Archives of Book News Roundup

• At the South Seattle Emerald, Marcus Harrison Green says goodbye to Vickie Williams, the owner of a long-running Columbia City Bookstore:

The longtime owner of Seattle’s only black-owned bookstore, Lem’s Life Enrichment Bookstore, in the Columbia City neighborhood, was laid to rest in a funeral attended by more than 600 people, including local officials and community luminaries, and a large swath of the black community.

• Remember how I was complaining about the comics distribution monopoly a few weeks ago? Vanguard Seattle has a profile of a new independent comics distributor:

If you’re an independent comics creator in the Seattle region, Anne Bean wants to stock you. Bean—a comics writer, indie publisher and freelance writer—is launching Emerald Comics Distribution, a solo operation that will represent and distribute indie comics regionally.

• Shelf Awareness celebrates Secret Garden Bookstore's upcoming 40th birthday a few weeks early.

• Café Racer, which is home to the ongoing comics-drawing jam series Dune Night, is for sale. Whoever buys this coffee shop will forever be the hero of Seattle's comics community.

• Rare Seattle media job opening alert! Local news site Crosscut is hiring a staff writer.

• Seattle Public Library's own David Wright wrote about the best/worst storytime ever over at Literary Hub:

When we opened our new downtown library with its large auditorium, back in 2004, I stood looking up at the empty seats and immediately felt that I needed to do a story time for adults there. Ours is one of the most childless cities in the country. Every library has children’s story time. Don’t adults deserve the same? Our need for story doesn’t go away at a certain age. Not surprisingly, turnout has been good for over a decade, and spinoff programs such as ghost storytelling in bars are standing room only. Last year, I added another narrative element by pairing story readings with screenings of film adaptations in a program I called Page to Screen.

• The 2017 Man Booker International Longlist has been announced.

• Beloved food magazine Lucky Peach looks like it's folding in May of this year.

• Shelf Awareness reports that Wallingford's Wide World Books & Maps has to move next month:

The company is considering a few options, including reopening in another location or focusing solely on its Web business. Also under consideration are the possibilities of adding a coffee shop or wine/beer bar, or services like travel consulting "if we can find a different location that is already set up for these types of activities.... A partnership to share space with an existing café or coffee shop would also be of interest to us."

• If you're looking for work in the publishing field, you should note that UW Press is now looking to fill two positions:

The UW Press has an outstanding opportunity for a Senior Acquisitions Editor to acquire and transmit 20-25 high-quality trade manuscripts annually for publication for regional and national audiences. Areas for acquisitions will complement the press's existing editorial program in regional and U.S. history and culture, Asian and Asian American studies, environmental history, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, visual culture, and Native and Indigenous studies, with the opportunity to build distinguished lists in other areas.

The University of Washington Press has an outstanding temporary opportunity for a MELLON DIVERSITY FELLOW.... Through this temporary, full-time entry-level position, the Mellon diversity fellow will be immersed in the acquisitions department of a leading scholarly press, working closely with senior acquisitions editors, authors, and projects through the entire acquisitions process. In this experience, the fellow's main role will be to coordinate and support the work of evaluating, developing, and acquiring book-length manuscripts for publication by UW Press.

• Here's video of Emma Watson leaving feminist books at the Gertrude Stein statue in New York City to celebrate International Women's Day:

Dropping off books at Gertrude Stein statue in NYC✊📚 #IWD #IWDOurSharedShelf #ADayWithoutAWoman @the_bookfairies https://t.co/kJhmZfvBzw pic.twitter.com/rb81acPFkn

— Emma Watson (@EmmaWatson) March 9, 2017

• "Amazon UK has removed four books from sale which question or deny the Holocaust," reports Stephen Oryszczuk at Jewish News.

• Ron Charles at the Washington Post notes that you can now buy 1984 at Costco. It takes a President Trump to get Orwell onto the shelves of America's best big-box bulk retailer.

• "A branch of the Seattle Public Library is named after two African-American icons who never set foot in the Pacific Northwest," begins this report by historian Feliks Banel at MyNorthwest.com. The branch in question, of course, is the The Douglass-Truth Library.

• Ijeoma Oluo needs your help to keep her site The Establishment running:

It has been life-affirming to see so many writers bless us with some of their first professionally published pieces — women writers of color, trans writers, queer writers, disabled writers — talking about some of the most important issues of the day with actual lived experience. I have loved knowing that every piece is edited with integrity, and that every writer is paid for their labor. To be a member of the founding team of a rare platform that is fair and equitable and treats all writers with respect has given my work more purpose and satisfaction than I could have ever imagined.

