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?

Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling Anthology. We've put $20 in as a non-reward backer

Who is the Creator?

Apex Publications.

What do they have to say about the project?

Upside Down is a collection of short fiction. Each story examines a tired trope or common cliche and twists it into something new!

What caught your eye?

What a fun project. Short fiction that takes a trope — Prostitute with a Heart of Gold; the City Planet; The Singularity Will Cause the Apocalypse; Heroine Loves a Bad Man; The Magical Negro, just to name a few — and flips it in some way.

The editors leave it up to the author to decide how to destroy the trope they chose, so no doubt there will be a lot of imaginative upending of some hoary old cliches.

Plus the production values look great — nice artwork, nice video, nice presentation.

Why should I back it?

A ton of reasons, but here's a good one: Seattle's own Nisi Shawl is included.

Plus it's cheap! Get the ebook for $5, or the softbound print copy for $15.

How's the project doing?

28 days to go, and they're 45% funded. It's a good bet they'll make it.

Do they have a video?

Kickstarter Fund Stats

• Projects backed: 8
• Funds pledged: $160
• Funds collected: $100
• Unsuccessful pledges: 0
• Fund balance: $880

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,

The Little Free Library closest to my house is often full of crap. I'm talking outdated programming books and collections of VHS tapes and other things that stay in the LFL for weeks and weeks because no one wants them. The structure is not in someone's front yard, so it's unclear who is responsible for it. I'm tempted to weed the LFL myself, tossing the old crap and filling it with newer novels, audio books on CD, hardback non-fiction titles. (I just KonMari-ed my bookshelves, so I have lots of goodies to contribute.) Would that be overstepping?

Thanks,

Alyssa, Capitol Hill

Dear Alyssa,

I admire your “go-getter” attitude. Personally, I’ve never been convinced of the community benefit of those tiny libraries. To me, they are what you’ve experienced: twee trash cans adored and installed by middle- and upper-class individuals who believe that their poorer neighbors will treasure their garbage.

But I’ve been wrong about many things lately. For instance: take the ghosts haunting my vagina. Most contemporary researchers agree that the best method for dispelling ghosts is to ask them politely but firmly to leave. If that doesn’t work, leading studies show that asking a ghost what it wants – like a ham sandwich, for instance – and then satiating it will do the trick.

I consider myself a woman of science, unmoved by superstition, so for months I have faithfully followed the scientific method.

“PLEASE LEAVE,” I scream at my vagina on a near-nightly basis. Followed by, “DO YOU WANT A HAM SANDWICH?”

Still, the hauntings have continued. So last weekend, I purchased an amethyst dildo from a serene wiccan named Goshuhn. Now, I’m not one to believe in the healing powers of crystals, but Goshuhn assured me that ghosts really hate amethysts because the crystal is known as a sobering agent and ghosts love to party (bizarrely, they also love ham sandwiches so I might’ve just been encouraging them to stick around).

Despite my skepticism, the amethyst dildo appears to be working. I have noticed a 50 percent reduction in paranormal activity in my vagina over the past week.

This is all to say, while I’m skeptical that a little free library can work, I am willing to put my faith in you, Alyssa. Tomorrow, tape a sign to that tiny library that says something like,

Spring cleaning! I’ve noticed our pickings have become a bit stale, so on TKTKTK (this is where you fill in a date/time) I’ll be tossing old items and replacing them with new stock. Please feel free to stop by, say hi, and contribute a book that you love and think others will enjoy. If you have questions, contact me at TKTKTK (this is where you put your email address, if you want).

I believe in you,

Cienna

Two more to go. The 18th issue of Intruder, Seattle’s free, invitation-only comics anthology, is available around town right now, which means only issues 19 and 20 are left before the whole operation folds. Everything seems more acute when a countdown timer’s running, of course, so it’s hard to say for sure, but this issue of Intruder certainly feels more…Intruder-ier than ever before: thicker, full of a wider variety of comics, even livelier than usual.

