Welcome to Bloomsbury Books
An independent bookstore in downtown Ashland, Oregon
Bloomsbury Books is an independent bookstore on Main Street in downtown Ashland, Oregon, home of the world-famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Founded in 1980, we specialize in contemporary fiction and children’s books, but also carry a wide variety of nonfiction and local authors, and, of course, have a large Shakespeare and theater section.
Upcoming Events
Latest Podcast
Event Live Stream
Here is a link to a Facebook live stream of Gary Lark and Marc Janssen reading their poetry on Monday, 4/3/2023.
Bloomsbury Recommends
We hope you enjoy our favorite Bloomsbury Picks as much as we have!
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The Hunter by Tana French
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Searcher and “one of the greatest crime novelists writing today” (Vox), a spellbinding new novel set in the Irish countryside. It’s a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die. Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He’s found it, more or less: he’s built… -
The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown
Cassie Andrews, a mild-mannered bookseller in New York City, inherits the mysterious eponymous volume from a deceased customer. Discovering its magical ability to transport her to any place she envisions, Cassie, accompanied by her spirited roommate, Izzy, embarks on an adventure. However, as they realize the perilous potential of the book, they find themselves entangled with an enigmatic man known as the Librarian, who protects a collection of similarly magical books, and pursued by malevole… -
Chain-Gang All-Stars
by Nana Kwame Adjei-BrenyahHave you been sentenced to a life in prison? Are you looking for a way out? In this dystopian debut novel, Adjei-Brenyah provides the brutal answer… gladiator-style death matches. If you stay alive for three years, you are granted your freedom. Naturally, this is a controversial plan. The spectacle of violence, beautifully rendered and oddly tender, is an eye-opening lens thought which the reader can explore the suffocating sickness that is incarceration. The story examines the idea fro… -
The Curse of Pietro Houdini
by Derek B. MillerThe Curse of Pietro Houdini has everything you want in a historical page-turner of a novel: a colorful cast of characters, some with shadowy pasts; a rich, historical setting in and around the WWII siege of Montecassino; an art heist featuring Renaissance masters; a coming-of-age story in which a young orphan navigates secrets, lies and moral ambiguities as the story unfolds. If you enjoyed City of Thieves or All the Light We Cannot See, don’t miss The Curse of Pietro Houdini! – Diana -
Martyr!
by Kaveh AkbarHow do you make sense of a life when all you can see is loss? How do you find meaning amidst the messiness of living? Thorny questions for sure, but as Cyrus Shams struggles with love, loss and addiction in his quest to understand what it means to live a life that matters, what he learns is heart-wrenching and profound, but also at times darkly funny. Wholly original and beautifully written, you’ll be glad you took this journey with Cyrus. – Diana -
Day
by Michael CunninghamIn this deceptively simple and absolutely beautiful novel, a family navigates life as families do: moving backwards and forwards. growing together and apart, learning about love and compassion, hope and grief, success and failure. The brilliance of Day is in the telling, told in three parts on the same date over the course of three successive years. While we only spend a short time with this family, we feel like we’ve known them forever. Sensitively written without an extra word, Day is a sub… -
What Moves the Dead
by T. KingfisherFatal fungi, a non-binary narrator, a crumbling Eastern European nation, and a family desperately clinging to the decaying remnants their aristocratic past… This is a wickedly macabre reimagining of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” told from a delightfully fresh perspective. – Skye -
Age of Vice
by Deepti KapoorPart crime drama, part family saga, and all money, power and corruption set in modern India, Age of Vice has all the ingredients that you want in a thriller, Bunty Wadia is the ruthless patriarch of the Wadia empire. His son, Sunny, is heir apparent with ambitions of his own. Neda, Sunny’s journalist girlfriend, is caught between two entirely different worlds in her relationship with Sunny, But it is Ajay, Sunny’s right-hand-man, who becomes the lens through which the wealth and corruption th… -
The Writing Retreat
by Julia BartzThe enigmatic and intoxicatingly charming Roza Vallo writes dark, fantastical, sapphic horror that has developed a cult following. Alex is ecstatic to find out that she has secured a spot at Vallo’s exclusive writing retreat. And also terrified. Terrified because she hasn’t been able to write a sentence in months, terrified because her former best friend and current rival has also secured a spot, and terrified because at Vallo’s isolated mansion in the mountains, the pressure and games the wr… -
The Heart of It All
by Christian KieferIn the opening chapters, Kiefer manages to capture the landscape of the Midwest in winter with a care and love that will resonate for anyone with ties to the area, even those of us who have left it behind. This isn’t some stuck-in-the-past lament about the Rust Belt but an empathetic and keenly observed account of communities and characters reckoning with personal and collective change. – Meg
More Favorite Books
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
Featured Titles
Below are some of our currently featured titles available at Bloomsbury Books.
