Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin - Kickstarter Fund Project #6

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?

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. We've put $20 in as a non-reward backer

Who is the Creator?

Arwen Curry.

What do they have to say about the project?

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, a feature documentary, explores the remarkable life and legacy of the groundbreaking 86-year-old author.

What caught your eye?

This one is pretty self-evident. Le Guin is one of the greats. Like so many, the Earthsea books cracked open my mind when I was a kid, and my mom read them to me, a little bit at bedtime over months. A school for wizards? Whoa. What an amazing thing to consider, and her mix of beautiful prose, great humanity, and startling insight into the minds of all kinds of characters cemented her legacy. And then she wrote a ton of other great books.

The filmmakers have Le Guin's full cooperation. This will be a rare and privileged look into the woman who created so many great works.

And, even better, she's a Northwest writer — she's lived in Portland since 1959.

Why should I back it?

Because, odds are, you're a Le Guin fan as well, and the idea of watching a few hours of her talking about her writing — as well as interviews with other writers like Michael Chabon and Margaret Atwood, is just thrilling.

"Any kind of imaginative fiction trains people that there are other ways to do things and other ways to be. There is not just one civilization, and it is good, and it is the way we have to be. It trains the imagination." - Le Guin, from the video.

The rewards, especially if you dig deep into your purse, are good. Signed artificats, and even a 1-minute audio answer to a writing question from Le Guin herself. But, like all films, the reward is the film itself.

How's the project doing?

20 days to go, and they've up over $140k of their $80k goal, so quite well. But, like I said last week, filmmaking is expensive. This money they're raising secures another funding grant that covers most of their costs, but they will use every penny we throw at them, and then some.

Do they have a video?

Kickstarter Fund Stats
  • Projects backed: 6
  • Funds pledged: $120
  • Funds collected: $40
  • Unsuccessful pledges: 0
  • Fund balance: $920

From the fine folks at Publishers Weekly:

Bookstores sales rose 2.5% in 2015, marking the first time since 2007 that sales in the sector were up. According to preliminary figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau, total bookstore sales in 2015 hit $11.17 billion, up from $10.89 billion in 2014.

To celebrate, let's visit a few bookstores this weekend, okay?

Cienna Madrid is celebrating the long Presidents' Day weekend by not offering any advice at all. Never fear: she'll be back next week with an all-new column. If you're desperately in need of a Cienna fix, may we humbly suggest you investigate the Help Desk archives? That's 25 weeks packed full of literary advice!

Book News Roundup: The huge success of #1000BlackGirlsBooks

  • We told you a couple weeks ago about Marley Dias, the student who, "sick of reading about white boys and dogs," launched the #1000BlackGirlsBooks hashtag. Now, according to Vox, Dias's mission is complete: She has collected 1000 books featuring black girls as main characters, and is donating them to libraries in her school and to an elementary school in Jamaica. Here is Dias on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, discussing her project:
  • Here is a sentence that is full of awesome: Shoreline Community college students, inspired by a social-justice-themed science fiction anthology, are hosting a book drive benefitting Books to Prisoners. Read more here.

  • The Douglass-Truth branch of Seattle Public Library is hosting a display featuring the history of the Seattle Black Panther Party. If Beyoncé's incredible Super Bowl show piqued your interest in the Black Panthers, this is a good way to learn more.

  • I like Medium as a website; I think it's a great way to adapt blogging into something a little more thoughtful. But it does seem to be full of Tech Folks with Opinions. Like, for instance, Vinod Khosla:

If luck favors the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur is credited with saying, we’re in danger of becoming a very unlucky nation. Little of the material taught in Liberal Arts programs today is relevant to the future... Though Jane Austen and Shakespeare might be important, they are far less important than many other things that are more relevant to make an intelligent, continuously learning citizen, and a more adaptable human being in our increasingly more complex, diverse and dynamic world.
  • Look, I could go on about this, but I just want to leave a little thought here in response: science is very important! Obviously. But why do we have to promote science at the expense of literature? Shouldn't a good education produce well-rounded students? Shouldn't we be concerned about the humanity of students, as well as their marketability? Good, lord, why would we transform education into an all-or-nothing proposition?

