Books

Can you eat the aloe from your aloe plant? Local artist Kate Reed found the answer in a book in the library, while looking for a reference photo of the plant. On her Instagram account, @partykrill, you can watch her paint an overhead view of a sprawling aloe plant, with two white gym shoes peeking through the interstices of the leaves, based on a picture she found in her daughter’s school library.

The term “scientific fiction,” a subtle adjustment to science fiction, is often used to describe weighty literary novels about cutting-edge technologies and big ideas, and it’s an apt way to describe Aja Gabel’s riveting second novel, “Lightbreakers.” Its trafficking in theoretical and experimental physics comes in service of a moving story about art, time, loss and the possibility of love.

“Brigands & Breadknives” is fantasy author Travis Baldree’s third book in the “Legends & Latte” series, this time starring Fern, the potty-mouthed bookseller originally introduced in “Bookshops & Bonedust.” Baldree will take the Northwest Passages stage Monday at the Montvale Event Center, where he will discuss this latest publication.

Travis Baldree brings what is called cozy fantasy into a trilogy with “Brigands & Breadknives,” providing a story that reads like an animated feature.

LOS ANGELES – It’s a rare gray Saturday in Los Angeles; raindrops collect along a window overlooking a row of trees at Le Parc at Melrose.

Last week, a group of well-read women gathered at Erika Burden’s home. They dined on a rigatoni and ricotta casserole, served with homemade bread, and they talked books – specifically, “The Catcher in the Rye.”

The Book “Nascent” – a young adult dystopian science fiction novel set in the near future – came to Spokane author Bitty Balducci in a dream.

Poetry isn’t just for the romantics, the literary types or the melancholic. Poetry can be for everyone. American poet Lucille Clifton said, “Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.”

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, who will be a writing mentor for Whitworth University’s new, low-residency Master of Fine Arts program, said that, despite trying to write about other things, her work always returns to isolation. Her latest short story collection, “Outer Stars,” is no exception. The collection won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in short fiction, and will be released by University of North Texas Press on Saturday.

It’s November. It’s dark. It’s cold. It’s cozy. It’s time to write. At least that’s the case for those taking part in the annual National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as NaNoWriMo.

How did Margaret Atwood get to be so powerful?

“I am not the sort of person to throw a lavish party, but this is no ordinary party and the thing that makes it necessary is no ordinary loneliness,” Sonora Jha wrote in the opening of her latest book, “Intemperance.” “After nine years of revolutionary solitude (except for a couple of brief dalliances), I find myself a woman in her mid-fifties, caught in the shudder of the planet’s mid-2020s, now seeking communion with a man, despite everything we know.”

It’s about time a novel tackled the challenges that intersect aging and desire. Old people having sex has long been a taboo subject in a culture that masquerades aging as an undesirable fate. We need concealer and anti-wrinkles cream to hide the battle scars of a well-lived life.

Post Falls artist and author Keith Harrop invites readers to take a step back in time and into his enthralling imaginative world.

In “The Serious World,” the latest collection from former Spokane Poet Laureate Laura Read, the poem “Dear Sylvia,” addressed Sylvia Plath, writing:

Nearly four years ago, on a cloudless Friday afternoon in downtown Los Angeles, the 13-year conservatorship saga of Britney Spears was declared officially over. The storyline had been in the news for months, largely thanks to the efforts of the “Free Britney” movement, and I was one of a dozen or so reporters who sprinted out of the hearing room at Stanley Mosk Courthouse that day to dial their editors or whip out their laptops.

Since 2018, Eduardo Chavez has been on film tours promoting his documentary, “Hailing Cesar,” to colleges and high school students which chronicles his journey to better understand the legacy of his grandfather, labor leader Cesar Chavez.

In “The Reformatory,” author Tananarive Due blends historical fiction and horror to tell the story of the Gracetown School for Boys, a fictionalization of the institution Dozier School for Boys set in Florida in 1950.

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Oct. 11, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana. (Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.) HARDCOVER FICTION 1. "The Intruder" by Freida McFadden (Poisoned Pen) Last week: — 2. ...