We are delighted to help celebrate publication of award-winning Seattle chef/owner Ethan Stowell's first book, Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen (Ten Speed Press, co-authored by Leslie Miller). In this beautifully produced book, the proprietor of Union, Tavolata, How to Cook a Wolf, Olives & Anchovies, and the new Staple & Fancy brings the best of Italian tradition and Pacific Northwest bounty together. Ethan Stowell's honors include a James Beard Award nomination as Best Chef Northwest, citation as one of 2008's Best New Chefs in America by Food & Wine magazine. National publications with rave reviews of his restaurants have come from Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Wine Spectator, GQ, and more. Jill Lightner, editor of Edible Seattle magazine (www.edibleseattle.com), will conduct an onstage interview with Ethan as part of the proceedings. This should be fun ... and leave one hungry for more.

One of the most accomplished novelists at work today, Mona Simpson makes this very welcome Elliott Bay return. Starting with her breakout debut, the enduringly popular Anywhere But Here in 1986, and with each of her three novels since, she has read at Elliott Bay. My Hollywood (Knopf) tells the story of two seemingly very different families' lives—lives deeply examined and explored in contrast with superficial concerns suggested in a Hollywood setting. "This big gorgeous book is at once an entertaining, socially astute upstairs-downstairs drama and a profound meditation on the shifting and often competing demands of love and work in a woman's life. One more time, Mona Simpson has burrowed deep into the American family to extract the shivering truth about the many trade-offs women face in raising children today. Lola, the Filipina nanny at the heart of the book, is surely one of the great literary creations of our time." - Michelle Huneven. "Simpson's massive gifts—for unflinching precision, for artful indirection, and for the deft unfurling of imagery—are on vivid display in My Hollywood, a book that carries us down deep, into the darkness of two distinct worlds, and lights them up, finding all the comedy in the ways they are the same world, and all the tragedy in the unbridgeable distance between them." - Michael Chabon.