Archives of Book News Roundup

• Just a reminder that we are very excited about the Seattle Review of Books showcase happening at Bumbershoot this Sunday at 7:30 pm. We'll be presenting poets EJ Koh and Robert Lashley onstage with poet, novelist, short story author, and all-around Seattle literary lion Sherman Alexie. We hope to see you there.

• Wallingford's wonderful Open Books closed yesterday and will remain closed for about two weeks because it's "transition time," which means old owner John Marshall will be officially handing over ownership to Billie Swift. Expect the store to reopen in mid-September under Swift's command.

• You have two days to submit to the Tahoma Literary Review's eighth issue.

• So happy that Ursula Le Guin is getting her own Library of America edition but it's a little sad that she prickles so much at the mention of genre: "'I don’t want to be reduced to being "the sci-fi writer." People are always trying to push me off the literary scene, and to hell with it,'" she tells the New York Times. This is very likely a generational thing — Vonnegut hated being referred to as a sci-fi writer, too — and in the long run, it's not a big deal. Still, it's a shame that Le Guin can't take pleasure in raising the bar for an entire genre.

• Amazon's newest brick-and-mortar Amazon Books store will open in Chicago in 2017.

• Since the internet is currently (and rightly) aghast at a dumb blog's "how to talk to a woman wearing headphones" article, let's just take this opportunity to remind men how to talk to women reading books in public. Step one: don't. Every step after that: seriously, don't. This has been a public service announcement from the Seattle Review of Books.

• Looking for a book-related job? Seattle-based publishing industry news organization Shelf Awareness is hiring a full-time publishing assistant "responsible for email newsletter ad trafficking with our book industry advertisers; direct work with the newsletter CMS; physically managing new book galley receiving, handling and shipping to book reviewers; managing other administrative tasks as assigned." They also promise unlimited free books.

• Looking for an arts-related paid internship? The Seattle Office of Arts & Culture is hiring "a junior or senior college intern to assist the Communications and Outreach team in all aspects of managing the Office's events and communications, including preparation and dissemination of print and online marketing materials, pre-event planning and logistics, day-of-event onsite work and planning."

• It's too late to attend the event discussed in this South Seattle Emerald profile, but you should still read about Seattle poet Natasha Marin's Reparations project.

• If you like the maps in the front pages of fantasy novels or role playing games, this fantasy map generator will provide hours of entertainment.

• This tweet from Books to Prisoners just won't get out of my head. Please support Books to Prisoners whenever you can; they do excellent work, and as you can see from this photo, they have to jump through some ridiculous hoops every day.

Drawing underwear on the cover of a critically acclaimed novel so that it will pass prison censors. #justB2Pthings pic.twitter.com/AS0S0r4SRI

— Books to Prisoners (@B2PSeattle) August 10, 2016

• San Diego Comic Con is happening right now, and most of the stories coming out of the convention could just as easily be press releases. But when you get that many creative people in one space at one time, interesting things will happen. For instance, Seattle author G. Willow Wilson gave the first public reading from her upcoming second novel, The Bird King. Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool writes:

Wilson treated her audience to a reading of the first chapter of The Bird King. The first chapter follows the young concubine Fatima as she slips out of her harem quarters to visit her friend Hassan. Fatima has become obsessed with an outdated map, and longs to see the world outside of the palace walls. Willow takes great care in describing her world, inviting her captive audience into the detailed and vibrant world she has created. The Bird King has no set release date.

• But some Comic Con-style press releases are more newsworthy than others: the New York Times just reported that Roxane Gay and poet Yona Harvey are publishing a new series with Marvel Comics titled World of Wakanda. It will be a spin-off series from Ta-Nehisi Coates's excellent Black Panther comics. Here's a quote from Gay that I love: “The opportunity to write black women and queer black women into the Marvel universe, there’s no saying no to that."

• In non-comic-related news, you should read this profile of the owners of the only romance-only bookshop in the United States over at the eminently bookmarkable website Badass Ladies You Should Know.

• I'm already getting excited to introduce David Sedaris when he reads at Benaroya Hall on Wednesday, November 16th. (Here's last year's introduction.) If you're at all interested in attending this reading, you should know that tickets are on sale now, and they usually sell out very early. I attend a lot of readings, and I can tell you that Sedaris is the best reader I've ever seen. He also sticks around and signs everyone's books before and after the reading, taking the time to have a personal conversation with everyone in line. I hope to see you in November.

