The awesome organizers of comics and art show Short Run made a special announcement about their upcoming fall show: Special guests at the show this year will include Vanessa Davis and Trevor Alixopulos. Davis's comic Make Me a Woman was published by Drawn & Quarterly, and Alixopulos is an up-and-comer who will be in the newest volume of the Kramer's Ergot anthology. In case you've missed it, Short Run also revealed the identity of this year's Dash grant recipient, a program that provides funds to an artist to make a new comic in time for the show; this year's Dash winner is a new-to-Seattle cartoonist named Brendan Kiefer. The Short Run Festival will happen at Fisher Pavilion in Seattle Center this year on Saturday, November 6th. Save the date.

Now is the time to nominate the Seattle-area "artists, arts and cultural organizations and community members" that you love for the 2016 Mayor's Arts Awards. Get your nominations in by May 31st.

It's always award season somewhere: Lots of women won at the Nebula Awards last week, and a pair of Japanese literary prizewinners have been announced, including an 80-year-old literary critic who won a prize for up-and-coming authors. Also, yesterday the O Henry Prizewinning short stories were announced. Congratulations to everyone.

Marley Dias, the 11-year-old who invented the #1000BlackGirlBooks movement, guest-starred on this week's episode of the BuzzFeed podcast Another Round, which included a roundtable on beloved children's books. If you are in need of something heartwarming after another dismal week of Trumpery, this is the most life-affirming thing I've heard in a very long time.

Jeff Bezos has confirmed that more Amazon Books brick-and-mortar stores are on the way. If you haven't read it, here's my experience at the first Amazon Books store.

Yes, and Jonathan Franzen went on Jeopardy! this week and he didn't win and he didn't embarrass himself. It's pretty sketchy that one of the categories on his show was "Birds," given that Franzen is maybe the most famous birder in the United States right now and he was representing a bird-preservation nonprofit on the show. Sure, it was all for charity, but it's still a hell of a coincidence, isn't it?

In Austrailia, a civil servant published a book and was arrested for it, but according to Melville House's MobyLives blog, "nobody seems quite sure why" he was arrested. Fascinating.

There is no good goddamned reason to publish a young adult version of the Da Vinci Code. If a teenager wants to read the Da Vinci Code, they should just read the Da Vinci Code. It's not a particularly challenging book on any level, from reading comprehension to content. There's nothing wrong with reading a trashy thriller, but the unnecessary repackaging of trashy thrillers to appeal to different demographics is getting tiresome.