Every year, the Short Run Comix & Arts Festival gets a little larger. This year's happening at Seattle Center on Saturday, November 4th from 11 am to 6 pm, is way bigger than last year's mammoth show.

And this isn't some size queen trip: the additions are all high-quality affairs. The main floor of Short Run will be essentially the same: 270 exhibitors spread across the floor of Fisher Pavillion. These are cartoonists and publishers and poets and zine-makers and other graphic artists from around the country and the world, here in town to sell you something beautiful.

After the end of the APRIL Festival this year, Short Run made a point of reaching out to literary talents, to give them more of a voice at their show. One whole row of the show is now devoted to a "Lit Alley" of independent literary talents and presses. Authors Willie Fitzgerald, Emmett Montgomery, and Stacey Levine will also write short stories on the spot based on Twitter posts in something called the Reverse Tweet Translator.

And there's more, too: What's a convention with some panels? Across Seattle Center at the Vera Project, Short Run is throwing a days' worth of panel programming, including "an active participatory performance by Sean Christensen, Fern Wiley, Maura Campbell-Balkits, Vivian Hua, Eileen Chavez & Daria Tessler;" a conversation with cartoonists Emil Ferris (author of the brilliant My Favorite Thing is Monsters) and Leela Corman moderated by me; a discussion on comics journalism with Jesús Cossio, Joe Sacco, and Seattle's own Sarah Glidden; and a spotlight on Bitch Planet author Kelly Sue DeConnick.

Short Run's high-profile special guests will be running a few programs, too. Julia Wertz, author of the comics memoir Drinking at the Movies and the urban sketchbook Tenements, Towers, & Trash, will be teaching a class. So will minicomics legend Tom Hart. Cartoonist Anders Nilson has created a participatory coloring-book garden for the show. And as always, the Short Run Bake Sale will be shilling high-quality brownies to fill your belly after you walk around Seattle Center all morning long.

There's much more, including programming before and after the big day. You can consult our Your Week in Readings column for more details or just look it up on Short Run's own site. And check back here for more over the coming week. Every day here on the Seattle Review of Books we'll be running interviews with Short Run exhibitors and reviews of books that will be debuting at Short Run. No matter what your interests, you'll find something at Short Run that feels like it was made just for you.