Sponsor Paul Vidich's An Honorable Man has been getting a great reception. It's Washington D.C., 1953, and any fan of spy novels knows that this time is pivotal in the espionage game. Russia in chaos after Stalin died, McCarthyism taking root at home, the Cold War starting its long tense march.

We've got a full chapter on our sponsor's page for you to read and see what you think. An Honorable Man is the perfect Father's Day book, a taut thriller set in an important American past.

It's thanks to sponsors like Paul Vidich, and readers like you, we sold out this season of our sponsorships. We couldn't be more thrilled. If you'd like to be notified when we release the next block, sign up for our low-volume sponsors' mailing list.

We have only four sponsor slots left, before August. If you're a small publisher, writer, poet, or foundation that is looking to back our work, and advertise your own in an inexpensive and expressive way, take a look at our open dates. We'd love to talk to you about opportunities to sponsor us. It's our way of making internet advertising something to look forward to.

Eric McDaniel has never before been responsible for managing an entire bookstore. Before he took the lead position at the new Third Place Books Seward Park, he worked as one of a handful of managers at Third Place’s Lake Forest Park store, and he spent two years at Half Price Books on Capitol Hill. All told, he’s worked in bookstores for a dozen years.

And he’s been involved with Seward Park since the very beginning. “I helped with the design and the layout” of the shop, McDaniel tells me, “and [Third Place Books Managing Partner] Robert [Sindelar] and I went through the blueprints together” since before the store was public knowledge. Other Seward Park staffers, particularly used book buyer Wesley Minter, provided input on the store’s layout, too.

McDaniel has lived in the neighborhood “for about seven years now. I consider this my community,” he says. What does he like about the area? “I love the amount of cultural diversity we’ve got down here,” he says. And he likes the fact that “people still say hello on the sidewalks in Seward Park and Columbia City. It still feels like a very tight-knit community, and people are still very engaged” both with the community and with each other.

One aspect that McDaniel says the store is taking its time on is the event programming. For the summer, he says, “we need to play with the music levels and listen to what a noisy dinnertime [at the attached Raconteur restaurant] is like.” But they’ll definitely be hosting events once they get the noise issues figured out: “we designed it to seat a hundred people,” he says, and he’s eager to get a reading series started. With the city divided by traffic as it is, he can see a time when big-name visiting authors headline three separate Seattle events on three consecutive evenings: one at Third Place Lake Forest Park, one in Seattle proper at Elliott Bay Book Company or Town Hall, and one at Seward Park.

The store is already planning to host book clubs, hosted both by staff and by Seattle author Garth Stein, who lives in the neighborhood. “We’ve already had so many people reaching out with things they’d like to host here,” McDaniels says, and he finds the different types of suggested programming and the high level of interest to be heartening.

Third Place Books Seward Park has a staff of eight full-time booksellers and two part-timers. McDaniel wasn’t just looking for veteran booksellers, though he has four of those, too. Of the novice booksellers, he says, “three of them have done library work, and one of them worked in magazines at Bulldog News.” Two of the staff are former college professors. Experience was less important to McDaniel’s hiring decisions than ensuring the staff had a wide range of tastes and interests. A history of bookselling isn’t always the best indicator of success for new hires, McDaniel says. “I was kind of looking for personalities, and for people who could work with each other.”

A seasoned bookseller might notice that the bookshelves at Third Place Books Seward Park are light in stock. “We left things a little bit loose on the shelves because we anticipated new books,” McDaniel explains. Partly, they did so because they were counting on “getting used books from the community,” and he says “we intentionally bought a little bit light knowing people were going to come in the door and request very specific things.” By making sure there was room to grow, McDaniel says, the Seward Park store was leaving room to reflect the flavor and tastes of its community.

Cities Like Seattle Are Recklessly Unprepared For Self-Driving Cars

New Seattle-based publidation Scout takes on the infrastructure of self-driving cars. It asks a vital question: in the modern days of rapid technological change, how can the traditionally slow process of civic change catch up to technology and ideas that will benefit the city?

Timelines for the arrival of consumer-ready self driving cars range from two to 20 years. Even if 20 years go by before Americans trade in their driver’s licenses, the fact that only one out of every 17 cities is even thinking about self-driving cars is shocking. Transit infrastructure, from roads to light rail, takes years to plan, billions in investment, and decades to build.

At best, cities omitting autonomous vehicles from transit planning represents a failure of imagination. At worst, it’s gross civic negligence.

