Wednesday, January 24th, 2018

Visonary science fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin has died.

Born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California, Le Guin loved fantasy and sci-fi as a child, though the latter fell out of her favor when she began to find the frequent themes of militaristic conquest overly repetitive and distasteful. 

Her studies in graduate school at Columbia University centered on Romance Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and her own (never published) first attempts at novel writing were set in a more realistic world.

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Friday, January 12th, 2018

Happy birthday to international bestselling author Haruki Murakami, known for such works as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, and, most recently, Men Without Women.

Born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1949, Murakami initially had no aspirations to become a writer.  He studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo, but after graduation, he and his wife opened a successful coffee house and jazz bar, and, as he told interviewer John Wesley Harding in an interview for BOMB magazine, "I didn’t write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn’t create anything at all."

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Our Brilliant booksellers are what really set us apart as a bookstore, so we like to take the opportunity to celebrate their accomplishments whenever we can.  This has been an especially big week for Jodie, one of our long-standing booksellers.  Not only is he now a published writer, but he's also the recipient of a Christmas Bonus from James Patterson!

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Thursday, October 19th, 2017

David Cornwell, better known by his pen name John Le Carré, is the British author of masterful spy thrillers, including A Perfect Spy and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

Born October 19th, 1931 in Poole, Dorset, Le Carré spent much of his childhood in boarding schools.  As a teenager studying abroad in Switzerland, he gained the attention of a British intelligence agent working in the area, and was asked to join MI6, the British intelligence agency.  He continued to work in intelligence during his university years at Oxford, where he received a degree in modern languages, and began drawing on his experiences to craft his first novel. 

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