One of the high points of this issue is Tom Van Deusen’s “Autobiographical Comic Strip,” in which a seemingly mundane trip to the UW Medicine building in Ravenna is upturned by some delightful physical comedy involving a duck. Van Deusen’s art keeps getting tighter and more interesting with every new pages of comics he produces; he’s starting to develop a line that looks very similar to former Seattle cartoonist Jason Lutes, only with more of a sense of fun.

Other strips in this issue share that absurdist comedy vibe. Brandon Lehmann’s dark-but-funny “Stranger Danger” is about a wizard who keeps alternating attempts to lure a young boy into his van with exasperated outbursts when the boy is too easily duped. Seth Goodkind reaches out to a horrific newspaper comic strip deity in hopes of discovering the secrets of comedy. Marc Palm’s strip investigates the weird world of sexually experimental music.

But this issue of Intruder also presents some social commentary — “Urban Distress,” by Marie Hausauer delivers a modest proposal combining haute couture and Seattle’s homelessness problem — and an earnest David Bowie tribute from David Lasky, along with surrealist art pieces like Tim Miller’s full-page illustration of…well...something — a quasi-religious pin-up featuring a bunch of arms and shapes and white space that looks like it could change your life under just the right blend of hallucinogenic drugs. In fact, Intruder has even less of a house style than it did a few months ago. The issue sprays from earnest to painfully ironic, from dense craftsmanship to abstract carelessness. If you can find a thematic link between all these strips, you’re a more astute reader than I.

Since Intruder’s organizers announced the impending end of the magazine, Intruder has only become more interesting. It feels less like a ferocious, impassioned mission statement for Seattle’s comics community, the way it did when Intruder first started, and more like a celebration of itself. With each passing issue, Intruder looks more like Intruder as it prepares to disappear forever. These are the issues that young cartoonists will try to evoke in years to come when they put together their own anthologies. I can hear them now — telling each other, “no, we should make it more like Intruder,” and everyone will know exactly what they mean by that.

• Congratulations to the winners of the city's Civic Partner grants, which are selected by the Office of Arts and Culture. You can read more about the grants at Capitol Hill Seattle and find a list of all the recipients here, but Seattle-area literary organizations recieving grant money includes APRIL, Arcade magazine, Book-It Repertory Theatre, Clarion West, Copper Canyon Press, Floating Bridge Press, Hedgebrook, Jack Straw Foundation, Lit Crawl Seattle, Hugo House, Seattle Arts and Lectures, The Raven Chronicles, and Town Hall Seattle. Grants range anywhere from a couple hundred bucks to tens of thousands of dollars.

• The New York Library Association has added a few names to its Writers Hall of Fame. The living recipients are Roger Angell, Roz Chast, Samuel R, Delany, and Stephen Sondheim. Deceased recipients include Maya Angelou, Jean Craighead George, Don Marquis, and Grace Paley.

• Delightful weird fiction publisher Small Beer Press has published a lovely blog post celebrating the fact that two Small Beer titles have been chosen as staff recommendations by Christina at Ravenna Third Place Books. "It’s pretty great as a publisher on (near!) the east coast to see our books as staff picks on the west coast," the post explains. Seattle loves Small Beer titles; if they ever look into leaving Massachusetts, we think they'd be a great fit here in our city.

• President Obama has nominated a new Librarian of Congress. Hopefully, those ninnies in the Senate won't delay the process the way they're threatening to delay the Supreme Court nomination. On Facebook, Obama writes,

Today, I'm nominating Dr. Carla Hayden to be our 14th Librarian of Congress. Michelle and I have known Carla since her days working at the Chicago Public Library, and her dedication to learning and education is unparalleled. More recently, she's been hard at work revitalizing Baltimore’s struggling library system as the CEO of Enoch Pratt Free Library. Last year, during the unrest in Baltimore, Dr. Hayden kept the doors of the Pratt open as a beacon for the community. Her understanding of the pivotal role that emerging technologies play in libraries will be essential in leading the Library of Congress as it continues to modernize its infrastructure and promote open access and full participation in today's digital world. Finally, Dr. Hayden will be the first woman and the first African-American to hold this position in its 214 year history – both of which are long overdue.