Does Literary Criticism Have a Grade Inflation Problem?

Alex Shehard looks at LitHub's new Book Marks service, a review aggregator (the Seattle Review of Books is one of the source sites for Book Marks), and argues that the grades of the books are elevated on the site.

This is not a new debate. Literary criticism has been routinely lambasted for its niceness, its lack of intellectual rigor, and its mediocrity. n+1’s first issue took on The Believer, which “[differed] in at least one particular from, say, the New York Review of Books, in that its overt criterion for inclusion is not expertise, but enthusiasm.” Writing in Slate in 2012, the critic Jacob Silverman decried the effect of social media on reviewing, arguing that it made incisive criticism more difficult because your potential targets were almost always connected to you in some way: “Reviewers shouldn’t be recommendation machines, yet we have settled for that role, in part because the solicitous communalism of Twitter encourages it.” (In 2013, meanwhile, Clive James took to The New York Times to tell Americans that they simply weren’t good at writing hatchet jobs.)

Head in the cloud

Sophie McBain, in the New Statesmen, looks at whether we're losing our ability to remember things now that we can store them all in our external hand-held brain.

do not remember my husband’s tele­phone number, or my best friend’s address. I have forgotten my cousin’s birthday, my seven times table, the date my grandfather died. When I write, I keep at least a dozen internet tabs open to look up names and facts I should easily be able to recall. There are so many things I no longer know, simple things that matter to me in practical and personal ways, yet I usually get by just fine. Apart from the few occasions when my phone has run out of battery at a crucial moment, or the day I accidentally plunged it into hot tea, or the evening my handbag was stolen, it hasn’t seemed to matter that I have downloaded most of my working memory on to electronic devices. It feels a small inconvenience, given that I can access information equivalent to tens of billions of books on a gadget that fits into my back pocket.

Every week, the Seattle Review of Books backs a Kickstarter, and writes up why we picked that particular project. Read more about the project here. Suggest a project by writing to kickstarter at this domain, or by using our contact form.

What's the project this week?

Small Town Noir: Mug shots from New Castle, PA 1930-60. We've put $20 in as a non-reward backer

Who is the Creator?

Diarmid Mogg.

What do they have to say about the project?

An extraordinary collection of criminal mug shots and the stories behind them from one small American town 1930-1960

What caught your eye?

This is a fascinating idea: a series of mughsots from a small town in America, found by a journalist and artist, who started investigating the stories of the people in the images. Using the attached criminal records, as well as newspaper information, Diarmid is creating a narrative of crime in this small town from 1930 - 1960.

That's a great concept, but execution is everything. Look at his website for a sample, where you'll see the people in the mugshots, and what Diarmid has recreated is evocative and well written, and he includes all the sources on each post.

Why should I back it?

Because no researcher will ever write this history, but it's a history worth knowing. A history of grift, of corruption, of petty crime, of people in the wrong place at the wrong time, with all of the racial and social layers that still affect American jurisprudence. Back it because the stories are amazing, and back it because you want to know.

How's the project doing?

They're only 4% funded currently, towards their goal of $20,000. A slow start, they can use every bit of help we can offer.

Do they have a video?

Kickstarter Fund Stats

• Projects backed: 23
• Funds pledged: $460
• Funds collected: $400
• Unsuccessful pledges: 0
• Fund balance: $580

Whenever I read a glowing blurb on a book these days, I wonder to myself, "what is this person's relationship to the author?" It's no secret that authors write blurbs for friends, or former students, or authors who have previously blurbed them. Every blurb comes with a price — a favor owed, a favor repaid. A bookseller once told me that the only blurber they trusted was Thomas Pynchon, because Pynchon was a recluse and therefore he only blurbed books that he honestly liked because he didn't carry the personal baggage that every other author did when it comes to blurbs. (I've used this observation as a yardstick in the years since, and Pynchon has driven me to authors I might not otherwise have discovered, including Jim Knipfel.)

It's not like this observation is new or especially deep. Blurbs have always been favor games, passed around like cigarettes in prison. But maybe now, thanks to social media and a broader range of book news outlets, we can just see the strings that connect the authors a little more clearly than we once could. We now know when authors are friends or that they both spent time at the Iowa Workshop back in 2009 or that they have the same agent. Maybe it's always been this craven and insular, but it's never been quite this openly craven and insular.

