• The Short Run Comix and Arts Festival has unveiled their schedule of events, and it's a doozy. It begins next week at Elliott Bay Book Company with the launch party for Seattle cartoonist Sarah Glidden's brand-new book Rolling Blackouts. I'll be interviewing Glidden onstage about her book, which documents Glidden's travels through Turkey, Syria, and Iraq with several reporters from the Seattle Globalist. I hope to see you at Elliott Bay next week, and I hope you'll consider attending all the Short Run events over the next two months.

• You have until November 15th to apply for Artist Trust's Arts Innovator Award, which gives $25,000 annually to two artists of any discipline "who are originating new work, experimenting with new ideas, taking risks, and pushing the boundaries of their respective fields." We would love to see an author take home one of these bad boys, okay?

• If you are a woman aged 50 or older, you have until November 30th to submit your unpublished poetry collection to Two Sylvias Press's Wilder Series Book Prize. One book of poetry will be selected as the winner. The winning author will get a thousand dollars and her book will be published by Two Sylvias.

• The feminist bookstore featured in the comedy series Portlandia posted a sign in their front window reading "Fuck Portlandia! Transmisogyny – Racism – Gentrification – Queer Antagonism – Devaluation of Feminist Discourse." When the Willamette Week asked the bookstore for comment, they eventually responded with a note that read:

After some consideration and research we've decided to officially tell the Willamette Weekly to go fuck themselves. Your paper has absolutely zero journalistic professionalism and you are scummy rape apologists. Thanks for the opportunity tho! Have a great night.

• Over in Pullman, the Washington State University Museum of Art is hosting a neat-looking survey of Northwest cartooning featuring artists like Peter Bagge, Ellen Forney, Jim Woodring, Eroyn Franklin, David Lasky, and Mita Mahato.

• It looks like a new California law requiring a Certificate of Authenticity for every signed item just made it a lot more difficult to sell autographed books. Eureka Books published a blog post earlier this week about the spot this puts them in:

Here’s the problem: We sell greeting cards by local artist John Wesa. He signs each one. If we sell one for $5, under this law, we have to provide a certificate of authenticity, and we have to keep our copy of the COA for seven (7!) years. For a $5 greeting card.

• It's Banned Book Week, and the Humble Bundle right now contains a number of banned books and comics for you to buy for cheap. Proceeds benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which defends cartoonists everywhere from injustices like shitty work conditions and dumb citizens who try to block their freedom of speech.

• Google fed over ten thousand books to its artificial intelligence in an effort to teach it colloquial language. Problem is, Google didn't ask permission from the authors, or even offer to pay them for their work. One author tells the Guardian:

“Is this any different than someone using one of my books to start a fire? I have no idea ... I have no idea what their objective is. Certainly it is not to bring me readers.”

• Skyfall director Sam Mendes is producing (and may direct) a movie adaptation of Spokane author Jess Walter's bestselling novel Beautiful Ruins. At the very least, it will be a gorgeous film.

• NPR is publishing interviews that went into Studs Terkel's incredible book Working, about the day-to-day lives of workers, from prostitutes to mechanics.

• Michiko Kakutani's review of a new biography of Hitler's rise is a masterpiece of shade: Kakutani uses the book as an excuse to write at length about Donald Trump without ever once using the word "Trump." It's one of the better reviews Kakutani has published of late.