Extended Holiday Hours

Starting today, Broadway Books will be open extended hours on Sundays through December 21st. For your shopping convenience, our holiday hours on Sunday are 10 am to 7 pm. The rest of the week we are open from 10 am to 9 pm. Want to know if we have a book in stock? Just give us a call at 503-284-1726. We'd be happy to hold it for you -- and even have it gift wrapped and ready for you to pick up. If we don't have it, we can likely get it for you in just a day or two. Thanks for thinking local first! We appreciate your support.

Coolest Book in the Store Right Now

Right now, the coolest book in the store -- bar none -- is Birdscapes: A Pop-Up Celebration of Bird Songs in Stereo Sound, by Miyoko Chu with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Most books with bird calls allow you to hear one bird's song at a time. Birdscapes offers you seven elaborately produced, full-color pop-up portrayals of various bird habitats with multiple bird songs from those habitats in stereo! When you open any of these individual spreads, you feel as if you are practically out in the habitat yourself. Powered by replaceable AAA batteries, the book offers a Sonoran Desert, a Pacific Seabird Colony, an Eastern Deciduous Forest, an Arctic Tundra, a Cypress Swamp, the Grasslands of North America's Great Plains, and a Pacific Rain Forest. This beautiful $60 book would make an excellent gift for any bird lover. I can't stop looking at -- and listening to -- this magical book.

That's a lot of candles!

February 14, 2009, marks the 150th birthday of the state of Oregon. To honor this sesquicentennial (try saying THAT word three times fast), Matt Love and the Nestucca Spit Press have just released Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon's Sesquicentennial Anthology, A Merging of Past and Present Oregon Voices and Stories. Edited by Matt Love, the volume contains works both contemporary and historical and includes writings by Kim Stafford, Don Berry, Kathleen Dean Moore, H.L. Davis, Melissa Madenski, Monica Drake, Joe Kurmaskie, Henk Pander, Ken Babbs, Ken Kesey, Jeff Baker, Barry Lopez, Cheryl Strayed, and many many more. It concludes with the poem William Stafford, former Poet Laureate of Oregon, read at the opening session of the 1987 Oregon House of Representatives. This wonderful treasure of all that is Oregon can be yours for only $30. What a wonderful holiday gift this would make.

Ken Kesey Award Winner

Just out today in paperback: Bearing the Body, by Corvallis author Ehud Havazelet. The book was just selected as this year's winner of the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction in the 2008 Oregon Book Awards. It was also named a New York Times notable book of the year. We've got copies!

Clever Pop-Up Book

Click on the link below to stroll through the pages of this clever new pop-up book from Roaring Book Press. Robert Sabuda, master paper engineer and king of all things pop-up, calls ABC3D, by Marion Bataille, "one of the most delightful and innovative pop-up books I have ever seen." Only $19.95 -- what a great gift!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnZr0wiG1Hg

Signed First Editions!

Speaking of Wild Beauty, we have signed first editions of this spectacular volume. This book has knocked our socks off, and we were thrilled to host John Laursen at the store recently, discussing the making of this book -- which was literally years in the making. The book is a splendid combination of scholarship, history, and art that illuminates the rich photographic heritage of the Gorge with 134 images by three dozen photographers. The amazing photos -- many never before available to the general public -- and insightful text are printed on yummy archival paper, and the whole package was produced locally. At only $75, this book makes an excellent gift -- especially for yourself! We also have unframed posters for $20 and boxes of cards (10 cards with 10 separate images) for $15. But they're all going fast!

PNBA Book Award Short List

The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association has just announced its first-ever Book Awards short list! The titles were selected by a committee of independent booksellers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. The following twelve books were chosen from a list of more than 100 nominees, all of which were written by Northwest authors and published in 2008.

• American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon, by Steven Rinella (Spiegel & Grau)
• The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein (Harper)
• Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs, by Buddy Levy (Bantam Books)
• The Eleventh Man, by Ivan Doig (Harcourt)
• The English Major, by Jim Harrison (Grove Press)
• Guernica: A Novel, by Dave Boling (Bloomsbury)
• The Jewel of Medina: A Novel, by Sherry Jones (Beaufort Books)
• Little Hoot, Jen Corace, illustrator (Chronicle Books)
• Selected Poems: 1970-2005, by Floyd Skloot (Tupelo Press)
• Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska, by Seth Kantner (Milkweed Editions)
• Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957, by Terry Toedtemeier and John Laursen (The Northwest Photography Archive & Oregon State University Press)
• The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life, by Floyd Skloot (University of Nebraska Press)

Congratulations to all of the nominees! The winners will be announced in January 2009 -- stay tuned to this blog for more information!

Get Happy!

A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as "very happy" spend more time reading and socializing. The study appears in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research.

Come on in and socialize with us and we will gladly direct you to some great new reading material -- and we can all be happy together!

Twilight on the Big Screen

Last night the filmed-in-Oregon movie based on the book Twilight hit the theaters to astoundingly large and enthusiastic crowds. This romantic thriller about teen vampires and the human girl who falls in love has taken the teen -- and adult -- world by storm. Check out all four books in the series by Stephenie Meyer: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. If you've read all of those and are hungry for more, here are some ideas: The Host, Meyer's first adult novel, a science fiction tale with an eye for romance; Marked, Book One in the House of Night teen vampire series by P.C. and Kristin Cast; and the Sookie Stackhouse vampire mystery novels by Charlaine Harris -- the basis for the new HBO series True Blood.

National Book Awards

Here are the winners of the National Book Award, just announced this week:

• Nonfiction: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed (Norton)
• Fiction: Shadow Country, by Peter Matthiessen (Modern Library)
• Poetry: Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems, by Mark Doty (HarperCollins)
• Young People's Literature: What I Saw and How I Lied, by Judy Blundell (Scholastic)

Reserve your copies today! 503-284-1726

A Thousand Splendid Suns

The wait is almost over! A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini's follow-up novel to The Kite Runner, will be available in paperback starting next Tuesday. The book is as grim -- maybe even more so -- as his first, but it's a gripping hard-to-put-down read. The man knows how to tell a story, that's for sure! If you want us to hold a copy for you, give a shout. 503-284-1726.

A Bag When You Need It

Yes, it's true. The compact little package Gloria is holding in the top photo folds out into the handy and oh-so-chic shoulder bag Gloria is modeling in the lower photo. When you don't need the bag, it easily folds back into its own little built-in pouch, which is about 3-1/2 inches square. Ever taken a trip or gone shopping and wished you had an extra bag? Now you can easily tuck one in your purse or backpack or suitcase to be there when you need it. And no stuff sack to lose, as it's part of the bag itself. Only $7.95 each -- what a perfect stocking stuffer!

John Keeble Reading

Last night John Keeble read from his novel Yellowfish, recently reissued by the University of Washington Press. He had an enthusiastic audience, including Robin Cody, author of Ricochet River and Voyage of a Summer Sun. Signed copies of Yellowfish are available at the store! (John on left; Robin on right.)

Nam Le -- Writer to watch

Nam Le, author of The Boat, a wonderful collection of stories, has won the Dylan Thomas Prize, which honors writers under the age of 30. Le was born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, and lives in New York. The Boat, his debut publication, is a wonderful collection of stories. Peter Florence, chairman of the judges for the prize, says that Le is, "in this panel's opinion, a phenomenal literary talent." I definitely concur with this opinion!