For Duane Wilkins, University Book Store is a family affair. His mother worked there for over 20 years, and he started shopping there, by his own estimation, somewhere between the ages of 12 and 14. “I think sometimes I work here as karmic payback for what I put booksellers through” as a customer, Wilkins jokes. He used to bombard U Book Store employees with questions — “when is the next book in this series coming out and when is this book coming out in paperback” and so on. He used to prefer to shop at the Washington Book Store, a competitor across the street from University Book Store that has long since gone out of business. “My mother would give me grief about it,” Duane says, but he offers, by way of explanation, “they carried all the Harlan Ellison books, and University Book Store didn’t.”

Science fiction has appealed to Wilkins since he was in elementary school. He still recalls the book that introduced him to the genre: Robert Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo. From there, he read all the Heinlein he could find, followed quickly by all the sci-fi books in his school library. It wasn’t long before he discovered comics and started attending sci-fi conventions. Wilkins started working at University Book Store in the receiving department in 1983. From there, he joined the night maintenance team and became a cashier. By 1988, he took over the science fiction section — “nobody else wanted it” — and he soon became a buyer for sci-fi and for kids.

After he took charge of it, Wilkins quickly transformed University Book Store’s meager selection into the single best science fiction section in the entire state of Washington. And Wilkins has become Seattle’s sci-fi godfather — authors seek him out for his approval, publishers seek to woo his attention for new titles, and the local sci-fi community reveres him for his years of championship. It’s not uncommon to come across Wilkins’s name in the “thanks” sections of sci-fi novels, and it’s rare to talk to a sci-fi or fantasy author who doesn’t have an adoring story about him.

What, to Wilkins, makes a good science fiction and fantasy section? He likes to see a breadth of stock: “Do they carry the entire Wheel of Time series? Or just a few books from the series?” And he looks to make sure they have more than just the most popular names; not just Neal Stephenson, say, but also Charles DeLint, Jack Vance, and Robin Hobb. “There’s a lot of names I just eyeball” within seconds of entering a bookstore, Wilkins says.

A pivotal moment for Wilkins came early in his career when he helped with a Terry Brooks signing in the store. Brooks, he says, “taught me about how authors should treat their fans.” Wilkins likes authors who “take the time to thank their fans for supporting them. I respect an author who knows that it’s good to treat them well. Nobody comes to a [book signing] saying ‘well, I think your writing sucks but I want to see what you look like.’ They come because they’re fans.” Over the years, he’s met hundreds, maybe thousands, of sci-fi authors, but a few of his encounters still render him starstruck: Ray Bradbury, for instance, was “very quiet and shy,” but Wilkins still found meeting him to be “anxiety-producing.”

Wilkins is a world-class recommender of books. He prides himself on connecting readers with authors they’ll absolutely love. “I have a couple customers come in and tell me [my recommendations are] always right. It’s flattering.” On the other hand, “I had someone come in and tell me I’m right half the time, which was upsetting for me. I like to be in the 90th percentile” when it comes to book recommendations. He likes to read a broad range of subgenres, including “space opera, high fantasy — even urban fantasy/romance, if it’s good enough.”

So what counts to him? “The most important thing is characters.” But he’s also a fan of good worldbuilding, which he equates to an iceberg: “you only see the tiny tip sticking out” of the surface of the novel, he says, but you can tell when an author has thought through the 90 percent of the book’s logic that the readers will never see. And high-quality prose is slightly overrated: “the writing can be average or bad as long as the storytelling is strong. There are writers out there who I won’t name who are brilliant writers, but their stories are bad because nothing ever happens.”

And what’s he been reading lately? “I just finally finished reading Lawrence Schoen’s book Barsk;” he’s excited for this Friday’s event for the anthology Unbound with editor Shawn Speakman and writers including Terry Brooks; Calamity, the third book in Brian Sanderson’s Reckoners series; and Charlie Jane Anders’s debut novel All the Birds in the Sky, which he pitches to me with a personal appeal, saying “I’m assuming you were a nerd, got picked on in high school?” He assures me that however bad I may have had it in high school — moderately bad, for the record — the main characters of Birds had it much worse. He says it was a surprising book, one of those reading experiences that starts as one kind of a book and then changes partway through: “I thought it would be this whole thing, but it’s a whole other category. “ Goes to show, Wilkins says; with some of the best books, “you can’t always tell.” If you read the right books, science fiction/fantasy will always find ways to surprise you.