• Seattle writer Anca Szilagyi announced yesterday that her debut novel, Dirty, will be published by Lanternfish Press "in late 2017 or early 2018." She describes the book as "a magical realist work about a teenage runaway whose father is disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War."

• Tomorrow, to celebrate International Women's Day, Tor.com will publish new flash fiction by a host of great sci-fi authors — including Charlie Jane Anders, Maria Dahvana Headley, Nisi Shawl, Carrie Vaughn, and many more — on the theme "Nevertheless, She Persisted."

• Jillian Kay Melchior at Heatstreet writes: "To draw attention to female authors, a Cleveland bookstore celebrated Women’s History Month by turning every male-written book in the fiction room backward on its shelf." Go look at the picture of what the bookstore looked like, now imagine what your shelves would look like if you did the same. Better yet, actually try it on your own bookshelves. It only took Loganberry Books 2 hours to do this with their 10,000 titles.

• Headline of the day: "The New Yorker’s new bot will tweet 92 years worth of poetry at you."

• Print magazine sales declined 12.4 percent last year. It's not as steep a drop as the year before, but it's still bad news for print media.

• Always warms our hearts to see book reviewers start out young:

Found in the children's section: THE PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW. #kidsreviewbooks #thomasthetankengine 😂 pic.twitter.com/1g5HaEobaH

— Elliott Bay Book Co. (@ElliottBayBooks) March 6, 2017

• The Seattle Public Library has announced that they've made public a dataset which "includes a count of checkouts by month of both physical and digital items, and spans from 2005 to the present." You can find that list here.

• The Nebula Awards ballot has been announced. We couldn't be more pleased to announce that Seattle Review of Books contributor Nisi Shawl's novel Everfair is on the ballot for best novel. We're bummed to see that Seattle author Cat Rambo's short work "Red in Tooth and Cog" was bumped from the novelette category because it's a little too short to meet the word count.

• A novel by Walt Whitman has been discovered. (To quibble: At 36,000 words, it's more of a novella than a novel.) It sounds positively Dickensian:

...Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, is a first-person narrative following an orphan on his journey through New York, which included a full cast of colorful, diabolical money-and-power-hungry characters, as well as “virtuous Quakers” and a “sultry Spanish dancer.” Researchers believe that the work was never reprinted after it was published anonymously in the New York–area newspaper The Sunday Dispatch.

• You should apply to be the Mall of America's writer-in-residence.

• Sometimes you just need a title to know that you should read something: "Xenu’s Paradox: The Fiction of L. Ron Hubbard and the Making of Scientology

• Jseattle at Capitol Hill Seattle blog says that the Elliott Bay Book Company building is going up for sale:

“This offering represents a unique opportunity to invest in a 100% leased property with a stable retail income stream and future development potential located in one of Seattle’s hottest and growing neighborhoods,” the pitch from the Jones Lang LaSalle real estate firm concludes.

• "An average of five people are kicked out of Seattle Public Libraries (SPL) each day," Nathalie Graham writes at the South Seattle Emerald. Her full report on SPL's anti-homeless policies is a must-read.

• Shockingly, Milo Yiannopolous's agent, who recieves a portion of Yiannopolous's income as a writer, has written an editorial for Publishers Weekly titled "In Defense of Milo Yiannopoulos's Book." Thomas Flannery Jr writes:

When protesters try to silence Milo, when they show up to his events and physically threaten him, or scream and smear fake blood all over themselves, or riot and destroy property, they are using tactics I, as a self-described progressive, have always chided others for using. I won’t stand for it when religious groups try to silence transgender supporters, and I won’t stand for it when so-called progressives try to silence conservative voices.

• Regarding the above quote: Flannery is confusing freedom of speech with a right to a platform. Just as Yiannopoulos has a right to speak, protesters have a right to protest him. And if Yiannopoulos threatens students, as he did in Miluaukee colleges have a right to not give him a platform. Remember, while Flannery whines about people raising their voices, it was a Yiannopoulos fan who shot a protester when Yiannopoulos spoke at the University of Washington. So who's doing the intimidating, here? And why should Publishers Weekly have given a platform to someone who is financially vested in Yiannopoulos's success? Maybe it's because Flannery is the only person in the publishing industry willing to stand up for his client?

