Young adult books at the Columbia County Library. Some people have requested to move the YA section into the adult section because of what they call “obscene” material in 100 […]Read More
“Radio Free Olympia” is a book about a handful of characters, one of whom, Petr, is raised on the Olympic Peninsula. Without traditional parents, he’s also raised by the landscape. Petr guides readers through folklore of the peninsula by broadcasting spirits on a homemade radio. Reporter Lauren Gallup sat down with Jeffrey Dunn to discuss what inspired this surreal story Read More
The 2023 Washington State Book Awards were announced Tuesday, Sept. 26. (Courtesy: The Washington Center for the Book) Listen (Runtime 3:57) Read By Johanna Bejarano and Lauren Gallup The Washington […]Read More
Kids and caretakers watch a “Madeline” DVD in the basement of the Columbia County Library on a hot Tuesday afternoon. (Credit: Courtney Flatt, Northwest News Network.) Listen (Runtime 0:58) Read […]Read More
On Nov. 7, some voters will decide whether to dissolve the Columbia County Library in Dayton, Washington. If they choose to do so, librarians said it would be the first […]Read More
On Nov. 7, some voters will decide whether to dissolve the Columbia County Library in Dayton, Washington. If they choose to do so, librarians said it would be the first […]Read More
The Imagination Library of Washington has gifted 1.6 million books to early learners statewide. Dolly Parton began the program in her home state of Tennessee in 1995. Washington created its statewide program in 2022 and on Aug. 15, the country music star celebrated its reach here, with those who made it possible. Read More
Listen Read Two different school districts in the Columbia Basin are reviewing books in their libraries. Both Kennewick and Walla Walla school districts have had community complaints regarding several books. […]Read More
More Murrow News Stories COLFAX, Wash. – Don’t judge a book by its cover. We’ve all heard the saying, but the Whitman County Library takes it to a whole new […]Read More
Read at night, at the end of a too-long day, and characters will enter and exit the rooms of memory, trailing the scent of cigarette smoke and faded perfume. With Simon Van Booy's new novel, Night Came With Many Stars, open in front of me, I know the smell of summer afternoons and the pattern of paint spattered on a workingman's boots. I can hear the bugs in the dark and Read More
Ly Tran's memoir House of Sticks brings to mind both the story of The Three Little Pigs and the myth of the unassimilated other in Francois Truffaut's The Wild Child (L'Enfant Sauvage), in its unsentimental yet deeply moving examination of filial bond, displacement, war trauma, and poverty.Read More
With the sale of print books rising just over 8% and all unit sales of books surpassing 750 million, Black bookstores would play an integral role in feeding the nation's "sudden" appetite in the plight of Black people.Read More
Heaven is a raw, painful, and tender portrait of adolescent misery, reminiscent of both Elena Ferrante's fiction and Bo Burnham's 2018 film Eighth Grade. I cannot, in good conscience, endorse it without a warning: This book is very likely to make you cry.Read More
In the past year, and throughout history, narratives surrounding Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been rife with violence, hardship and grief. Yet they are so much more than their experiences of suffering — beyond tales of war and isolation, there is joy, confusion, anger and relief.Read More
"Son of the Storm" defines these tensions clearly from the start, as a prologue whirls readers into a society already at a dangerous crossroads, at once reaching for new levels of power, and busy walling itself off from risk. The effect is rich, wild, and occasionally dizzying.Read More
A Supreme Court justice is gravely ill, ideological control of the court hangs in the balance — throw in a ruthless president and an international conspiracy, and what you have is the plot of Stacey Abrams's new novel, While Justice Sleeps. Yes, that Stacey Abrams, the Georgia politician, and she's written a thriller ripped straight from the headlines — inspired by a Read More
Nước — the Vietnamese word for country and water — permeates Eric Nguyen's haunting debut. Signifying both a place of origin and the means by which a boat refugee departs from such place of origin, Things We Lost to the Water poignantly explores all the ways in which Vietnamese refugees are affected by country and water — in sum, by dislocation.Read More
You fall in love with a person, but you get a package deal. That's one of the big messages of two new novels that ruminate on love and family, particularly the family that's thrust upon you when you happen to mate with one of their kith or kin.Read More
In a virtual ceremony, Louise Erdrich was named the winner of this year's Aspen Words Literary Prize, for her novel The Night Watchman. The $35,000 prize goes to a work that "illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture."Read More
The new book World Travel: An Irreverent Guide is credited to Anthony Bourdain. But it was not really written by the bestselling author, chef and TV personality who died in 2018.Read More
To say that The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is a sly simulacrum of a rock oral history is to acknowledge only the most obvious of this novel's achievements. Walton aspires to so much more in this story about music, race and family secrets that spans five decades. And, all the glitzy, quick-change narrative styles don't detract attention from the core emotional power of her Read More
Libertie, a new novel by Kaitlyn Greenidge, is inspired by the life of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, the third African American woman to earn a medical degree in this country.Read More
The Life of the Mind is about endings that dribble to a close, the inexorable erosion of dreams, the slow leak of youthful buoyancy. It's about being young-ish at a time in history when it feels like many things might be fading away, including the natural world. The great accomplishment of Smallwood's taut novel is that while it is, indeed, about all those grim subjects, Read More
Children's author Beverly Cleary died Thursday in Carmel, Calif., her publisher HarperCollins said. She was 104 years old. Cleary was the creator of some of the most authentic characters in children's literature — Henry Huggins, Ralph S. Mouse and the irascible Ramona Quimby.Read More
In John Lanchester's collection, Reality and Other Stories, the supernatural manifests itself through cell phones, social media, computers, reality tv shows, and smart houses. "Signal," the opening story, was originally published in The New Yorker and it's a standout: an eerie homage to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.Read More