This is the fourth in our Bookstore of the Month series about University Book Store. Here's week one, week two, and week three.

Seattle Poet and writer Esther Altshul Helfgott returns as this week's sponsor, and we're thrilled to have her. She's going to be appearing March 6th in an event featuring the music of Mozart intersersed with Esther reading from her book Listening to Mozart: poems of Alzheimer's.

Find out more on our sponsors page, and read the first part of Esther's Listening to Mozart, to get a feel for her direct, and lyrical, approach to processing pain and loss.

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.

TUESDAY Beloved Seattle young adult author Sean Beaudoin debuts his new short story collection, Welcome Thieves, in a release party at Hugo House. Beaudoin promises “Music, cheap booze, a slideshow. Not the usual routine.” Welcome Thieves is his first book for adults.

WEDNESDAY It’s time for a big name: Jon Krakauer reads at Town Hall. His latest, Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, is about the sexual assault epidemic on college campuses around the country. Have you seen this video of Krakauer shutting down a questioner last year? It’s very worth your time:

THURSDAY Tonight, Seattle Review of Books cofounders Martin McClellan and Paul Constant will present our book club picks at the beautiful Bainbridge Island bookstore Eagle Harbor Book Company. We invite you to come talk books with us.

But because we always offer additional events when there’s an SRoB-related happening, your ALTERNATE THURSDAY event is the very last Cheap Beer and Prose at the old Hugo House. It’s quite a lineup, too: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Hanna Brooks Olsen, Jessica Mooney, and Jason Schmidt. This will be your last chance to buy $1 PBRs from the Hugo House bar. Make it count. (By “make it count,” I mean “drink until you start sobbing and clutching a column in the Hugo House while vowing to never let it go,” obviously.)

FRIDAY At the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library, Dr. Damon Tweedy will read from his new book, Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine. We know that African-Americans receive very poor health care in this country, but up until now, I’m not sure that anyone has really explored, in-depth, how people treat our African-American health care providers. This looks fascinating.

SATURDAY The African-American Writers Alliance group reading has become a tradition at Elliott Bay Book Company; the reading started over two decades ago, and it moved to Capitol Hill with the bookstore a few years back. Tonight’s readers: Alliniece Andino, Margaret Barrie, Jaye Ware, Gaylloyd Sisson, Minnie Collins, Lola Peters, Monique Franklin, Santiago Vega, Helen Collier, and event organizer Georgia S. McDade.

SUNDAY Celebrated tiny comic convention Exterminator City returns in a new location: Ballard’s Push/Pull, at the corner of Market & 24th. About two dozen Seattle cartoonists will be around to sell and discuss their very latest books.

The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens

The extraordinarily nutso piece by Elspeth Reeve that everybody was talking about this week.

Each social media network creates a particular kind of teenage star: Those blessed with early-onset hotness are drawn to YouTube, the fashionable and seemingly wealthy post to Instagram, the most charismatic actors, dancers, and comedians thrive on Vine. On Facebook, every link you share and photo you post is a statement of your identity. Tumblr is the social network that, based on my reporting, is seen by teens as the most uncool. A telling post from 2014: “I picked joining Tumblr and staying active on here because: 1. I’m not attractive enough to be a Youtuber 2. Not popular enough for twitter 3. Facebook is dumb.” You don’t tell people your Tumblr URL, you aren’t logging the banalities of your day—you aren’t even you. On Tumblr, you can revel in anonymity, say whatever you want without fear of it going on your permanent record. You can start as many Tumblrs as you like, one for each slice of your personality, whether that’s gymnastics fandom (how I got into Tumblr) or Barack Obama-Harry Styles slashfic (it exists) or akoisexual identity (when your feelings of sexual attraction fade once they’re reciprocated). A Tumblr staffer pointed me to a blog called Dolph Lundgren & His Action Nips, which is just shirtless photos of the actor with his nipples turned into blinking GIFs.