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The Women
by Kristin HannahWhen her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, Frankie joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets―and becomes one of―the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost. But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends…. -
Fup
by Jim DodgeI read this little gem at least once every year to laugh at Jake’s moonshine antics and to revisit the strange and tear-inducing adventure of Tiny and his mysterious duck, Fup. Take your whiskey or tea out to the back porch on a quiet evening and sit for an hour or two to relish the wonder wrought by Jim Dodge in this short tale. – Meg -
The Whalebone Theatre
by Joanna QuinnWhen we first meet Christabel Seagrave, we know three things: it is the end of WWI, she is 3 years old, and she is a force to be reckoned with. Orphaned yet living on her family’s estate, she is mostly left to her own devices as she grows up exploring the seaside around her home, along with the books in the estate’s extensive library. An eccentric cast of characters come and go: Rosalind, her champagne-loving stepmother; Myrtle, the wealthy American “Poetess;” Taras, the Russian-expat artist;… -
Young Queer America: Real Stories and Faces of LGBTQ+ Youth
by Maxwell Poth (Author), Isis King (Foreword)PRIDE MONTH PICK Photographer and activist Maxwell Poth has traveled all over the United States, inviting LGBTQ+ youth to share their stories as part of Project Contrast, a nonprofit that amplifies these voices and connects kids and families with the resources they need to survive and thrive. This book collects the stories and portraits of seventy-three queer kids and teenagers from fifteen different states. In their own words, these young people share the challenges they’ve faced comin… -
Page Boy
by Elliot PagePRIDE MONTH PICK Full of intimate stories, from chasing down secret love affairs to battling body image and struggling with familial strife, Pageboy is a love letter to the power of being seen. With this evocative and lyrical debut, Oscar-nominated star Elliot Page captures the universal human experience of searching for ourselves and our place in this complicated world. The Oscar-nominated star who captivated the world with his performance in Juno finally shares his story in a groundbr… -
Walking Practice
by Dolki MinPRIDE MONTH PICK The Left Hand of Darkness meets Under the Skin in this radical literary sensation from South Korea about an alien’s hunt for food that transforms into an existential crisis about what it means to be human. After crashing their spacecraft in the middle of nowhere, a shapeshifting alien find themself stranded on an unfamiliar planet and disabled by Earth’s gravity. To survive, they will need to practice walking. And what better way than to hunt for food? As they discove… -
A Renaissance of Our Own
by Rachel E. CarglePRIDE MONTH PICK There are breaking points in all our lives when we realize that the way things have been done before just don’t work for us anymore, be it the way we approach our relationships, our belief systems, our work, our education, even our rest. For activist, philanthropist, and CEO Rachel E. Cargle, reimagining—the act of creating in our minds that which does not exist but that we believe can and should—has been a lifelong process. Reimagining served as the most powerful catalyst… -
The Late Americans
by Brandon TaylorPRIDE MONTH PICK In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. Among them are Seamus, a frustrated young poet; Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicate her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious do… -
The Blighted Stars
by Megan E. O’KeefeThe first book of an epic space opera trilogy by an award‑winning author. Humanity is running out of options. Habitable planets are being destroyed as quickly as they’re found and spy Naira Sharp thinks she knows the reason why. But her mission is cut short when she ends up stranded on a dead planet, with a member of the family behind the planet shortage. To survive and keep her secret, Naira will have to join forces with the man she’s sworn to hate. And together they will uncover a plot that… -
Woman, Eating: A Literary Vampire Novel
by Claire KohdaLydia is hungry. She’s always wanted to try Japanese food. Sashimi, ramen, onigiri with sour plum stuffed inside – the food her Japanese father liked to eat. And then there is bubble tea and iced-coffee, ice cream and cake, and foraged herbs and plants, and the vegetables grown by the other young artists at the London studio space she is secretly squatting in. But, Lydia can’t eat any of these things. Her body doesn’t work like those of other people. The only thing she can digest is blood, an…