On Thursday, October 22nd, Lit Crawl Seattle is bringing you readings from more than 65 authors at 20 different venues. The full schedule of events is a little bit daunting. How are you supposed to choose three readings out of this embarassment of riches? Let the Seattle Review of Books help! Here's our third suggested itinerary:
If you're sick and tired of "traditional" readings, where someone stands up and talks about their book for fifteen minutes, Lit Crawl's got you covered.
1. At Capitol Cider, Seattle Public Library librarians David Wright and Andrea Gough will present a cider flight, along with readings to go with each of the ciders. Gough and Wright are wonderful readers, and they're likely to uncover some real gems for this event. Plus, drinking with librarians is always a lot of fun.
2. At the Frye Art Museum, Rachel Kessler will present a slideshow performance of Christian Charm Workbook, "her multimedia memoir about growing up with the Jesus movement in 1970s Seattle." Kessler is a great local writer, and she always finds some interesting ways to incorporate other media and performance into her work.
3. It's back to Capitol Cider for you, where Book-It Repertory Theater will perform a segment of their adaptation of David James Duncan's brilliant novel Brothers K, which is a retelling of The Brothers Karamazov set in Washington state.
Teenage wasteland
Published October 14, 2015, at 12:01pm
In Alice LaPlante's new novel, a depressed teenager finds religion. Unfortunately, the religion is a doomsday cult.
Meet Josh Simmons at Short Run. Bring Xanax.
Our October Bookstore of the Month is a special one, because it’s a bookstore that will only exist in the world for one day. The Short Run Comix & Arts Festival will take place this year on October 31st at Fisher Pavilion in the Seattle Center, and for that one day, it will be the largest bookseller of independent literature, zines, and comics in the Seattle area. Every week this month, we’ll highlight a different Short Run exhibitor, to give you a better idea of the scope and breadth of the festival.
Josh Simmons has published three graphic novels — House, The Furry Trap, and Black River — with Fantagraphics Books. He’ll be selling the latter two books at his own table at this year’s Short Run, along with some black-light posters and original art. In addition, he’s debuting Habit #2, a collection of solo comics and collaborations with local comics contributors Tom Van Deusen, Eric Reynolds, and Ben Horak at the show. Simmons describes this issue of Habit as “52 pages of nutso horror comics.” (Oily Comics, the Massachusetts-based publisher of Habit, will also be exhibiting at Short Run this year.)
Simmons creates dreamlike horror comics that don’t fit the traditional horror narratives. In an interview with Paste magazine, he discusses why horror movies tend to be about women, and why women seem to make up a disproportionate amount of the audience for horror:
Is it something to do with owning or coming to terms with one’s place in a misogynistic society? Are women just more equipped to process dark, sexy, fucked up, fun shit, like horror movies? I’m not sure.
Simmons gave a very long interview with the Comics Journal about his process, his ambitions, and whether his work is nihilistic or not. He’s clearly a thoughtful artist, one who especially appreciates the elasticity of the comics medium for experiments in narrative storytelling.
This will be Simmons’s third Short Run. Ask him for a favorite Short Run memory and he’ll find it impossible to pick a single gem out of the “whirlwind mishmash of art shows” and the opportunities to meet other fans and creators. The “drinking, mania and exhaustion,” apparently, makes everything blur together. At this year’s Short Run, he’s especially looking forward to Jim Woodring’s new 3D comic, Frank in the 3d Dimension. Simmons’s advice for first-time Short Run attendees? “Bring snacks, cash, coffee, Xanax, a satchel and water.”
Great news! Jamaican novelist Marlon James has won the booker for A Brief History of Seven Killings. Everybody I know who has read this book has done nothing but rave about it, and as this linked BBC article says: “The judges had come to a unanimous decision in less than two hours.”
Congratulations to James. If you’d like to know more about him — and his winning book — Jess Walter and Sherman Alexie recently talked to him on their podcast A Tiny Sense of Accomplishment.
On Thursday, October 22nd, Lit Crawl Seattle is bringing you readings from more than 65 authors at 20 different venues. The full schedule of events is a little bit daunting. How are you supposed to choose three readings out of this embarassment of riches? Let the Seattle Review of Books help! Here's our second suggested itinerary:
You could attend a whole evening's worth of poetry readings at Lit Crawl with a nice mix of new, up-and-coming, and established names, providing an excellent cross-section of where Northwest poetry is right now.
1. Up at the Sorrento Hotel, Rebekah Anderson hosts a curiosity-themed evening of poetry with readers Lucy Hitz, Jourdan Keith, and Maggie Hess.