• Video footage of Marcel Proust has been discovered. If In Search of Lost Time was inspired by a cookie, imagine what Proust would have written in response to a clip of archival footage.

• I was reading this blog that mocks old library books, and the most recent entry is a sexual health guide for youth written by Dr. Ruth Westheimer. The writer, Holly Hibner, writes, "The cover image attached features an endearing but very old lady who looks way too much like my grandma." The fact that young writers don't know who Dr. Ruth is makes me feel very, very old. One day, Hibner will probably be reading a post written by a young writer mocking one of Dan Savage's books. On that day, she might understand how I feel right now. That is all.

• Most comics blogs only cover actual comics news less than a third of the time, Heidi MacDonald at The Beat discovered. The rest of the posts are about "toys, wrestling, video games and what I’d call 'related business news' like conventions, collectibles and human interest."

• I loved reading this super-nerdy post tracking the changes of a minor-but-useful spell through the many editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

• Wallingford comics shop Comics Dungeon is becoming a nonprofit. From the press release:

Seattle comic book store, Comics Dungeon, Inc., has made the change to leave behind its for-profit status to become a fully non-profit corporation.

Comics Dungeon, Inc will be changing its name to Comics for Community, Compassion and Culture, C4C3. “After being part of the community for over 25 years, we wanted our focus to be giving back to the very community that built our success,” said Scott Tomlin, C4C3’s president. The Comics Dungeon retail store name will remain the same.

• What kind of asshole lights a Little Free Library on fire?

• Here's an opportunity to win free tickets to the Hugo House's Literary Series event this Friday, which features authors Megan Kruse, Angela Flournoy, and Phillip B. Williams, with musical guests Crater.

Win tix to see Angela Flournoy @hugohouse @fredwildlife 2/17-to enter post pic of yourself reading in Seattle with #seattlereads by 2/15 pic.twitter.com/cJvMpjwAKN

— Seattle Library (@SPLBuzz) February 12, 2017

• Third Place Press, the publishing arm of Third Place Books, has compiled the final speeches of President and First Lady Obama into book form. Titled Be Vigilant But Not Afraid: The Farewell Speeches of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, the book costs $7 and proceeds will benefit three very good causes. Find more information on their site.

• The Miami Herald paints a (depressing) picture of the (depressing) library of the future:

Virtual reality simulations, talking robots and a magic school bus — this is what happens when a theme park company designs a library.

Landmark Entertainment Group — the company responsible for the Spider-Man and Jurassic Park rides at Universal Orlando and Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas — has partnered with the city of Homestead to create the world’s first “Cybrary,” or cyber library.

“We are redefining what the library is,” said George Gretsas, Homestead’s city manager. “When you think about bettering this thing called a library, which has been around since before 300 B.C, do you turn to the library scientists — the librarians — to create a fresh and new thing, or do you turn to people who have expertise in the areas of entertainment and attraction?”

• Fantastic Washington DC bookstore Kramerbooks is currently in a state of disarray, with senior management resigning, supposedly in response to the store's new owner.

• A London bookshop is tweeting the first Harry Potter book at Piers Morgan.

• When will they officially change the name to Department of Edumacation?

Hey @usedgov you misspelled "Du Bois" as "DeBois", got busted & apologized, then you misspelled "apologies" as "apologizes" in your apology pic.twitter.com/J610rUE8D9

— Judah Friedlander (@JudahWorldChamp) February 12, 2017

• Sherman Alexie is sharing a bill with Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard and Naomi Wachira on Sunday, March 5th at the Showbox on 1st Avenue. This is a fundraiser benefitting Standing Rock and The Water Protector Legal Collective. Sherman Alexie is the only writer in the Northwest who can consistently share a stage with rock stars. This is worth your time, and it benefits a great cause. Buy your tickets now.

• Here's a book job that doesn't require you to move to New York City: Seattle-based press Sasquatch Books is hiring a Production Editor! Here (PDF) is the job listing. Applications are due by February 20th. But you probably shouldn't turn in your application on the last day, since editors are deadline-driven. So work on your resume this weekend and get it in on Monday.

• Mark Campos at the Seattle Weekly this week contributed a comic strip that pokes fun at that guy who asks those kinds of questions at readings. You know the guy. Yeah, him.

• Don't click this link if you frequently fantasize about Mr. Darcy. Seriously, don't click it.

• We told you yesterday that the New York Times seems to be removing a number of categories from its popular bestseller list feature. Starting early in February, they won't be publishing bestseller lists for graphic novels, mass market paperbacks, and certain lists for middle readers and young adults.