Does Amazon's Data Speak for Itself

I try not to link to the same source twice in one weekend, but when one of my favorite writers (Paul Ford — you read his "What is Code" from last year, right?) takes on one of our favorite topics, Amazon, I can't just ignore it, can I?

I don’t have a good mental model for thinking across nine million objects, nor for exploring 80 million opinions. This is what people are talking about when they say “big data,” of course: No one knows what’s actually inside there, no one can make sense of all that stuff. No single human being could possibly read all of the reviews on Amazon in a single lifetime, and even reading the names of all the products would take six or seven months. Big data, for the most part, is made by humans—it is the record of what we clicked on, the banner ads we viewed, our paths through a site, multiplied by humanity. Sometimes it is seismic data or star charts too, but mostly what people are talking about with big data is data about human behavior that can be mined to create better predictive models for future human behavior.

One Man's Quest to Read — and Review — the World.

After just finishing our class teaching book reviewing at Hugo House, I've been thinking a lot about not only the nature and history of reviews, but what compells us to write them. Karan Mahajan's look at Michael A. Orthofer, and his the Complete Review, tease out some of the themes we love to linger on.

The Complete Review, “a selectively comprehensive, objectively opinionated survey of books old and new,” sits on the margins of the literary world, where it has flourished for sixteen years. As of last Friday, according to an analog counter on the site’s decidedly unglamorous homepage, it had reviewed three thousand six hundred and eighty-seven books, from a hundred different countries, originally published in sixty-eight different languages—an average of two hundred and thirty books a year. Virtually all of this criticism, and everything else on the Complete Review, is the work of Michael A. Orthofer, a fifty-one-year-old lawyer who was born in Graz, Austria, and brought up in New York City. Orthofer built the site—it took about five months; he coded it with basic HTML—on a P.C. at his home, in Manhattan, in 1999. For years, his name did not appear on the site, which claimed to be run by an “Editorial Board.” In 2009, on the site’s tenth anniversary, he began signing some reviews; the next year, he unmasked himself, discreetly, on the “About” page. In April, the retiring Orthofer will make his first serious bid for mainstream respectability, by publishing a book with the Columbia University Press. “The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction” is the culmination of his work so far, as well as a continuation and a promise.

German Forest Ranger Finds That Trees Have Social Networks, Too

Sally McGrane brings you one of those rare moments where you have to reconsider everything you thought you knew about a topic, to have your brain cracked clean open. Also… looks around, whispers at you you know, Ents—.

PRESENTING scientific research and his own observations in highly anthropomorphic terms, the matter-of-fact Mr. Wohlleben has delighted readers and talk-show audiences alike with the news — long known to biologists — that trees in the forest are social beings. They can count, learn and remember; nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals across a fungal network known as the “Wood Wide Web”; and, for reasons unknown, keep the ancient stumps of long-felled companions alive for centuries by feeding them a sugar solution through their roots.

Understanding Seattle's high-rise boom

For an tall-building and architecture nerd like me, Paul Roberts great Crosscut article is a delightful read. Curious about the future of the Seattle skyline? Wondering why we don't have 110 story towers coming soon to downtown (hint: it has to do with one of our city's nicknames, Jet City)? Wondering what the heck is going to happen on that corner that just got the hurricane fencing put up? Then, friends, this is a must read:

Consider: there are currently 13 high-rise apartment or condo buildings of at least 24 stories in development or planning in the downtown area. The average is 39 stories. Another 24 high-rises are in the proposal pipeline, according to city and industry reports.

Not all the proposed towers will be built, of course, but those that are “launched” will represent a shift in downtown housing that is unprecedented not only in size but also in socioeconomics. Like 4/C, many are being “amenitized” for an upscale market. To be profitable, they will need rents of around fifty percent above the city average, according to several industry estimates. What’s more, to judge by the heavy emphasis on studios and one-bedroom units, developers are anticipating a downtown population that is childless and even single.