Arundel Books

10/29/2026

👻🍂🎃🦇 Halloween finds in our children’s section!

10/15/2026

The highly anticipated new edition of the definitive story of Seattle’s early jazz scene!

From 1912 to 1961, Seattle’s Jackson Street pulsated around the clock with the lively rhythms, energetic harmonies, and inimitable melodies of jazz. This creative atmosphere launched the careers of Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, and Ernestine Anderson, as well as Bumps Blackwell, who produced Little Richard’s first hit records. Some of the era’s great touring musicians played the city as well, including Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, and many of them sat in on the music-making sessions that took place in the after-hours spots and bottle clubs. In 1948 two dozen nightclubs lined Jackson Street, overflowing with jazz music, dancing patrons, and bootleg liquor.

Drawing on oral histories and interviews with more than eighty musicians as well as Black newspapers and archival sources, Paul de Barros reconstructs a world of nightclubs, speakeasies, and jam sessions. The story unfolds against the social realities that shaped Seattle’s jazz culture: racially segregated musicians’ unions, the effects of Prohibition, and a city government whose corruption allowed an underground nightlife to flourish. In this distinctive environment, Black musicians forged a thriving musical culture largely ignored by the mainstream press.

Fully updated throughout, this second edition features information that has come to light since the first edition was published in 1993, as well newly discovered archival photographs, maps of key sites, and an expanded discography.

10/08/2026

Anne Carson, Canadian poet, essayist, and classicist, has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy announced the award on October 8, 2026, recognizing her “bold and inventive oeuvre” that creates new forms for contemporary literature through a playful dialogue with classical traditions.

Notable works include Autobiography of Red, Eros the Bittersweet, and The Beauty of the Husband. She joins a select group of laureates, becoming only the 19th woman to receive the prize and the third Canadian to win, following Alice Munro (2013) and Saul Bellow.

Carson, born in Toronto in 1950, is celebrated for blending verse, prose, and translation while drawing heavily on ancient Greek and Roman literature.

But Carson’s significance lies not simply in what she writes about, but in the way she writes. A scholar of Greek literature, she doesn’t treat the classics as museum artifacts, preserved behind glass; she treats them as living, breathing sources of energy. In her work, fragments of Sappho and other ancient texts collide with the urgencies of modern life… love, sexuality, grief, celebrity, loneliness, and alienation.

Carson transforms Sappho 31 from a poem of jealousy into a poem of desire so intense that the self begins to unravel. Carson invites us into Sappho’s world not by simply translating her words, but by letting us feel what happens when desire becomes so powerful that the self begins to dissolve. Her work lives in that strange space between the ancient and the immediate, where love, loss, silence, and the body blur together. Even a fragment can feel like an entire world opening.

Visit us online and in the shop to add the brilliance of Anne Carson to your collection.

10/07/2026

It’s and we are here to celebrate.

Since 1982, week has been in place to encourage readers to examine challenged literary works, illuminate the power of literature, and to draw attention to the danger that exists when restraints are imposed on the availability of information in a free society.

Our team of booksellers are ready to suggest your next favorite read, and our front window display is filled with books that keep the mind and heart open!

10/05/2026

Sunsets on the corner of 1st and Jackson ✨

09/30/2026

Dive into literature’s ultimate interactive riddle. A book written in the language of dreams where the final word circles back to the very first.

Finnegan’s Wake has no definitive beginning or end, offering an endless, rule-breaking puzzle that mirrors a continuous cycle of time, memory, and human history.

Seen here is a copy found in our rare fiction shelf and also available to ship worldwide to you. This First Printing is from the library of academic/poet William Matchett and features his notes in the margins throughout the whole text (guess he read the book from cover to cover!) Beside the notes and a humorous magazine clipping to the front pastedown, many of Matchett’s notes are informative and add to the textual reading. He taught for many years at the UW in Seattle and was a close colleague with Theodore Roethke.

09/29/2026