So this is a big deal: Hometown Heroes is a one-day, free, all-ages comics art show "formed out of a desire to connect creators, readers, and the stories that bond them in a new way." It happens on April 8th from 6 to 11 pm at 1927 Events (1927 3rd Ave). I love Emerald City Comicon as much as anyone, but you can't really argue that ECCC gives as much attention to Seattle comics creators as it used to; the show has become a very big, very mainstream event. And that's great! But Hometown Heroes offers a chance for Seattle's indie comics community to show off what they've been working on, which is just as important. This could be the perfect springtime complement to the Short Run Festival in Seattle's comics calendar year. If you're considering attending, go click the "interested" button on Facebook.

Portrait Gallery: Judy Blume

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

Judy Blume is certainly somebody we don't need to say very much about, other than tomorrow is her birthday. Millions of kids learned about themselves, and their friends, neighbors, and siblings through her empathetic and big-hearted works. If she were here, we'd say thank you Judy Blume! We here at the Seattle Review of Books wish you a very happy birthday.

Book News Roundup: Seattle's housing crisis, in comic form

  • Mary Ann Gwinn at the Seattle Times offers an in-depth preview of Third Place Books' new Seward Park store, which will open in late April.

  • Seattle author Lesley Hazleton's upcoming book on agnosticism, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, has earned two places of pride in the most recent issue of Publishers Weekly. Hazleton's book received a starred review praising "her appealing voice and accessible prose," and it was also chosen as a most-anticipated book of the spring. Agnostic is due out this April, and we can't wait.

  • The award-winning Ms. Marvel comic written by Seattle writer G. Willow Wilson has been nominated for another award — this time, it's up for the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics. McDuffie was a giant in the comics world and a champion for diversity in a time when it seemed as though comics would always be the province of straight white dudes, so this is a real honor. Congratulations to Wilson, and a recommendation to our readers: the most recent issue of Ms. Marvel, which hit comics stands yesterday, might be her best yet.

  • Seattle cartoonist Tom Van Deusen has a pretty great autobiographical comic in this week's Seattle Weekly about Seattle's housing crisis. You really should go read it.

  • Some bad news for authors that we found in the Melboure, Austrailia newspaper The Age:

Recent surveys in Britain, the United States and Australia have revealed a serious slump in the income that authors receive from their writing. In Australia, authors have seen their average income from writing decrease from about $22,000 in the early 2000s to less than $13,000 in 2015. For many authors, that means they can no longer earn a livelihood from their work.
  • And because it's always better to end on a weird note than a bad note: Amy Brady has published a remarkable interview with the founders of the dark web's first literary magazine over at Literary Hub.

Thursday Comics Hangover: Mean girls gone wild

Some of the best comics-minded thinkers — Grant Morrison, Kieron Gillen, Kelly Sue DeConnick — love to talk about comic books in musical metaphors. It’s an apt comparison; sometimes going to the comic book store and picking up a few comics is reminiscent of visiting the record store and walking out with a bag full of singles. They’re tiny bursts of art in an eminently consumable, commercial format, and they have their own aura of cool about them.

If Vancouver cartoonist Ryan Heshka’s Mean Girls Club was a record, it would be a blistering woman-fronted punkabilly band's 45, the kind that begins and ends in just under two minutes but somehow expands to consume entire weeks of your life. It’s a gorgeous, self-contained dirty thrill of a book, one that feels simultaneously retro and modern.

It helps that the whole comic as an object is aesthetically pleasing. Published by London comics company Nobrow as part of their 17x23 series — described as “a graphic short story project designed to help talented young graphic novelists tell their stories in a manageable and economic format” — Mean Girls Club is a beautiful package. It’s squatter than most comics, squarish, printed in shades of hot pink on quality paper with french flaps. Very few comics these days, aesthetically, look this good.

Mean Girls Club is a short story about a street gang of unruly women: Pinky, Wendy, Sweets, Blackie, Wanda, and McQualude. They torture innocent people. They take fistfuls of pills and slap each other with fishes and punch well-meaning nurses right in the jaw. And then the mayhem really starts.

Heshka’s retro art recalls a cross between Richard Sala and Charles Burns, and he squeezes invention out of the limited color palette on every page. Most readers of Mean Girls Club will burn through the book in a matter of minutes, but they’ll want to read it over and over again, because it’s just so damn catchy and pretty and funny and raw. If this was a record, you’d wear out the grooves in a matter of weeks.