I was talking with a friend a few weeks ago and I wondered, as I often do, if maybe we should do away with blurbs altogether. Nobody I know takes them seriously anymore, so maybe a blurb moratorium — a blurbatorium? — would be worthwhile. But my friend had a better idea. She said, "maybe they should just list the author's friends on the back cover." And, you know, that struck me as a pretty good idea.

Call it the Endorsements List. Rather than run a bunch of two-sentence lies about the book that overuse words like "luminous" and phrases like "by turns," why not just provide a list of the author's peers, teachers, friends, and classmates? We'd be able to learn a lot about the author — it would be kind of like an "If You Like X, You'll Also Like Y" algorithm — and we wouldn't have to sift through all the atrocious bullshit that passes for modern blurbs. Lay it out plain and let the reader decide whether they care or not.

These lists would just be governed by one simple rule: authors would have to expressly consent to be added to an endorsements list. The understanding would be that they were using their own name as a commodity to add value to another author's name. If they overused that commodity, people would stop caring. But if they only endorsed the authors they truly enjoyed, the value attached to their name would increase. This would mean less work for the authors — rather than struggling over how to describe a book in twenty words or less, they'd just have to sign their name — and it would clean up a dirty system of paybacks and back-scratching.

Every Friday, Cienna Madrid offers solutions to life’s most vexing literary problems. Do you need a book recommendation to send your worst cousin on her birthday? Is it okay to read erotica on public transit? Cienna can help. Send your questions to advice@seattlereviewofbooks.com.

Dear Cienna,

I know we have to be very careful these days. I mean, political correctness or whatever you want to call it. But, just because you like books by the Marquis de Sade doesn't mean you want to do the things inside, right?

Just because you like a white male writer doesn't make you bad, right? What about us who just want to read whatever the fuck we want and don't want to have to freaking justify it to everybody?

Bellevue Man

Dear Bellevue Man,

I doubt anyone is arguing that you should disavow all white male writers, as they’re ubiquitous. You might as well proclaim that you don’t like your beaches sandy. But a lot of people agree that white male authors have historically received, and continue to receive, a level of reverence, attention, and clout simply because of their race and gender, and maybe we should make an effort to find some new voices.

Nevertheless, I am sorry to hear you’re feeling oppressed by the literati. It’s hard to feel unfairly judged for something you can’t help, like your ethnicity, gender, or preference for books authored by white men. What you need to do is find a group of like-minded peers with whom you can share your burden. I would suggest you drop in on a support group – like those offered by Seattle Counseling Services – but I suspect your kind would not be welcome there.

Instead, head down to the Hard Rock Cafe with a copy of Charles Bukowski’s Love is a Dog From Hell (or anything by Hunter S. Thompson) and belly up to the bar. Order one of Marshawn Lynch’s favorite drinks – Skittles Sangria or a Patronessy – and wait for another white man to sidle up and compliment your taste in literature and hip appropriation of black culture. I suspect that after a few weeks of this routine, you will have amassed your own fawning book club. No longer will you and your brethren have to stand in the shadows like the millions of other white men who like to read works by millions of still other white men. Finally, you too shall be free.

Kisses,

Cienna

Each week, Christine Marie Larsen creates a portrait of a new author for us. Have any favorites you’d love to see immortalized? Let us know

Time Magazine correspondent, and author of Broad Influence, Jay Newton-Small is in town next Tuesday to talk about leveraging female political power.

Tomorrow Night, Friday, June 10th, come see these paintings in person! Push/Pull Gallery, and the Seattle Review of Books, are putting on a show at Essentia Mattresses Store on 1st Avenue. We'll be joined by Lesley Hazelton, Maged Zaher, and Sarah Galvin. More information is here on the Facebook invitation. Please come and say hello.

• Seattle author Neal Stephenson's Seveneves will be adapted into a film by writer Bill Broyles, director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer — the same team that made Apollo 13, Deadline reports. Based on Martin McClellan's review of Seveneves, they have a lot of good stuff to work with.

• Author Kate Messner wrote a kid's book about addiction. Apparently, this is a controversial-enough topic that a school cancelled Messner's planned visit:

I was told today that the principal felt the book and my presentation about the writing process behind it would generate many questions that they would not be able to adequately answer and discuss. I called and asked the school to reconsider because I desperately didn’t want to disappoint all those kids. I explained how the topic was handled in a sensitive, age appropriate way.