• This story has developed since then.

• Alexander Lu at Comics Beat asked the New York Times why this change was happening, and the Times responded that "the discontinued lists did not reach or resonate with many readers." Lu indicates that there may be some anti-comics sentiment inside the Times:

A source indicated to The Beat that Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review, was ultimately responsible for the policy shift. A recent tweet [by Paul] about John Lewis’, Andrew Aydin’s, and Nate Powell’s March began with “hey, kids” and called the comic a “children’s book.”

• That aforementioned tweet is hopelessly ignorant about one of the most powerful autobiographical comics ever written. And it's unbearably condescending to Representative John Lewis, who is a bona fide hero for his civil rights activism:

Hey, kids: The new children's book by @repjohnlewis has set an awards record https://t.co/0bB1t46joI

— Pamela Paul (@PamelaPaulNYT) January 24, 2017

• Susana Polo at Polygon makes a great case about why the bestseller list mattered for comics:

Week after week, The New York Times best seller lists revealed that the American comics industry is anything but dominated by young adult men and the superhero comics they shove into plastic bags. Last week’s lists — which could now be the last ones The New York Times ever publishes — were topped with Ghosts, a female-led young adult coming-of-age story from perennial Times best seller Raina Tegelmeier, on the paperback side, and a graphic novel adaptation of science fiction grande dame Octavia Butler’s Kindred on the hardcover side.

• And Calvin Reid at Publishers Weekly has an overview of how the publishing industry was blindsided by this decision, including lots of reaction interviews with publishers. If you only read one piece on all this, read this one.

• Look, the newspaper industry is in trouble. Everyone knows it. But I cannot for the life of me figure out why newspaper leadership responds to budget cuts by slashing their arts coverage. The New York Times's Bestseller List is a trusted brand, one that conveys a special status to authors and publishers. It is an asset. For them to cut back on this at the same time that newspapers are trying to emphasize their value is a pretty stupid move.

• It's obvious that Pamela Paul has no respect for comics as a medium. (In fact, I'm willing to bet that she considers it a genre and not a medium.) If this was her decision, I have no faith in her leadership at the New York Times. I can't for the life of me understand why you'd make your book review section even more elitist and condescending than it already was; it's like she's actively trying to turn readers away from the Times's book reviews. When they inevitably slice away even more books coverage at the Times, I bet they'll blame it on declining readership. And I also bet none of the blame for that declining readership will fall where it belongs: with Pamela Paul.

• Roxane Gay's upcoming book, How to Be Heard, was due to be published next year by Simon & Schuster. BuzzFeed reports that Gay has pulled How to Be Heard from publication because "I can’t in good conscience let them publish it while they also publish [white supremacist] Milo [Yiannopoulos]. So I told my agent over the weekend to pull the project."

• Ten writers, including Seattle Review of Books columnist Nisi Shawl, are contributing sepculative dystopian short stories about the Trump administration to Slate. The project was organized by Ben H. Winters, whose Last Policeman trilogy is really one of the most underappreciated sci-fi stories of the last five years. In his introduction to the series, Winters notes that since November 8th "we’ve all read 100 thinkpieces about what the next four years might hold, but fiction has a special power to clarify, galvanize, prophesy, and warn."

• Speaking of dystopian fiction and Donald Trump, Penguin just had to publish 75,000 copies of 1984 due to overwhelming demand. Welcome back to the bestseller list, George Orwell.

• A biography of Thomas Jefferson by Glenn Beck's favorite historian, the conservative evangelical zealot David Barton, has been disavowed and discontinued by the book's publisher. The book supposedly tried to make the case that Jefferson was an evangelical.

Since its initial publication, historians have debunked and raised concerns about numerous claims in Barton's book. In it, Barton calls Jefferson a "conventional Christian," claims the founding father started church services at the Capitol, and even though he owned more than 200 slaves, says Jefferson was a civil rights visionary..."When the concerns came in, from multiple people, and that had weight too, we were trying to sort things out," said Thomas Nelson Senior Vice President and Publisher Brian Hampton. "Were these matters of opinion? Were they differences of interpretation? But as we got into it, our conclusion was that the criticisms were correct. There were historical details — matters of fact, not matters of opinion, that were not supported at all."