2. Chances are good you've already attended Cheap Wine & Poetry. It's just probability in action: Hugo House is always packed full of people during CW&P, and the series has been going on for years so it's likely you were in that crowd at some point. This special Lit Crawl edition of CW&P features wine at a buck a glass and readings from Arlene Kim, Matt Gano, and Seattle Civic Poet Claudia Castro Luna, with host Jeanine Walker.
3. Storied poetry journal Poetry Northwest caps your poetry adventure at Sole Repair, with readings from Clare Johnson, Suzanne Bottelli, and Emily Bedard. Poetry Northwest editor Kevin Craft will host the evening.
If you haven't yet read President Obama's interview with the incredible novelist Marilynne Robinson in the New York Review of Books, please take the time to read it. I can't recall a sitting president ever doing something quite like this. It's just too delightful for words.
Sorry, Eileen Myles
Published October 13, 2015, at 11:44am
Eileen Myles is one of our sharpest observational writers, and her poems contain the kind of contradictions that would break the brain of a lesser writer clean in two. Here's why she should be immortal.
Over at Crosscut, Knute Berger reports back on a little archaeological digging he did into Seattle's book history. He believes he may have found a record from Seattle's very first Library. Go read the essay, which began as a speech Berger delivered at an event celebrating Seattle's newest library, Folio Seattle.
Spoiled
To tell the truth, I have forgotten
which year goes with what.My memory: as good as milk.
My family: spoiled throughand through. Pure as mold
on a September nectarine,we refuse to announce defeat,
death. In this house, the marginsof mourning are tucked in,
pleated to the neck.In August, my uncle dies
and no one tells his children.He crosses his arms
in a blue suit in a coffinwhere the ants
want in. In December,my brother and I bundle up
for a storm that goesthrough another town.
What were we preparing for?My mother warns us:
beware of well-lit places.Beware of fires burning
in the dark. If there is a spiderunder your cup,
what will you do about it?
Since Shelf Awareness published the rumors that Amazon is preparing to open a bookstore in University Village, Geekwire has done a little digging into Seattle public records and uncovered blue prints for a space that "will combine elements of an Apple store and a Barnes & Noble, with areas for browsing books and checking out and buying new devices." It's a huge space.
On Thursday, October 22nd, Lit Crawl Seattle is bringing you readings from more than 65 authors at 20 different venues. The full schedule of events is a little bit daunting. How are you supposed to choose three readings out of this embarassment of riches? Let the Seattle Review of Books help! Here's our first suggested itinerary:
New literary magazines and publishers are popping up all the time in Seattle, and Lit Crawl is a great opportunity to sample what's out there. Whether you're an aspring author looking to network or a reader desperate for new voices, this itinerary is for you.
1. The James Franco Review reading at the Capitol Hill Branch Library starts off your Lit Crawl. The Review is dedicated to treating every author as though they're worthy of the privilege and prestige that James Franco enjoys every day of his life. JF Review ontributors Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, SRoB contributor EJ Koh, Isaiah Swango, and Leija Farr will read. Editors Corinne Manning and Aaron Counts will host.
2. Local publisher Instant Future, the e-book imprint of Portland's Future Tense, presents authors Zach Ellis, Litsa Dremousis, and Tara Atkinson at the Raygun Lounge. They'll each be reading from their novella-sized non-fiction e-books. This event is hosted by Instant Future publisher Matthew Simmons and Instant Future author Elissa Washuta.
3. End the Crawl up at Ada's Technical Books, where Spartan editor Ross McMeekin presents contributors Ian Denning, Jenny Hayes, M.C. Easton, and Robert P. Kaye.
Here's a fun exercise: guess which of these four quotes about money and class are actually from the recent Jonathan Franzen profile in the Financial Times and which of these quotes I made up to make Jonathan Franzen sound bad.
1. Jonathan Franzen understands poverty:
“I am literally, in terms of my income, a 1 per center, yes,” he says, his eyes not on me but on the empty table next to us. “I spend my time connected to the poverty that’s fundamental to mankind, because I’m a fiction writer.”
2. Jonathan Franzen is poor in spirit:
“I’m a poor person who has money.”
3. Jonathan Franzen doesn't hire people to do his work for him, except for the people he hires to do work for him:
“I don’t like to hire people to do work that I can do,” he says. So that means he does his own dusting in the New York apartment he shares with his girlfriend? Franzen looks slightly shifty. “We do have a cleaner, although even that I feel some justification because we pay her way more than is standard and she’s a nice Filipino woman who we treat very well and we’re giving her work.”