Once Upon a Quinceañera opens in Miami, the summer after Carmen Aguilar's senior year. Due to an incomplete internship credit, Carmen has yet to graduate high school. So she's working for an event company called Dreams Come True, where she dresses up as a singing, dancing Disney Princess for birthday parties. She's at one of these parties (dressed as Belle) with her best Read More
Decades later, Birmingham News Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist John Archibald is trying to do just that. Archibald comes from a long line of Methodist preachers in the South; his father had a pulpit at a critical time and place in American history — 1960s Alabama.Read More
With smoke-and-mirrors panache, The Committed -- Viet Thanh Nguyen's sequel to The Sympathizer -- continues the travails of our Eurasian Ulysses, now relocated to France and self-identified as Vo Danh (which literally means "Nameless"). Having survived a communist reeducation camp, a perilous sea crossing, and a long sojourn in an Indonesian refugee center, he arrives in Read More
NPR talks to Ahuja about the inspiration and process behind capturing the girls' ordinary lives: their hopes, dreams, anxieties and frustrations.Read More
Johnson says she wrote You Should See Me in a Crown for her readers, yes, but also for herself: "I wanted to remind myself that it is possible to be Black and queer and from where you're from, and still get all the best things out of life."Read More
The book is guided by the structure of time. We go full circle from June through to May; summer through to spring. There is a poem for each month, just as there is a poem for each feeling. Pleasure, annoyance, boredom, spiritual awakening — we feel it all. And as the poems travel through time, the poet's vulnerability and loneliness are palpable enough to, perhaps Read More
The roads taken by the family in The Removed, Brandon Hobson's new novel, are essential ones in this moment of national reclaiming. The story in this book is deeply resonant and profound, and not only because of its exquisite lyricism. It's also a hard and visceral entrance into our own reckoning as a society and civic culture with losses we created, injustices we allowed, Read More
Author Rachel Lynn Solomon based the story partly on her own experience. "Shay's journey mirrors mine in a lot of ways," she tells me via email. "We both studied journalism in college, and at the beginning of the book, she produces a talk show similar to the one I worked on in my early twenties. I also reported a handful of stories and produced a weekly pre-recorded show Read More
Some time into his new book The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, Charles Blow recalls hearing Harry Belafonte give a speech.Read More
At the start of the story, Fatima is a young Ghanian girl who has taken on the mantle of the Adopted Daughter of Death. Renamed Sankofa — an avian symbol of the West African Akan people, one that embodies the idea of harnessing the past to forge a better tomorrow — she wanders the land, inducing dread and awe in the towns she encounters, a living legend wielding the power Read More
Washington-based Regnery Publishing, which aims to spread the message of "prominent and lasting voices in American conservatism," announced on Monday it will publish the title in May.Read More
When now Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris was "accused" of being "too ambitious" on the campaign trail, it spurred her niece, activist and author Meena Harris, into action.Read More
Outlawed opens in an alternative America of 1894 that was torn asunder by a flu epidemic some 60 years earlier. West of the Mississippi, centralized government has been replaced by a patchwork of Independent Towns. One of the few things this fragmented America agrees on is that women are put on Earth to bear children. That's it.Read More
A little boy decked out in a pink rhinestone cowboy outfit travels around a farm and points out things that bring him joy. "A is for adventure. Every day is a brand new start. B is for boots — whether they're big or small, short or tall. C is for country," the story goes. This is the basic premise of the new kids book C Is for Country written by Lil Nas X, the Read More
Blues legend Robert Johnson has been mythologized as a backwoods loner, his talent the result of selling his soul to the devil. Wrong and wrong again, according to Johnson's younger stepsister, who lives in Amherst, Mass. She tells his true story in Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, a memoir about growing up with her brother she published in June.Read More
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with British writer Robert Harris about the legacy of John le Carré, whom he's called "one of the great post-war British novelists" and who died Saturday at age 89.Read More
Manuel Vilas' quiet, intensely sad new, about a middle-aged man trying to connect with his estranged family while thinking a lot of deep thoughts about death, requires patience, but it's worth it.Read More
Jordan Scott is a poet, a master of words, and a stutterer. His new kids' book, gorgeously illustrated by Sydney Smith, chronicles his childhood journey towards coming to terms with his stutter.Read More
The third volume in Kuang's Poppy War series is out now. She grounded the story in history, both her own and China's; it follows a passionate, ruthless young woman who becomes a military leader.Read More
Artist and writer Lauren Redniss mixes art, design, and rigorous research with a prose style that is at once assertive, journalistic and poetic to create a book like no other.Read More
This year's National Book Awards — announced in a first-ever virtual streaming ceremony — went mostly to writers of color, as the foundation that gives the prizes vowed to be more inclusive.Read More
The British author writes beautifully of her own recent bout with a personal winter, a period when she felt low and overwhelmed — and aims to help others to embrace their winters.Read More
Bridges was the little girl depicted in that famous Norman Rockwell painting — the first Black student at her New Orleans elementary school. Now, she's written a book to tell kids her story.Read More
Jess Walter's new novel an adventure tale based on actual events in the early days of the last century's labor movement — which was much wilder and bloodier than most people remember.Read More
Mike Curato's new young adult graphic novel Flamer follows a teenager struggling with self-hate and all the different parts of his identity — being a Catholic, a Boy Scout, and being gay.Read More