This is not a drill:

The eighth installment of the Harry Potter series, the two-part play, "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," will be published as a book this summer, author J.K Rowling announced on her Pottermore website Wednesday.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will be released on July 31st, which is canonically Harry Potter's birthday. Presumably, it will break all previous sales records for plays.

Book News Roundup: Celebrate Sherman Alexie, Get a New Job, and Change the Font on Your E-Reader

  • Congratulations to Sherman Alexie, who is this year's Pierce County Library system selection for Pierce County Reads. The library chose five of Alexie's books for everyone in Pierce County to read. They are: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Reservation Blues, Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Flight, and War Dances. I wholeheartedly agree; everyone in Washington state should read all of those books.

  • Seattle Arts and Lectures is hiring a Program Associate for its Writers in the Schools program. If you support writing education for kids, this might be the job for you.

  • The lineup for the third Rainier Valley Lit Crawl has been announced. This one happens on March 5th. Start getting excited. One of the readings will happen at the Peruvian chicken joint Big Chickie, which surely represents some kind of a first in Seattle literary history.

  • Nationally, the book Twittersphere is very excited that Lisa Lucas, the former publisher of Guernica, has just been named the third Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, which oversees the National Book Awards.

  • Selma director Ava DuVernay is being pursued to direct a film adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. I would watch the hell out of that.

  • In the face of a consumer revolt, Amazon has changed the weight of a Helvetica font on its Kindle e-readers. Readers weren't happy when Amazon swapped out the font for a lighter version.

Songs are not poems in fancy clothing

Published February 10, 2016, at 12:01pm

Mairead Case review Simon Joyner's Only Love Can Bring You Peace.

It's one thing to love Simon Joyner's music. Is it possible to love the lyrics, when they're stripped of the music and bound in a book?

Read this review now

Meet Brad Craft, University Book Store's used book buyer

Brad Craft, the used book buyer at University Book Store, says he “didn’t grow up in a bookish atmosphere” — he didn’t have access to a good library, and none of his teachers introduced him to the joys of literature. Where did he learn to love books? “Yard sales,” he says. He was especially drawn to a certain type of book: “I’ve read more gothic romance novels than most men my age,” Craft explains. He assumed the bodice-rippers that he bought from his neighbors were classics of literature. “They looked like classics to me,” he says. The women on the covers “were in historical costumes,” after all, just maybe with a little more cleavage than you’d find on the cover of your typical Bronte book. For a long time, Craft says, “I couldn’t tell you the difference between a novelization of Airport ’77 and a Jane Austen novel.”

But he did eventually move on from the smut to the real classics: “I didn’t read Austen until I was in my late thirties, and then she was a revelation.” Now he’s obsessed, calling himself “a big set person.” At his home, he has matching sets of works by Fielding, Kipling, a 24-volume Balzac collection and “four sets of Dickens, I’m afraid.” What’s his favorite Dickens? “David Copperfield is close to my heart. I’ve read that more than all the others, including The Pickwick Papers. And I’m a big fan of The Old Curiosity Shop. I don’t even like allegory, but I think it’s a really exquisitely achieved allegory.” Craft has heard the quote attributed to Oscar Wilde that a reader “would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of [Curiosity Shop’s] little Nell without dissolving into tears...of laughter,“ but he disagrees: “I actually think it’s beautifully done.”

Craft worked at the late, lamented Stacey’s Books in San Francisco for 12 years. He’s done time at other used bookstores, and he even worked a handful of months in a corporate bookstore — “I had no emotional attachment to the place, but it did give me insights into the sale of things that happened to be books.” He can’t recall exactly how long he’s been at University Book Store — 12 or 13 years, give or take — but he knows that he helped convince management to add used books to the bookstore’s stock about a decade ago. He’s been behind the counter ever since.

Craft has been drawing since even before he could read. “My mother tells me that I drew before I talked. If she wanted me to be quiet and content, she just put a drawing implement in my hand and put me in the corner and I kept myself busy.” He started out copying John R. Neill’s illustrations from the Oz books, and even today he posts his bookish illustrations on his blog, Usedbuyer 2.0. A collection of his illustrations is for sale at University Book Store, and he sells author caricature calendars every December.