• Chuck Palahniuk admits that he came up with the term "special snowflake" in Fight Club, and he's not ashamed of it: "Every generation gets offended by different things but my friends who teach in high school tell me that their students are very easily offended," he says. I didn't think my opinion of Chuck Palahniuk could get any lower, but here we are.

• Writers, don't forget to apply for a residency at Mineral School! You say you don't know how to apply for a residency, or even, really, what a residency is? This Sunday, a number of local organizations that host residencies are putting on a panel to discuss residency-related issues. It's at the library downtown, it's free, and it's at 2 pm. Go get your questions answered. Really, who the hell wouldn't want to get out of town for a while?

• Melville House appreciates the Merriam-Webster Dictionary for their anti-Trump stance.

• Capitol Hill Seattle this morning published a post on the Queer Resurgence on Capitol Hill Poetry Slam Festival, which happens this weekend. Check out the lineup of readers here.

• If you missed Tuesday night's event at the central branch of the Seattle Public Library, in which Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore interviewed Sarah Schulman, author of Conflict Is Not Abuse, a video of the event is now available on YouTube:

• Young booksellers from around the country, including a few in Seattle, are launching Indies Forward, which Sydney Jarrard at Bookselling This Week calls "a new volunteer organization dedicated to cultivating, supporting, and sustaining the emerging generation of innovators and leaders in the bookselling industry." Jarrard continues:

Indies Forward, which will focus primarily on development, networking, and mentorship, will provide educational programming specifically tailored to new and emerging booksellers, on such topics as personal finance, management, and the economics of bookstores and publishing. The group plans to set up standalone networking events as well as in conjunction with regular industry gatherings so that younger booksellers will have a greater chance of being able to attend.

• PEN America just announced their literary awards finalists for the year. It's an impressive array of authors, including Teju Cole, Colson Whitehead, Yaa Gyasi, and Helen Oyeyemi.

• And the National Book Critics Circle finalists have been announced. The fiction prize is a face-off between heavyweights: Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon, Ann Patchett, Louise Erdrich, and Adam Haslett. Also, Margaret Atwood is getting a lifetime achievement award.

• Entertainment Weekly has collected every book President Obama ever recommended.

• Over at the South Seattle Emerald, Alex Garland examines the impact of the Beacon Hill library's closure on the community. The library will be closed for several months for renovations.

• Here's Yoshiko Yamamoto's poster for this year's Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair, which happens at Seattle Center on October 15th and 16th:

• Spokane's alternative weekly newspaper the Inlander has published a special poetry issue. If you love Northwest poetry, you need to check it out.

• Rob Liefeld's ghastly Extreme Comics characters, many of which were published during the creatively bankrupt 1990s superhero comics glut that nearly destroyed the comics industry, have been optioned for a shared universe of superhero movies. I can't think of a better symbol for the oncoming superhero movie malaise than this dispiriting piece of news.

• Now that garbage human Milo Yiannopoulos has signed a book deal fora quarter of a million dollars, maybe Yiannopoulos will finally pay out that $100,000 in scholarships for white men that he raised last year? Jack Smith IV at Mic reports that the scholarship hasn't benefitted a single student:

The money, however, has disappeared down a rabbit hole of private bank accounts and apparent shell companies registered to the same address in London. Almost a year since the fund's launch, Yiannopoulos is, for his part, reacting in a manner consistent with previous concerns around the fund's handling: by claiming paperwork for the fund is being processed and that the money will be disbursed at a later date.

• Medium, the blogging service that has rapidly become both a popular longread supplement to Twitter and blog hosting platform for sites including The Awl and ThinkProgress, announced massive layoffs and office closures today. Seems they still don't know how to monetize words on the internet. And founder Ev Williams says the service is considering new ways to pay writers for their work, but his comments are so vague that they should provide absolutely no consolation for writers anywhere. Williams writes, "It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like. This strategy is more focused but also less proven." I take this as Silicon Valley-ese for "we have no idea what we're doing."

• Bellingham's terrific independent bookstore Village Books is now officially under new management.

It is an honor to be the new owners of Village Books and Paper Dreams. We are thrilled to be in a community that values books as much as we do. We look forward to meeting you! Paul, Kelly and Sarah 📚 #villagebooksandpaperdreams #lynden #bellingham #shoplocal #indiebooks #americanbooksellersassociation #booklovers #bookworm #pnw #giftshop #fairhaven

A photo posted by Village Books & Paper Dreams (@village_books) on Jan 1, 2017 at 12:59pm PST

• Mary Ann Gwinn at the Seattle Times says that seven local booksellers from University Book Store, Third Place Books, Elliott Bay Book Company, Liberty Bay Books, Village Books, and Eagle Harbor Book Company have won "bookseller bonuses" from ridiculously wealthy author James Patterson.

