Books

Pulitzer prize-winning author Ed Humes spoke to more than a hundred students and community members Thursday evening at the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center at Gonzaga University with the hope of getting Spokanites to engage with what could be the most consequential challenge the country is facing: waste.

Big league talent spread across the 1946 Spokane Indians baseball team, until lives and dreams were shattered by a bus crash nearly 80 years ago. The bus heading to Bremerton began descending Snoqualmie Pass, tumbled off the highway and plummeted into a ravine before bursting into flames. Nine players died. Others who survived were badly injured. Three members who weren't on the bus escaped it all, but the memories never faded. Those individual players' stories, along with influences of post-World War II times, captivated Eric Vickrey, author of the new "Season of Shattered Dreams: Postwar Baseball, The Spokane Indians and a Tragic Bus Crash That Changed Everything."

At one time the “foundational betrayal” in Simone Gorrindo’s marriage was her husband’s career in the military. For a pacifist-raised editor in New York City, it was difficult moving to a military base in Georgia with a full-time job of being a supportive spouse to someone fighting terrorism overseas.

Microplastics are in the food we eat, the water we drink, the refreshing IPAs at our local brewery. All told, we munch on a credit card’s worth of plastic every day and probably will for the rest of our lives.

The planet is facing a number of environmental crises, and the impacts are all too present here in the West.

“The Wives” hit close to home.

The 26th edition of Eastern Washington University’s Get Lit! Festival kicks off this week, offering several days of writing workshops, meet the author events and panel discussions. The headliner this year is Carmen Maria Machado, best known for her short story collection titled “Her Body and Other Parties” and her memoir, “In the Dream House.”

In “Sleeping Giants,” Rene Denfeld tells an awakening story that weighs the complex balance between human cruelty and kindness.

On its face, “Sleeping Giants” can appear like a dark story focused on a woman searching for truth after learning her 9-year-old biological brother was swept away by waves crashing on a remote Oregon beach 20 years before.

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, March 23, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2024 Circana. (Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2024, PWxyz LLC.) HARDCOVER FICTION 1. "The Women: A Novel" by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin's) Last week: 1 ...

In May 2008, Spokane banker Joel Armstrong had been keeping tabs on a mother duck and her 10 eggs, nested on the concrete awning outside his second-floor downtown office window, for weeks.

Eighty years ago, an extraordinary collegiate basketball game took place. It’s such a shining moment, it’s madness that March 12 isn’t an annual hoops holiday. On that Sunday morning in 1944, when most folks (including local cops) were at church, the Duke University medical school team traveled across town to play the all-Black North Carolina College Eagles behind locked gym doors. “The Secret Game” – a legitimate contest with a referee and a game clock but no spectators – was the first college game in the segregated South with Black and white players on the same court. The Eagles’ fast break helped them torch Duke, 88-44, but the competitive juices were still flowing afterward, so the young men did something even more extraordinary: On a Jim Crow hardwood, at a time when Black teams weren’t even allowed in the NCAA or NIT tournaments, they split up the teams and ran it back, shirts and skins.

Everyone should know the name Percival Everett by now. His "Also by Percival Everett" lists read like discographies, revealing more than 30 novels with resonant, sometimes playful titles such as "The Trees," a Booker Prize contender, or "Dr. No," published by Graywolf Press. Movie "American Fiction," which just won a screenplay Oscar, is based on his 2001 satire "Erasure."

Madeline Miller, the New York Times bestselling author of Greek mythological retellings “Circe” and “The Song of Achilles,” is virtually coming to Spokane.

Growing up in Spokane, Minda Dentler once handed water to Bloomsday runners as a volunteer, but competing in events of that sort seemed off-limits to her.

There was once a slogan, “You’ve read the book. Now see the movie.” These days, if one is lucky, the opposite might apply. But still I wonder: If you loved “Poor Things,” the Oscar-nominated film starring Emma Stone, will you read the book? That would be Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, “the most sheerly entertaining pseudo-Victorian romance since A.S. Byatt’s ‘Possession,’ ” as I put it in my 1993 review of the American edition. Gray – who died in 2019 at the age of 85 – was arguably the major Scottish literary figure of the 1980s and ’90s. “Poor Things” is just one title in his wide-ranging bibliography, though he singled it out as his “happiest novel.”

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Feb. 24, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2024 Circana. (Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2024, PWxyz LLC.) HARDCOVER FICTION 1. "The Women: A Novel" by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin's) Last week: 1 ...

The title “The Year of the Locust” suggests a novel of biblical proportions. And it is.