph and Yahoo News have given me nightmares for life by reporting on a story involving a giant catfish in India with a taste for human flesh.  Yes, you read correctly.  Catfish. Human. Flesh.  The alleged Bunyanesque catfish is also known as a goonch which have been known to appear in the Great Kali… Continue reading

  • Julia Glass: Book Group Darling

    When Julia Glass’ first book, Three Junes, came out in 2002 and won the National Book Award, it became a book group trailblazer. Book groups everywhere rejoiced in a new author of contemporary fiction whose writing was fresh and confident and featured complex, memorable characters. You’d think that would be easy to do, but it… Continue reading

  • Is Political Satire Redundant?

    You know how when something’s on your mind, you start seeing it everywhere? I find this to be especially the case in the libary, where lately the red, white and blue covers of political fiction have been jumping off the shelves at me. Did you know that Senator Barbara Boxer wrote a novel – a… Continue reading

  • Mishima’s Sword

    Mishima’s Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend  by Christopher Ross. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I lived in a southern city in China called Guangzhou. At that time Guangzhou was more vibrant than ever.  People were pouring into this so-called Window of the South Wind city to look for opportunity. Many… Continue reading