• Well, here's a disgusting bit of year-end fuckery: Penguin Random House, the large publisher that formed when Penguin merged with Random House, "has derecognised the National Union of Journalists and Unite for collective bargaining with its management," according to The Bookseller, which reports the move has left staff "nervous." Over 140 authors have signed a letter asking Penguin Random House to rethink this anti-labor position. All readers, authors, librarians, and booksellers should stand with Penguin Random House's union; we need more unions in this world, and if the somewhat civilized leaders of the publishing industry can't recognize the dignity of their employees, what hope does that offer anyone else?

• E-book news site Tele-Read has recently stopped paying freelancers and so it is now running less news. Publisher David Rothman blames Google and Facebook for "siphon[ing] ads from us and burden[ing] us with bureaucratic requirements" for photos and content.

• You should read Kevin Nguyen's year-end roundup and complaint about literary whiteness at the Millions. A taste:

...if you think Book Twitter is white, try going to a book event. These are almost exclusively white spaces, and being a person of color in them has become increasingly anxiety inducing. You drink with familiar people and strangers and just wait for someone to say something kinda fucked up to ruin your night. Just because my last name is Nguyen doesn’t mean I want to talk about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. I am not interested in hearing you talk about how attractive an Asian-American debut novelist is. And for the last time, as much as I love Ed Park, we really, really do not look alike.

• It's the beginning of book list season, which is a holiday that I must admit kind of befuddles me. I'm not a list-maker. I find lists to be very unsatisfying. But many of you like them, and that is, of course, okay. I'd like to direct your attention to two of the biggest lists of the season: The New York Public Library has published its list of the top books for kids and teens and the New York Times published their 100 Notable Books of 2016. If you like your lists to be shorter and more local, the Seattle Public Library has published a terrific list of three "Bus Reads for November." I'm not going to link to every list on this site, but I'll make note of the especially worthy ones in days to come.

• Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has announced that he's producing a TV and movie series based on the popular Kingkiller Chronicle fantasy trilogy.

• An Amazon employee leapt from a building on the online booksellers' South Lake Union campus yesterday after emailing a number of Amazon employees including founder Jeff Bezos. The person is in medical care with "non-threatening injuries."

• Seattle-area writer Ted Chiang has long been one of the local sci-fi community's best-kept secrets. Just about every Seattle sci-fi writer worth their salt counts Chiang as one of their favorite writers, but his work has not garnered larger acclaim. That's all about to change: one of Chiang's short stories is about to be adapted into an upcoming film called Arrival starring Amy Adams that is attracting a lot of pre-release buzz.The Wall Street Journal published a great little profile of Chiang yesterday that you should read.

“He’s got a really good mix of humanity and science, unlike some writers,” said Ellen Datlow, the editor who acquired “Tower of Babylon,” the first story of Mr. Chiang’s to be published, for Omni magazine in 1990.

• While we're talking about Seattle-area writers, Electric Lit published a long interview with Elissa Washuta that you should read.

• So this is kind of creepy: according to GeekWire, at Amazon's brick-and-mortar bookstore, you're apparently only able to buy books on discount if you're an Amazon Prime customer. If you're not on Prime, you pay full list price.

• Greta Van Susteren has a bad opinion about the cost of colleges. Rather than cutting the ridiculously expensive stadiums or coaches' salaries, she seems to think libraries are making colleges too damn expensive:

Colleges should stop building vanity projects like huge libraries and billing students-full libraries are on our smartphones! https://t.co/QBeVKZvIKZ

— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) October 31, 2016

• On that last item, let's be clear: books are an investment in education, and they are non-negotiable. In fact, eliminating library books from a college would disproportionately harm low-income students who might not have the technology needed for ebooks. This is clearly an idea that was not at all thought through.

• Moss, the excellent free Northwest-centric literary magazine, is offering $20 annual subscriptions through Patreon, which gets you an annual print edition and early access to each quarterly issue of the magazine. This is absolutely a steal. Give if you can.

• You have until Halloween to apply for the Jack Straw Artist Residency programs, which teach artists how to better use sound as a medium. Most writers are, sad to say, terrible readers of their own work. A program like Jack Straw immediately gives writers an edge over the competition by teaching them how to present their work in a reading, radio, or podcast setting. The writers program curator this year is poet and essayist Jourdan Imani Keith, who it is safe to say knows a thing or two about reading work aloud. Get your applications in by 5 pm on the 31st.