• Video of Lesley Hazleton's TED Talk about soul isn't available online yet, but this account of her recent talk certainly has us intrigued — especially the bit where she describes fundamentalists:

“It’s not that they have no soul, it’s that something in them seems to have shriveled. They’ve hunkered down and built a wall inside themselves. afraid of the unknown. They live walled off from the world.”

• Seattle cartoonist Tatiana Gill just published an autobiographical comic titled "My Body Positive Journey" to her website. It's all about the long journey of coming to peace with yourself. I reviewed a few of Gill's autobiographical comics back in November; if you like this comic, you should consider buying one of her published works.

• What common thread unites Man Booker Prize winners? You can filter out the winners using this interactive infographic, but the answer, unfortunately, is "they're men writing books about men."

• I often use the New York Times Book Review as an example of the kind of stodgy, establishment-friendly book reviews that we don't try to write at the Seattle Review of Books. So it's only fair that I share a NYTBR piece that absolutely knocks it out of the park: Jennifer Senior's review of serial plagiarist Jonah Lehrer's A Book About Love is that rarest of reviews: the generous takedown. You get the sense in reading the review that Senior gives Lehrer multiple opportunities to prove himself, but he disappoints her at every opportunity. Senior's review is intelligent, dramatic, funny, and never cruel for cruelty's sake. It's the best review I've read at the Times in years. You should read it.

• The intense-sounding Computational Story Laboratory has pulled apart and analyzed novels and identified the "Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling." This is intrinsically interesting stuff, although one can picture Hollywood immediately turning it into a shitty formula for screenwriting, the way the work of Joseph Campbell has been twisted into a bad story factory. Anyway, those six arcs are:

A steady, ongoing rise in emotional valence, as in a rags-to-riches story such as Alice’s Adventures Underground by Lewis Carroll. A steady ongoing fall in emotional valence, as in a tragedy such as Romeo and Juliet. A fall then a rise, such as the man-in-a-hole story, discussed by [story-mapper and novelist Kurt] Vonnegut. A rise then a fall, such as the Greek myth of Icarus. Rise-fall-rise, such as Cinderella. Fall-rise-fall, such as Oedipus.

• The fact that Elie Wiesel passed away on the same weekend that Donald Trump tweeted a barely coded anti-Semitic graphic from a white supremacist group was more than just unfortunate timing: it served as a reminder that we need writers and advocates and witnesses like Wiesel in our public sphere more than ever. He will be missed.

• The American Poetry Review just announced that Seattle author Jane Wong won the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize for her poem "I Put On My Fur Coat."

• If you missed Lynn Schnaiberg's Crosscut profile of Elissa Washuta's new role as Writer-in-Residence at the Fremont Bridge, you should read it now:

What does pull her away from her books and laptop are the boats. Like the 205-foot Lady Lola “superyacht” she started following online. Oh, and the Fremont Avenue brawl for which she called 911. And the much-appreciated cellphone call she gets from the bridge operator every time the bridge is raised (a safety check to make sure she’s not on — or under — the bridge, since her tower affords access to its underbelly.)

• Seattle author Matt Ruff has had a good idea: if you have any questions about his amazing new book Lovecraft Country, he's putting together a Frequently Asked Questions page on his site. Feel free to ask him anything, from book-club-friendly questions to specific plot points. It strikes us that very book should have a FAQ page.

• The New York Post — ugh, sorry for the link — reports that Amazon is planning to open its first east coast Amazon Books brick-and-mortar store in Manhattan.

• A reminder: please don't read Jonah Lehrer's new book. The fact that he's publicly failed so many times and yet is still being published by major presses is a serious indictment of the publishing industry.

• I very much liked Ben Winters' Last Policeman Trilogy, about a detective on an Earth that's facing down an apocalyptic asteroid strike. I haven't read his new book, Underground Airlines, but the below tweet from BuzzFeed's Saeed Jones accurately dismantles the publishing industry's breathless coverage of the book. Don't just operate under the assumption that an idea is new, or else you'll look like an uncultured ass, or a racist ass, or a racist uncultured ass:

Octavia Butler did this in 1979. RT @PublishersWkly: In His New Novel, Ben Winters Dares to Mix Slavery and Sci-Fi https://t.co/yrBgbQyvC3

— Saeed Jones (@theferocity) July 5, 2016

• Samantha Pak at the Seattle Globalist has written a great report on diversity in Seattle's bookstore scene. It's a must-read.

