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Reading Seattle: The City in Prose

May 5th, 2004 · No Comments

Yesterday’s Seattle Times printed a review of a book I’d like to read (put it on hold at the library – I’m #2 in line). I think I saw it in a window while walking through downtown Winslow the other day. The anthology Reading Seattle: The City in Prose attempts to disprove a 19th century historian’s proclamation: “Puget Sound has no literature.”

Co-editor Peter Donahue, in his introduction, is an all-out booster of our city’s prose product, describing it as “geographically savvy, smart and subtle, historically informed, diverse in both style and content, and highly readable.” He weighs the reasons why the urban Northwest has taken a back seat to the great outdoors in our best-known local literature and comes to the conclusion that the region’s “stunning natural beauty and frontier past” are the culprits, always shunting its high rises, back alleys and apartment dwellers unceremoniously aside.

Tags: books