• Holger Schott Syme is critiquing a book of Shakespeare scholarship, one tweet at a time. He's now in the midst of a tweetstorm that encompasses more than 500 tweets.

• A bunch of fantasy authors played a role playing game together. They all played goblins.

• Some assholes stole a bunch of books intended for prisoners in Austin.

• Why do people insist on using Netflix terms to describe books? First, everyone was crazy about "The Netflix of Books," which turned out to be a dumb idea because libraries already exist. Now the Wired headline "You May Soon Binge Books Just Like You Binge Netflix" is making my eyelid twitch. We already binge books. It's called reading. And when we read a novel, we're already absorbing the equivalent of a TV season or two. Watching movies is one thing, reading books is another. I understand that it's helpful to use metaphors to explain concepts to people, but these Netflix-to-books false equivalencies are particularly clumsy.

Writer Tom King’s The Vision series from Marvel Comics is such a weird, wonderful thing. It’s a superhero comic that features virtually no superheroics, a domestic drama about superheroes that’s more interested in the psychology of its main characters than their powers. It’s a Cheeveresque suburban drama where the secrets that the main characters keep from each other manifest in the form of murder and the deeper issues of faith and existential angst materialize in the form of the convoluted Gordian knot of comics history.

The eighth issue of The Vision pushes along the plot of the series, after a seventh issue that reveled in the characters' deep and occasionally contradictory history. The synthezoid superhero and his family have settled into an uneasy tranquility, and they’re enjoying a visit from their “uncle,” a superhero created by the power-mad evil robot Ultron. Things seem positively cheery for a while, until, of course, they stop seeming cheery. Artist Gabriel Hernandez Walta portrays all the characters with a wide-eyed innocence, and he underplays the science fiction elements beautifully. He puts such attention into the detail of Vision’s family’s somewhat preppy clothing that you almost forget their skin is a radioactive pink-purple.

The best parts of the issue are the scenes that don’t necessarily have to do with advancing the plot. The Vision’s son reads the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice — the passage about justice and salvation not being the same thing — as he absentmindedly plays fetch with his robot dog, Sparky. Meanwhile, Vision’s malfunctioning wife is plunking away at a piano and slowly falling apart. Her housewife’s lament touches on the core themes of the series, the question of reality and synthetics, of tools and humanity:

When when I simply access the notes and play play play them well...I seem to feel that I am not playing them. I have… simply…become the piano. I am perfect perfect perfect I am the piano. I am I am I am.

There are very few comics that compare to The Vision. It’s a dense and literate story that celebrates its pulpy superhero roots. It’s not a deconstruction, the way Watchmen was. It’s not one of the hyper-serious re-imaginings we’ve seen time and again in Watchmen’s wake. It’s not a winking postmodern joke. It’s a book that has its own rhythms and its own uncomfortable vibrations. It’s heartbreaking to think that King is leaving The Vision with issue 12. He claims that his story will be complete with that last issue, but it’s easy to imagine 50 or 60 more issues of this, collected into something dense and weird and creepy: the great American superhero novel.

Wednesday June 8: Homegoing Reading

It’s hard to turn anyone’s head with a dust jacket blurb these days, but the rare appearance of a Ta-Nehisi Coates blurb on Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel Homegoing — calling the book an “inspiration” and citing its “so fully realized, so elegantly carved” characters — is a rare meaningful instance. It announces this book as something worth your time. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Thursday June 9: Graphic Masters Opening Night

See our Event of the Week column for more details. Seattle Art Museum, 1300 1st Ave, 654-3100, http://seattleartmuseum.com. Free. All ages. 5 pm.

Friday June 10: Writers Opening Night

For months now, Seattle artist Christine Marie Larsen has created portraits of local and historical literary figures as a weekly feature here on the Seattle Review of Books. Tonight, she’s debuting her first show of author portraits, with three of her subjects — Maged Zaher, Sarah Galvin, and Lesley Hazleton — in attendance. Plus: a Little Free Library! Essentia, 2008 1st Ave, 441-0321, http://pushpullseattle.weebly.com. Free. All ages. 6 p.m.

Saturday June 11: Used Book Sale at Third Place Books

The best bookstores are the ones that have used books mixed in with the new books. Today at all three Third Place Books locations, including the beautiful new Seward Park store, all used books in stock are 40 percent off their sticker price. Go buy a stack of books the length of your arm, guilt-free. Third Place Books locations, http://thirdplacebooks.com, 366-3333, Free. All ages. 9 a.m.

