Griffin Bay Bookstore

Short-story authors Diana Xin & Hillary Behrman present their books. In Book of Exemplary Women, Xin's debut short story collection, women across different stages of life—and death—resist erasure and make their stories known. Contending with scorned lovers, bothersome ghosts, and their own unruly desires, these women hold the world at bay while holding each other close. They reach past geographical and generational divides to find communion and conviction. Behrman’s Lake Effect takes you from unmapped mountain ridges to wild urban places, and the outskirts of a desert outpost—exploring the many ways we love, labor, and isolate ourselves. In these stories, characters are rarely headed where they want to be.

The settling of the American West remains an indelible panorama in the world of the imagination. Pioneers. Cowboys. Indians. The movement of American hegemony across a wild and untamed continent created frictions and power struggles that reverberate to this day. “AN ACT OF FAITH is a collection of short stories and visions from that era, encompasses all the magic, pathos and moral courage it took for a people to progress and a land to change. David will share stories of his family that became homesteaders in the territory that is now Washington.

Join Island Verse for an evening with Rebecca Woolf, bestselling memoirist, feminist writer, and fierce advocate for women telling the complex and piercing and paradigm-shifting truth of their lives.