4. Jonathan Franzen really has been known to do his own work every now and again:
“I repainted our guest room this summer in our rather small house in Santa Cruz... If I had hired someone, it would’ve been done better, and I was very sick of doing it by the end, and yet it seemed important. The first two coats I enjoyed and the third coat I was getting tired of it and the fourth coat was just sheer torture.”
Did you guess? Give up?
One white step closer to the fire
Published October 12, 2015, at 11:30am
Seattle poet and writer Lola E. Peters penned a personal, and moving, book about being black in America.
Over the weekend, the Washington State Book Awards were given out in a ceremony at Seattle Public Library. Mary Ann Gwinn at the Seattle Times has a full list of winners. It's nice to see the awards spread around the state — winners include Spokane County novelist Bruce Holbert, Spokane poet Tod Marshall, and Tacoma historian Justin Wadland — but it's disappointing to see that the major adult awards went to white dudes. Demographics matter, people.
Your Week in Readings: The best literary events from October 12 - 18
MONDAY Our week begins with the Monorail Poetry Series at Fred Wildlife Refuge. Local author Tara Atkinson, who has a book coming out from Instant Future soon that I’m very excited to read, will be joined by Portland author Rachael Jensen and a Brooklyn writer with the unbelievable name of Sampson Starkweather. Jensen recently published her first chapbook with Snoot Books, and Starkweather has written a lot of books and also created “a multi-media website of pop/love GIF poems.” Can one read a GIF at a reading? Maybe you’ll find out tonight.
TUESDAY University Book Store hosts local sci-fi author Nancy Kress, who’ll be reading with Brenda Cooper. Kress is reading in support of a best-of collection of her work, and Cooper, who is also the Chief Information Officer for the City of Kirkland, reads from her new book Edge of Dark.
WEDNESDAY Head to the Kangaroo and Kiwi pub in Ballard for Librarian’s Revenge Trivia. As part of Seattle Public Library’s Booktoberfest promotion, librarians will be a-drinkin’ and a-trivia-in’ it up in an adults-only setting. This is such a ridiculously lovable idea.
THURSDAY At a very special setting — “the rooftop garden of the historic Union Arts Coop, in the heart of Seattle's Capitol Hill” — contributors to literary magazines Willow Springs and Los Angeles Review will read prose and poetry. Booze will be served, too. Readers include Maggie MK Hess, Johnny Horton, Kate Lebo, Sam Ligon, Gary Lilley, Kirsten Lunstrum, Christine Robbins, and Philip Shaw. That’s a fine array of talent, from new-ish names to well-established local (and used-to-be-local) writers.
FRIDAY Cascade Writers, an organization that “ brings dozens of educational seminars and workshops to members of the public interested in writing and publishing,” will present a group reading at University Book Store. Tonight’s readers are local sci-fi writers Ellen Datlow, Elliott Kay, and Kat Richardson, along with mystery author Tom Wright. It’s a genre-riffic kind of an evening.
SUNDAY As we prepare for the ginormous Lit Crawl happening on October 22nd, it’s probably smart to check out a smaller literary crawl just to stretch our reading muscles. Don’t want to pull an eye-hammy, after all. So it’s good news that Rainier Valley Lit Crawl is happening, with readers including Jeanine Walker, Greg Bem, Monique Franklin, Wendy Call, and Lindsey Walker.
Last day to visit the 2015 Seattle Antiquarian Bookfair!
Did you make it to the Seattle Antiquarian Bookfair yesterday? If not, head on down today! They'll be open through 4pm today. Go see rare book and ephemera dealers from around the country, and even from overseas. Lots of amazing finds for book lovers, collectors, and even for looky-loos.
Our thanks to them for their sponsorship over the past three weeks. Partnering with events like this is exactly why we're so excited about our sponsorship model. Go tell them you saw about the fair on the Seattle Review of Books.
The Sunday Post for October 11, 2015
What To Do If Your Workplace Is Too White
A manifesto by This American Life's Stephanie Foo that tackles excuses for lack of diversity in public radio, and how, exactly, to address it.
There’s a question I’ve heard a lot lately. Program directors and hosts approach me at radio events more and more often (it’s not hard to spot me — I’m often one of the only People of Color [POC] in the room) and ask, “How do I reach a more diverse audience? And how do I hire more people of color?”
I’m glad they’re asking the question. It’s about time that public media came to terms with the fact that it does not serve the public as a whole. More hosts and program directors realize that a market of POC exists — and if they don’t cater to it, they’ll fail to grow their audience. And I’m glad the people in charge are realizing that when it comes to attracting minorities, throwing some hip-hop beatz as a transition between stories is about as effective and transparent as Mitt Romney’s spray tan. Finally, finally, it’s becoming abundantly clear that the solution to our diversity problem is hiring producers of color, and that diversifying your business is smart from a content perspective.