With all the talk about classics and used books, some might be surprised to learn that Craft is an avid podcaster. He’s been recording his Breakfast at the Bookstore show with Nick DiMartino for over a year now. “I’m a relatively late adopter of technology,” he admits, “but then I can become very enthusiastic.” Craft got into literary podcasts as a fan, but then he discovered that most of them were “over-specialized,” focusing only on specific subgenres of mystery, say, or certain types of science fiction. Instead, he wanted to do something a little broader, talking about all kinds of book-related topics with all kinds of guests.

Craft also headlines events at University Book Store on a regular basis. He reads Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” every year at the holidays — this last year was his eighth performance — and he’s also celebrated the birthdays of Dickens and Thackeray with readings, as well as a celebration of the poems of William Cowper. (“That was a barn-burner, right there,” he laughs.) “It allows me to serve ham three or four times a year,” Craft says, and it provides a rare opportunity for adults to sit and be read to, which is a pleasure that too many people give up after childhood. “I just think literature is meant to be read aloud,” Craft says. “The greatest literature needs to be put into the air now and again.”

What does Craft love most about University Book Store? “Perhaps its age more than anything else,” he says. “There’s a tradition here of respect both for the customers and the employees. They really want their booksellers to have things like health insurance and a livable wage. The values clearly are from an earlier era in a lot of ways — in a lot of good ways.”

The rule of thumb about questions in headlines — that most headline questions can be answered, simply, "no" — has never been more true than in this blog post, which is headlined "Are Paid Book Reviews Worth It?"

I didn't know that paid book reviews existed, but now I'm horrified to learn that they do. Here's the thing: if you're paying for a review, the likely audience of that review is just going to be a bunch of authors who have also paid for reviews. Readers can instinctively detect insincerity in a review, and these kinds of mercenary reviews are very likely to be poorly written. A poorly written book review is about as useful to society as Ted Cruz's thoughts on feminism.

Now that I know there's a whole paid-book-reviewing industry, I just want to state for the record that the Seattle Review of Books has never and will never accept money in exchange for book reviews. That flies in the face of the very idea of book reviewing.

Don't pay for book reviews. Pay for advertising instead. It's more honest. (And if I may, allow me to make a humble suggestion about the kind of not-terrible internet advertising you could buy.)

Last week, Joni Balter was nice enough to ask Steve Scher and me to interview Seattle librarian-legend Nancy Pearl on her show Civic Cocktail. I asked her how she felt about recent anti-book library policies taking root in the Seattle Public Library and in libraries around the country. You can watch the show below:

Excerpt from "Lyrebird"

343.
Eve of the new year. Bitter cold city. I sit by the café window, bring the soup bowl to my lips. Someone in the park across the street is swinging high on a swing-set in the dark.

344.
At least one keyhole has been stuffed with tissue by a previous tenant. So there is no seeing through.

345.
A very partial morning. The things I am trying constantly to re-make, alter, edit, adjust. Bring myself always back to the path, and the path is hard to find. I do not always want it.

346.
The early morning young mothers’ parade. A child I cannot see, screaming, “I need it! Give me!” Complete anguish of wanting.

347.
A soft rain is falling, so fine it looks like dust in the air all around us, and everyone holds their umbrellas like a gift.

348.
The knives come back sharper than they had ever been—sharper than new. We arranged them in the kitchen like an arsenal. We were afraid to put them away.

349.
“What is your favorite place?” I asked the tree.
The place where I am.

Book about chimpanzee deemed essential reading for Seattle

Remember the "If All Seattle Read the Same Book" program that Nancy Pearl started almost twenty years ago? Did you know it's still going on? It's true! Only a few years ago, Seattle Public Library changed the title of the program from Nancy Pearl's super-cool name to the much-less-compelling "Seattle Reads." It's still basically the same idea: SPL has a ton of copies of one book, and the author appears at library branches all around town to talk about the book. Why did they change the name to something passive and un-catchy? I dunno.

Anyway, SPL announced this year's Seattle Reads choice on Friday afternoon, when nobody was paying attention. Here it is:

“We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves” is about a middle-class American family, ordinary in every way except one: Mother and Dad (psychologists), brother Lowell, sisters Fern and Rosemary. The narrator, 18-year-old Rose, begins her story in the middle for a reason: “I was raised with a chimpanzee," she explains. "I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half and I loved her as a sister. As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence.”