• Push/Pull, up in Ballard, is looking for new members to help run the space. If you're an artist with a lot of work to sell — comics, art, crafts — you should consider joining the team.

• Ebooks were not that as big a deal as at least one major publisher thought they'd be:

Penguin wrongly lost confidence in the power of the printed word and invested “unwisely” amid the rise of eBooks, one of the company’s bosses has admitted.

• Mark Haddon joins the list of big-name authors who are making a case against buying books on Amazon.

• It's kind of hilarious that the Nobel Committee can't get a hold of Bob Dylan.

• This poem by Joe Turrent is not extremely successful, but it is interesting: it's an erasure by way of Microsoft Word's "track changes" feature.

• Now the Pulitzer Prize is open to magazines in all categories. Formerly, only newspapers were eligible for many of the categories. Get ready for the New Yorker and the New York Times to go head-to-head forever.

• This comic-strip reimagining of Watchmen is perhaps the best thing I've seen on Twitter this month. (Thanks to SRoB tipper @E_Steven for the tip.)

holy shit pic.twitter.com/0GylRxl9RV

— FINDOM EARLE (@thrusticus) October 18, 2016

• Novelist Brit Bennett, whose new novel The Mothers is one of the most buzzed-about books of the fall, wrote a guest post for Seattle Public Library about the importance of libraries in her life.

• Speaking of the Seattle Public Library, librarian Misha Stone was on KING 5 the other day talking about book clubs. — what makes book clubs work, what books book clubs are reading these days, and so on It's definitely worth your time:

• Jean Riley wrote a great roundup of the state of independent bookselling in Seattle for Seattle Magazine.

The past few decades have been challenging for independent bookstores, with each decade seeming to bring on a new threat: First, there were the huge chains that dominated the retail landscape. Then, there was the shift to online shopping, followed by the invention of electronic–reading devices. And now, the entry of Amazon into brick-and-mortar territory with its first store in Seattle. Yet despite some trepidation expressed by area booksellers leading up to Amazon’s store opening last year, the indie scene here is undergoing a quiet renaissance, as evidenced by the spring opening of Third Place Books in Seward Park, bookstore buyouts and one of the most successful Independent Bookstore Days the city has experienced.

• Speaking of Amazon and brick-and-mortar stores: is Amazon really getting into the convenience store business? Apparently, the online retailer is planning on shops that would function like the"bodegas and convenience stores found in larger cities, offering customer the ability to quickly purchase both perishable and non-perishable products, like milk, meats, peanut butter, and other items." It's unclear if they'd carry books, too.

• Here's a time-lapse video of the New York Public Library's Reading Room as staff prepare it for its grand re-opening after renovations:

• And speaking of the New York Public Library, did you know that the NYPL has secret apartments? Atlas Obscura takes you on a tour.

• Flavorwire reports on a Publishers Weekly report on the publishing industry. The bottom line: "Publishing Makes 'Little Progress' in Diversity, Remains Extremely White." This is not good enough.

• And there's more bad news in the PW report, including the fact that women in publishing are still paid less than men. Boo.

• This came in too late for me to add to the readings calendar this week, but you should be advised that the Words West reading series will take place tomorrow night at C&P Coffee Company in West Seattle. The very special guests at this reading will be Tod Marshall, Washington State's Poet Laureate, and City Councilmember Lisa Herbold, who will share her favorite poem.This reading will also debut "a new library featuring a book by every author who has read at WordsWest." This is a super-cool idea.

• Do you know any teenagers who love making comics? You should direct them to the All City Comics Club, which is hosted by local comics superstar David Lasky and which takes place at the Bureau of Fearless Ideas. Here, have a flier:

• Bruce Springsteen is doing a reading tour for his new memoir, and he'll be reading at Elliott Bay Book Company on October 1st. Expect a madhouse. Tickets are here.

• Wordstock, Portland's annual literary festival, has announced their 2016 lineup, which will take place on November 5th. Highlights include Seattle authors like Maria Semple, Lindy West, and Sherman Alexie, along with national authors like Colson Whitehead, Yaa Gyasi, and Nicholson Baker.