• Seattle cartoonist Seth Goodkind discovered that someone plagiarized his artwork in order to win a contest put on by a music festival. When confronted, the artist apologized, but Goodkind wrote a wonderful letter explaining why plagiarism and contests for "exposure" harm artists. It's publicly posted on his Facebook wall and it's worth your time to read the whole thing. A taste:

Try asking several car dealerships if they will let you drive their vehicles around for a couple of weeks, and, if you like one, you might pay them for the mileage, and in the meantime, it’ll be “great exposure.” Considered this way, spec-work is simply a way of taking an artists work for little or nothing. In essence, theft.

• I recently interviewed the author Mary Roach about her wonderful book Grunt at Town Hall Seattle. If you couldn't attend, the audio of that interview is now available over at KUOW.

• "It is nearly impossible to be a writer and not be complicit in white supremacy," writes Zinzi Clemmons in an essay titled "What It Means to Be an Inclusive Literary Journal" published at Literary Hub.

• Don't listen to USA Today: Cormac McCarthy is still alive.

• Happy Bloomsday!

• The Private Eye Writers of America have announced the nominees for their annual awards, the Shamuses. Local nominees include J.A. Jance and Ingrid Thoft, who were both nominated in the "Best Private Eye Novel" category.

• Have you read the Neu Jorker, the spot-on New Yorker parody produced by comedy writers from The Onion, the Late Show with David Letterman, and more? It's eerie how good this magazine is, right down to the phony ads.

• Did you know that Octavia Butler predicted Donald Trump and his slogan, "Make America Great Again," 16 years ago? Kashmir Hill writes at Fusion:

In the book, despite being down in the polls, Jarret is elected and his supporters feel empowered to declare martial law, enslaving people who are not Christian Americans. Jarret starts an ill-fated war with Canada, and is not ultimately re-elected.

• Good news: Bookstore sales climbed almost 10 percent in April!

• "And text itself will get weirder..." Tim Carmody at Kottke rebuts that Facebook-abandoning-text story from earlier this week.

• The Humble Book Bundle is celebrating Pride month with a big e-book sale including the Gilbert Hernandez masterpiece Julio's Day, the experimental sci-fi comic The Infinite Loop, and an audio version of Sarah Waters's great Tipping the Velvet. Go get some LGBT literature for a low, low price.

• 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.

• If you'd like to be an exhibitor in this year's Short Run Comix & Arts festival, you should fill out this form sometime between now and July 15th.

• Yesterday, Artist Trust announced the recipients of their 2016 Fellowships. Fourteen artists received $7,500. According to Artist Trust, the winners were "selected for their artistic excellence, professional accomplishments, and continuing dedication to their discipline." Here's a list of all the literary winners, who deserve your congratulations:

Bill Carty (Seattle)

Miles Caudesch (Pullman)

Ramon Isao (Seattle)

Robert Lashley (Bellingham)

Michelle Peñaloza (Seattle)

Jekeva Phillips (Seattle)

Nance Van Winckel (Liberty Lake)

• Sherman Alexie published a list of his six favorite books about identity at The Week. The books, which include Seattle author Sonya Lea, should absolutely be added to your very long list of books to check out the next time you're at the book store. You can also hear a great interview with Alexie about his new kids' book on KUOW's site.

• As part of their big 40th (!!) anniversary celebration, Fantagraphics announced that they're publishing their own institutional biography, and it sounds incredible.

The highlight of the anniversary celebrations will be the long awaited release of We Told You So: Comics As Art, an irreverent, 600-page oral history of Fantagraphics edited by Tom Spurgeon with Michael Dean, as told through interviews with virtually every key player in the company’s history – as well as a few of its adversaries – and copiously illustrated with hundreds of photos, comics, drawings, and rare ephemera from the Fantagraphics vaults.

• The awesome organizers of comics and art show Short Run made a special announcement about their upcoming fall show: Special guests at the show this year will include Vanessa Davis and Trevor Alixopulos. Davis's comic Make Me a Woman was published by Drawn & Quarterly, and Alixopulos is an up-and-comer who will be in the newest volume of the Kramer's Ergot anthology. In case you've missed it, Short Run also revealed the identity of this year's Dash grant recipient, a program that provides funds to an artist to make a new comic in time for the show; this year's Dash winner is a new-to-Seattle cartoonist named Brendan Kiefer. The Short Run Festival will happen at Fisher Pavilion in Seattle Center this year on Saturday, November 6th. Save the date.