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel written by Karen Joy Fowler, who is an excellent novelist. Fowler will be in town from May 20th through the 22nd. You should read the book and attend an events. If it helps, pretend the program is still called "If All Seattle Read the Same Book." Because that really is a better name.

From Solitaire to Otherlife

We're thrilled to have Kelley Eskridge back as a sponsor this week. Her fantastic book Solitaire has been turned into a feature film, titled Otherlife. That means it's time to read the book before the film arrives into the world. Read the entire first chapter on ours sponsors page. Also, check out Kelley's writing about what it was like to write this film based on her book.

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.

Time out of joint

Published February 08, 2016, at 11:53am

Paul Constant review Heidi Julavits's The Folded Clock.

A very disjointed review of Heidi Julavits's beautifully disjointed memoir, "The Folded Clock: A Diary."

Read this review now

Your Week in Readings: The best literary events from February 8th - 14th

MONDAY Kick your week off right, with the very first “Ask the Oracle” event at the Sorrento Hotel. This is a new fortune-telling themed reading series from the Hugo House, and it’s got a great gimmick: audience members anonymously ask questions about their futures. The authors find answers to those questions in their books. Hugo House supplied a sample Q&A in the promotional materials:

Question: Should I move to a new city soon?

Answer (found by opening Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town to a random page ): “The 1944 Italy I remembered brown and gray and lifeless. Every city, every small town reeked.”

The readers/fortune tellers at this one are novelist Rebecca Makkai, screenwriter and novelist Ramon Isao, and local treasure/short story author Stacey Levine. Levine practically does divination in her readings on a regular basis anyway, so she’s an especially good choice to kick off the new format.

TUESDAY Hugo House hosts an event titled “Passing the Laurel.” It’s a reading that passes the symbolic baton from former Washington State Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen to current Washington State Poet Laureate Tod Marshall, with former Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken hosting. That’s a lot of damn laureates.

WEDNESDAY At The Book Larder in Fremont, Jesse and Kit Schumann of fancy Seattle bakery Sea Wolf Bakers teach how to make their rye bread, which is reportedly life-changingly good. According to the Larder, class size “is limited to 10 students and [the $65 entry fee] includes a light snack, bread samples, and bread and sourdough starter to take home.”

THURSDAY Tonight, author Yann Martel reads at the central branch of the Seattle Public Library downtown. I am not a fan of Martel’s Man Booker Prizewinning novel The Life of Pi; I think it’s a book that tries way too hard to prove its cleverness to its readers. But it is beloved by many people, and if you are one of those people, you should consider coming to this reading from The High Mountains of Portugal, which is a novel told in three novellas.

FRIDAY It’s time for the Hugo Literary Series at the Hugo House. As with all the Literary Series events this year, three authors and a musician write new work in response to a cliché. Tonight’s cliché is “What goes around comes around.” Your readers are poet D. A. Powell, excellent novelist/Believer magazine co-founder Heidi Julavits, and fantastic poet Sierra Nelson. Your musician tonight — and this is very exciting — is OCnotes. Here’s a video of Notes at work:

SATURDAY Here’s a neat-sounding event for women only: Read and Bleed at Twilight Gallery in West Seattle. It’s a period-themed reading event for women. The poster promises that this event is for ““Different vagendas, one cliterati.” In the organizers’ own words, here’s what’s going on:

Who: WOMEN ONLY (Women-Identified ok)

Breastfeeding moms are welcome too.

What: A Space Devoted To Self-Care (Read and be Read To)

When: The Day Before Valentine's

Where: Twilight Gallery in West Seattle

Bring your favorite book, pillow, and blankie

Dress-code: Super Casual, as in PJs, sweats, yoga pants, fuzzy socks ... the kind of attire you wear when bleeding.

FREE WINE & CHOCOLATE.

SUNDAY Spend your Valentine’s Day with UW professor of wildlife science John Marzluff, who reads at the Everett Public Library. His book Suburdia is about why suburbia has become home to diverse animal species, and how humans are supposed to share space with wildlife in the years ahead.