• I interviewed director Jeff Feuerzeig onstage at SIFF this summer about his new documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story. One of the questions I asked had to do with the many phone calls in the documentary: Laura Albert, who pretended to be an author named JT LeRoy for years, recorded all her phone calls, seemingly without the other callers' permission. Many of those recordings are in the film. I didn't record the onstage interview so I don't have Feuerzeig's response handy, but he stood by his film and his treatment of the recordings. This New York Times story indicates that others are unhappy with the very existence of the tapes:

For some people who reviewed transcripts from “Author” provided by The New York Times, the revelation years after the fact that Ms. Albert had been covertly recording phone calls was yet another deception in a trail of mendacity that extended to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when JT LeRoy published “Sarah,” a novel about a 12-year-old truck-stop prostitute, and “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,” linked short stories about an abused boy.

• For what it's worth, I was not especially impressed with Author. I thought it was one-sided to the point of almost being a hagiography of Albert. Feuerzeig defended his movie in the interview, referring to it as New Journalism in the style of Tom Wolfe.

• Spokane author Kate Lebo published a wonderful essay about gentrification in Seattle on The Rumpus over the weekend. It's titled "Twenty-Three Pieces of the Sunset Bowl" and you should read it. We ran an interview with Lebo on Seattle's many changes last year.

• Children's book author Jonathan Tweet debuts his new children's book about evolution, Grandmother Fish at Ada's Technical Books tomorrow morning. It's free; you should go! If you'd like to learn more about the book, our friends over at Nerdhole published a podcast interview with Tweet that is absolutely worth your time.

• Colombia is releasing Gabriel Garcia Marquez banknotes starting next month. They look like this:

• Now is the time to register for the spring edition of YAWP, which stands for Your Alternative Writing Program. It's a Port Townsend-based community retreat for established and aspiring authors, and registration costs less than two hundred bucks.

• This has been rumored for a while, but it's finally official: independent comics publisher Image Comics is moving from San Francisco to Portland, OR. Between Image, Dark Horse, and Oni Press, Portland is now home to three of the largest comics publishers in the country.

• The travel-minded folks at Atlas Obscura just opened a Seattle office, and now they're looking for a few Seattle-area "enthusiastic adventure nerd[s]" to be field agents. If you know a lot about Seattle past and present, and if you like leading tour groups and being obsessed with history, you should apply for this position.

• Hillary Clinton is a big fan of Elena Ferrante's books, calling the bestselling author "just hypnotic." Donald Trump doesn't read.

• The flash fiction magazine SmokeLong is accepting applications for the Kathy Fish Fellowship, which is a virtual writer-in-residence position that comes with a cash prize and "the opportunity to work with SmokeLong staff and participate in online writing workshops" for the year of 2017. Applications close on September 15th.

• Did you know that Seattle-area cartoonist David Lasky used to make cartoons with stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt back in his college days? It's true!

• Get a load of this gorgeous 360-degree anti-Trump comic made by Seattle cartoonist Eroyn Franklin.

• Thinking about moving to Tacoma to save on rent? Wondering if you should wear the polka dots or the stripes? Curious about whether you'll be alone for the rest of your life? If you have a question you'd like to have answered on stage at Bumbershoot, you should tweet it at Hugo House with the hashtag "#Oracle". Your question might be addressed by Garth Stein, Ijeoma Oluo, or Kristiana Kahakauwila; they will be divining responses from their published writings.

Have a question for @IjeomaOluo, @garthstein, or Kristiana Kahakauwila? Tweet it to us @HugoHouse using #Oracle! https://t.co/xOUIHFZmzh

— Hugo House (@HugoHouse) August 31, 2016

• The children's book world is in turmoil right now over a controversial new book for kids that focuses on German suffering during World War II. Gabriela Geselowitz at Jewcy first notes the similarity to the kid's book from earlier this year which made light of slavery, and then she writes:

Part of what is disturbing about the reception of the book is the unexplored idea of the mother’s brief attempt to seat the slave laborers at the kitchen table as a great act of bravery and resistance, a sufficient antidote to the evil which is not even alluded to in the rest of the story.

• Seth Grahame Smith, the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, is being sued by his publisher for breach of contract because he reportedly turned in a remixed public-domain work and they expected an all-new work.

• This bomb-throwing story at comics news and commentary site The Outhousers is certainly a little aggro, but it makes a good point: it's very weird that the comic book industry entirely relies on pre-orders. No other industry builds their entire business model on the idea that customers pre-order their products, sight unseen. Books can live and die before readers even get to check out the first issue. There must be a better way to run the industry, right?