• Now is the time to nominate the Seattle-area "artists, arts and cultural organizations and community members" that you love for the 2016 Mayor's Arts Awards. Get your nominations in by May 31st.

• It's always award season somewhere: Lots of women won at the Nebula Awards last week, and a pair of Japanese literary prizewinners have been announced, including an 80-year-old literary critic who won a prize for up-and-coming authors. Also, yesterday the O Henry Prizewinning short stories were announced. Congratulations to everyone.

• Marley Dias, the 11-year-old who invented the #1000BlackGirlBooks movement, guest-starred on this week's episode of the BuzzFeed podcast Another Round, which included a roundtable on beloved children's books. If you are in need of something heartwarming after another dismal week of Trumpery, this is the most life-affirming thing I've heard in a very long time.

• Jeff Bezos has confirmed that more Amazon Books brick-and-mortar stores are on the way. If you haven't read it, here's my experience at the first Amazon Books store.

• Yes, and Jonathan Franzen went on Jeopardy! this week and he didn't win and he didn't embarrass himself. It's pretty sketchy that one of the categories on his show was "Birds," given that Franzen is maybe the most famous birder in the United States right now and he was representing a bird-preservation nonprofit on the show. Sure, it was all for charity, but it's still a hell of a coincidence, isn't it?

• In Austrailia, a civil servant published a book and was arrested for it, but according to Melville House's MobyLives blog, "nobody seems quite sure why" he was arrested. Fascinating.

• There is no good goddamned reason to publish a young adult version of the Da Vinci Code. If a teenager wants to read the Da Vinci Code, they should just read the Da Vinci Code. It's not a particularly challenging book on any level, from reading comprehension to content. There's nothing wrong with reading a trashy thriller, but the unnecessary repackaging of trashy thrillers to appeal to different demographics is getting tiresome.

• Sorry for the late notice, but today at 4:30 pm, Seattle author Nicola Griffith will join Riva Lehrer to discus disabilities in arts and culture. Griffith is a SRoB favorite, and disabilities and the arts are not discussed very often in this town. So if you're free this afternoon, you should head up to the Odegaard Undergraduate Library for this event.

• This morning, the editors of The Toast announced that the site will be ending on July 1st.

NICOLE: You have a WHOLE OTHER JOB and a book in progress, I think you’ll stay busy. Oh, let me state for the record that we do not do NOT want anyone to start a Save The Toast campaign of any kind, even though it would be so obviously lovely and kind of you! We are done.

MALLORY: No Kickstarters, please. If you start one I promise I will waste every single penny sent my way on expensive single-serving cakes and various perfumed unguents designed to enhance my beauty.

• The shortlist for the Caine Prize for African Writing has been released. If you'd like to learn more about African literature, you can't really go wrong with this list.

• Cartoonist Chester Brown's latest book, Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, confused the hell out of SRoB co-founder Martin Mcclellan and I. But maybe we're not the only ones who were confused: comics blog The Beat discovered that Brown seems to have admitted accidentally misinterpreting a Bible passage in such a way that it furthered his own thesis. Of course, this doesn't invalidate Brown's book, but it does add another complicated layer to a book that is already made up of complicated layers.

• I mean, these digital pop-up books look fun and everything, but aren't real pop-up books a lot cooler than these? Just saying.

• If you ever wanted to read The Communist Manifesto but thought it had way too many words, the good folks at Crooked Timber have found a PDF of a 1948 Illustrated Communist Manifesto. Some of the drawings in this thing are truly incredible.

• Save the date: the Seward Park branch of Third Place Books will be having its grand opening party on May 21st and May 22nd. This is super-exciting! It's not every day (or even every year) you get to celebrate the grand opening of a new Seattle bookstore. You can (and should) confirm that you'll be there on the Facebook invite for the weekend.

• Save the date, part 2: on June 2nd, you'll get a sneak preview of a new reading series hosted and curated by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. Contagious Exchanges: Queer Writers in Conversation is self-described as "a monthly series featuring two dynamic writers bridging genre, style, sensibility, and all the markers of identity in queer lives." The official launch will be in October, but the June outing at the Hugo House will be a sort of "pilot episode" for the series, featuring poets Tara Hardy and Anastacia Tolbert.

• Seattle poet and novelist Karen Finneyfrock just launched something called the "Seattle Youth Novelist Project," in which a Seattle writer aged 13-19 will earn a mentorship from Finneyfrock and a spot in a reading this October. If you know any young writers, you should let them know about this. Deadline for submissions is May 30th.

