Local press Hawthorne Books has an astonishingly good track record. Their titles include Monica Drake's Clown Girl; Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water; Tom Spanbauer's Faraway Places (his first, hard to find until Hawthorne reissued it; not my favorite of his, but... if you're a Spanbauer fan, you want more Spanbauer); Frank Meeink's Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead; and plenty of other stuff I haven't read that is probably outstanding as well. Plus, their books are pretty. French flaps! I like a book that puts a little effort into itself.

Anyway, to celebrate their 10-year-anniversary, Hawthorne Books is having a big sale—all of their titles have been marked down to $10. My current default response to people asking for book recommendations is Game of Thrones, but if you've got some issue with 6000-page fantasy epics, a) WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU and b) you could do a whole helluva lot worse than any of the books in Hawthorne's catalogue.