Sunday June 12: Sci-fi Bike Ride

New-to-Seattle author Adam Rakunas celebrates his new novel about an interplanetary labor union, Like a Boss, with a bike ride featuring fellow sci-fi/fantasy authors Laura Anne Gilman and Brenda Cooper. The ride starts at Husky Stadium Station at noon and continues for 2.6 miles to Café Solsticio in Fremont for a 1 pm reading. Café Solsticio, 1110 N. Northlake Way 547-0404, http://solsticiofremont.com/. Free. All ages. 1 p.m.

Monday June 13: Leveraging Female Political Power

It’s clear that women will decide the election this November, either by showing up to vote against Donald Trump or by staying home out of disgust at the electoral process. Time magazine reporter Jay Newton-Small will share everything she knows about American women and democracy—from Hillary Clinton’s dealmaking to surprising demographic information—in a talk tonight. Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave., 652-4255, http://townhallseattle.org. $5. All ages. 7:30 p.m.

Tuesday June 14: Sweet Lamb of Heaven Reading

Lydia Millett’s delightfully creepy novels are full of sticky secrets and missing people and monstrous obsessions. Tonight she’s joined by Seattle’s own Stacey Levine—herself no stranger to bizarre and uncomfortable fictions. This pairing makes so much sense it’s ridiculous; these two writers will either become best friends or they’ll light each other on fire. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

If you grew up as a comics fan before the turn of the century, the giant posters in front of SAM celebrating their new Graphic Masters exhibit right now are sure to send a little shiver of joy running down your spine. Walk down First Avenue and you’ll be sure to see them: two giant posters reproducing artwork from Goya and Picasso, right next to a giant poster featuring Robert Crumb.

One of the central exhibits in Graphic Masters are the over 200 illustrations that Crumb made for his faithful interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Make no mistake, these aren’t etchings or sketches—they’re comics. More than that, they’re Crumb comics, featuring a big-legged Eve who has never before looked quite so stacked as she wanders, buck naked, around the Garden of Eden. Though some — myself included — would argue that the Genesis adaptation is not Crumb’s most brilliant work, it is most certainly stunning. And anyone who attended the Frye’s Crumb exhibit a few years ago can tell you that in person, his work looks almost holy: the individual feathered lines are pressed into the page, a reminder that a human hand created these almost-impossibly beautiful cartoons.

By now the embrace of Crumb feels almost commonplace, but in the 1990s, it was impossible to think that a major museum would be celebrating a cartoonist on the same level as canonical masters like Rembrandt and Hogarth. And this isn’t SAM slipping Crumb into an exhibit by giving him a pass as an honorary fine artiste—in fact, SAM is jumping completely into the comics world by celebrating the fabulous comics scene that has sprung up in Seattle over the last few years.

The opening night party for Graphic Masters features a special limited-edition paper called Whims, in which cartoonists who have contributed to Seattle’s scene-making Intruder comics anthology interpret works by Goya. And it’s asked the organizers of the annual Short Run Comix & Arts festival to put together a special zine and print fair at SAM. Short Run organizer Kelly Froh can’t quite believe this is happening; she says getting a call from SAM “was a big deal for us, to be acknowledged in this way, and we were happy to do it.“

She’s right to call it a big deal. Though legitimacy no longer escapes comics, there’s something different going on here. The literary world has embraced comics for almost twenty years now, but the fine art world, at least in Seattle, has never quite come out to celebrate comics quite like this; it’s a big moment in which a huge institution opens its doors to Seattle artists who have toiled for decades without even a hope of SAM’s acknowledgement. Local comics artists including Colleen Frakes, David Lasky, Aaron & Jessixa Bagley, Mita Mahato, and Megan Kelso will have tables of books for sale at the show, and Fantagraphics Books will be represented by Jim Woodring, who will be performing tricks with his enormous pen. (This is not a euphemism.)

This is a big night for Seattle comics, a celebration of a scene that has quietly been amassing momentum over the last handful of years. An acknowledgement by an institution as large and respected by SAM was not necessary for the scene—our cartoonists by and large already know they’re part of something great—but the endorsement isn’t meaningless, either. There’s something more happening in Seattle’s cartooning community than, as Crumb self-deprecatingly put it many decades ago, “only lines on paper.”

Seattle Art Museum, 1300 1st Ave, 654-3100, http://seattleartmuseum.com. Free. All ages. 5 pm.