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New Releases! New Releases!

"Part eulogy, part cultural cautionary tale, this book is Seattle's collective conscience -- reminding us of who we used to be." -- Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Seattle is built on booms—logging, fishing, aerospace, and now tech. This anthology gathers essays, interviews, photography, and comix to reconstruct community hubs lost to growth. From the settlements of Native American tribes to the incubators of grunge, from a foxxxy cabaret to an Old Spaghetti Factory, Ghosts of Seattle Past provides an eyes-on-the-street view of a city in flux.

The Ghosts of Seattle Past anthology comes at a critical point: Seattle had the country’s steepest rent hikes in 2015. The city is becoming a national focal point for issues of development. Both recent transplants and the old guard are trying to figure out how to live in the new landscape. Through their warm, conversational, whip-smart voices, the city speaks not only to the current boom, but also to longer-brewing problems of segregation, queer erasure, and colonization. Tracing the issues across six hand-drawn maps, Seattle’s best-known artists (including Elissa Washuta, Kate Lebo, and Paul Constant) join community lynchpins (including Chief Seattle’s great-great-great-great grandson) in a dialogue as incisively political as it is richly human.

"With the emotional precision and eye of a poet, Dunic traverses the vast expanse of Asia, examining how people—and nature—wound each other, but how love is the specific balm that heals. Her travels allow us to see details—scarlet, a mynah bird, a fissure—through her eyes. Her inward eye allows us to feel the pain and pleasure of a singular love. Dunic weaves a wondrous, mysterious and magical web with a deft touch that is as light as it is tight." -- Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye

In this teeming lyrical novel, love is remembered as a jungle of flora and fauna cleaved by tectonic shock and human fault. Our restless narrator stirs between Singapore, Japan, and British Columbia with prose that engulfs like radioactive mist. Personal, geographic, political, and cultural environments take on one another's qualities, culminating in the Tohoku earthquake that shatters Japan.

Leanne Dunic is a multidisciplinary artist and is the singer/guitarist for the band The Deep Cove.

Hiroko, headstrong and irreverent, uses her father's money to move to New York, promising to become a famous artist. Intolerant of weakness in others, she crumbles in the face of her own shortcomings. Sakiko, fragile and unsure in 1960s San Francisco, falls into marriage with a brazen Californian artist. From catty carpooling moms to manipulative stoners, abortions to adultery, White Elephant is a vivid book from a seasoned artist turned writer. Mako Idemitsu, daughter of Rockefelleresque petroleum executive Sazo Idemitsu, reconfigures her own family discord to reflect on the binds of being female in this quietly complex English translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter.

"Meet Me at the Bamboo Table is a thought-provoking book that challenges you to think about what's on your dinner table in a whole new light." — Simon Majumdar, author of Fed, White, and Blue: Finding America with My Fork, and Judge on Food Network’s Cutthroat Kitchen

In our ever-more-globalized world, how better to connect than with food, and who better to connect us than a chowhound communications professor? Crofts concocts a multimedia feast of photos, “sketchnotes,” and vignettes, inviting us to everything from Thanksgiving in Germany to a Lunar New Year dumpling party in Seattle. The result is a beautiful meditation on how food nourishes community.

“A mystery, a quest, a mother and a child, an earthquake and a discovery: Are You An Echo? folds poetry and history into recent events, resurrecting the work of Misuku Kaneko and bringing the gentle grace of her poems to a new generation.”

— Lauren Redniss, author of Radioactive, finalist for the National Book Award

In early-1900s Japan, Misuzu Kaneko grows from precocious bookworm to instantly-beloved children’s poet. But her life ends prematurely, and Misuzu’s work is forgotten. Decades later her poems are rediscovered—just in time to touch a new generation devastated by the tsunami of 2011. This picture book features Misuzu’s life story plus a trove of her poetry in English and the original Japanese.

This sprawling novel about modern China by best-selling author Cho Chongnae is our first foray into Korean literature.

Against a backdrop of rapidly morphing urban landscapes, readers meet migrant workers, Korean manufacturers out to save a few bucks, high-flying venture capitalists, street thugs, and shakedown artists. The picture of China that emerges is at turns unsettling, awe-inspiring, and heart-breaking. Cho deftly portrays a giant awakening to its own raw, volatile, and often uncontrollable power.

The Human Jungle was published as a trilogy of novels in Korean, each of which sold more than one million copies. Translators Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton have combined these into a single English-language edition. The book will be available in our Pike Place Market and online stores in the second half of August and in bookstores around the world soon after that.