Listening In
Maris Kreizman on evesdropping as part of the job, and evesdropping on how you learned your job, when you were a new editorial assistant.
The telephone was the preferred mode of communication for any busy editor, and we assistants were essentially operators, connecting our bosses to writers or to the bosses of other assistants, hearing how they flattered and evaded each other. We were supposed to learn how the industry worked by listening in, a step removed from the action but still hanging on the line, twisting the cord around our fingers.
The Chicago End-Times
The Awl published this long piece by Sam Stecklow on the state of the Chicago Sun-Times, and how their clunky, failing network was designed to take on bigger tech publisers.
The October 2014 press release announcing the launch of the Sun Times Network said that it was “designed to offer content in a manner similar to websites such as Deadspin and BuzzFeed, which aggregate news stories while offering additional commentary.” In an interview with Nieman Lab, Landon, who spent twenty-two years at the Tribune Company working on ad sales and classified services like Cars.com and CareerBuilder before being replaced during the disastrous Sam Zell era, said, “If I can take $10,000 a month, am I better off putting two or three kids against and creating lots of content? Am I better off hiring a known political writer that is controversial? Am I better off doing Facebook advertising? That’s the way you have to think about it.”
How Tom Wolfe Became…Tom Wolfe
Michael Lewis takes a long look at Tom Wolfe for Vanity Fair.
In the late 1960s a bunch of writers leapt into the void: George Plimpton, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and the rest. Wolfe shepherded them into an uneasy group and labeled them the New Journalists. The New Journalists—with Wolfe in the lead—changed the balance of power between writers of fiction and writers of nonfiction, and they did it chiefly because of their willingness to submerge themselves in their subjects, and to steal from the novelist’s bag of tricks: scene-by-scene construction, use of dramatic dialogue, vivid characterization, shifting points of view, and so on.
I doubt I was ever alone in failing to find the whole New Journalism story entirely satisfying. (Hunter Thompson, for instance, wrote Wolfe, “You thieving pile of albino warts…. I’ll have your goddamn femurs ground into bone splinters if you ever mention my name again in connexion [sic] with that horrible ‘new journalism’ shuck you’re promoting.”) For a start, there wasn’t anything new about the techniques. Mark Twain used them to dramatize his experiences as a riverboat pilot and a gold miner. George Orwell set himself up as a destitute tramp and wrote up the experience as nonfiction. Virtually every British travel writer who has ever left an unpaid bill might be counted a New Journalist. When you look at that list of New Journalists, what pops to mind is not their common technique. It’s their uncommon voices. They leapt off the page. They didn’t sound like anyone else’s.
Rahawa Haile’s short stories of the day, of the previous week, for October 10, 2015
Every day, friend of the SRoB Rahawa Haile tweets a short story. She gave us permission to collect them every week. She’s archiving the entire project on Storify
Short Story of the Day #275
Shara Concepción's "Eulogy for the Piraguero"
PANK (2015)
http://t.co/ovHoQM7pu0 pic.twitter.com/ejYMnz2hGc
— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) October 4, 2015Short Story of the Day #276
Ravi Mangla's "Horsie"
Sleepingfish (2008)
http://t.co/hjHNcckWls pic.twitter.com/rQioltE0Jl
— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) October 5, 2015Short Story of the Day #277
Jessica Alexander's "A Series of Unsustainable Arrangements"
http://t.co/C3FMA4q3qj pic.twitter.com/rRRr9iNOze
— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) October 6, 2015Short Story of the Day #278
Ann Eleven's "Robot Family"
The Toast (2014)
http://t.co/ccbU03XBks pic.twitter.com/xlPyhMx8XM
— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) October 7, 2015Short Story of the Day #279
My phone died and I bought a new one and my wallet is dry and no longer reaches the Pacific but ☁️ photos soon.
— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) October 8, 2015Short Story of the Day #280
Meg Pokrass's "Iris"
Newfound (2015)
http://t.co/06WCIGUtNj pic.twitter.com/tKQflUABRp
— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) October 9, 2015Short Story of the Day #281
Lisa Foad's "Lost Dogs"
The Night Is a Mouth (2009)
http://t.co/mbBBlr39nu pic.twitter.com/ak3nhz7jGp
— Rahawa Haile (@RahawaHaile) October 10, 2015Portrait Gallery: Amitav Ghosh
Each week, Christine Larsen creates a portrait of a new author for us. Have any favorites you’d love to see immortalized? Let us know
I’ve seen Ghosh speak on his previous trips to Seattle. He’s a funny, dynamic, and fascinating storyteller. Be sure not to miss him tomorrow at Town Hall.