• Where to begin with this stupid New York Times story on men's book clubs? Look, I just don't think this kind of thing should be celebrated: "'We do not read so-called chick lit,' he said. 'The main character cannot be a woman.'" There is nothing newsworthy in men who read only books by men. That's still the status fucking quo. A bunch of men who choose to ignore the experiences and perspectives of 50 percent of the population is, unfortunately, absolutely normal. When you run a media outlet, one of the most important decisions you make is to whom you pass the microphone. These men's book clubs did not deserve the microphone because there is nothing interesting about them. The only good thing to come from this story is the Twitter hashtag #ManlyBookClubNames:

Atlas Fistbumped #ManlyBookClubNames

— ppyajunebug (@ppyajunebug) May 4, 2016

Harry Potter and the Fragile Male Ego #ManlyBookClubNames

— Anne Ursu (@anneursu) May 4, 2016

A Confederacy of Dunces #ManlyBookClubNames

— Rob Spillman (@robspillman) May 5, 2016

• A lot of writers are getting upset about this (very good) interview with Bookslut founder Jessa Crispin. Many Facebook posts have been written refuting Crispin's claim that everyone in modern American literature is "super-cheerful because they’re trying to sell you something, and I find it really repulsive. There seems to be less and less underground. And what it’s replaced by is this very professional, shiny, happy plastic version of literature." Frankly, it seems weird to get upset over Crispin's opinion. If your view of American literature differs from hers, that's great. Go revel in the book world you see, and share its joys with others! But if your vision of American literature is somehow threatened by Crispin's negative opinion, to the point where you have to write an angry screed about it, maybe she's got a point?

• Speaking of Bookslut, the final issue of the online book review site features a good interview with Seattle writer Eli Sanders about his book While the City Slept. (We interviewed Sanders about his book a while back.)

• Every month, the University of Chicago gives away a free e-book. This month's free e-book is a very short collection titled Ebert's Bests, featuring an autobiographical essay by the late, great Roger Ebert about how he came to be a film critic. Go download the book now.

• One day, publishers will finally figure out a way to bundle an e-book edition with the purchase of a physical book. (It's really not that hard; comics publishers do this all the time.) Until that glorious day, Harvard Book Store is teaming with an app called Shelfie to offer e-books for sale with certain physical books at a low cost. It's not good enough, but it is at least a single step in the right direction.

• Have you read Kelton Sears's profile of new-to-Seattle cartoonist Simon Hanselmann yet? You really should. It's a super-interesting introduction to a great (and newly local) talent. Hanselmann is signing his new Fantagraphics title Megg & Mogg In Amsterdam and Other Stories at the Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery tomorrow; you should obviously go.

• Have you also read about the time Prince donated $12,000 to a library in Louisville because it "was the first full-service free public library in the nation open to African-Americans?" If not, please do so.

• You have eight more days to contribute to the Ghosts of Seattle Past project. If you're sad about the passing of any local landmarks, you should write them up for this project; your work might wind up in a collected edition published by Chin Music Press, the local publisher of beautiful books.

• New York City just approved a $30,000,000 contract with Amazon to provide e-books for the public schools.

• Beloved Vertigo Comics editor Shelly Bond was fired by DC Comics this week. Jude Terror at The Outhousers connects this news to the longstanding gossip that one editor at DC Comics has such a terrible record of sexual harassment charges that he's been moved into what comics journalist Nick Hanover described as "an all male quarantine." Comics rumor site Bleeding Cool identified the DC staffer in question as Superman editor Eddie Berganza

• "On the one hand the percentage of adults, overall, who say they haven’t read a book in the last year has climbed noticeably since 1978. On the other hand, the youngest demographic surveyed, ages 16-17, were the most likely to have read a book in the past 12 months."

• Libby Coleman profiles new World Slam Poetry champion Emi Mahmoud at OZY.

Her poetry shifts the focus back on Darfur. What sets Mahmoud apart, according to Renee, is a “global lens. Slam can be very U.S.-centric.” Mahmoud tries to start conversations. Some of her talking points are anecdotal — she has returned to Sudan a number of times, the longest visit for six months — and some of her stories have been drawn from refugee family members. Still other insights stem from her academic work: She’s double majoring in anthropology and molecular biology and is currently studying the trauma experienced by Darfuri refugee women in the diaspora. Her hope is to combine raising awareness through performance with a concrete plan to rebuild infrastructure in Darfur.

• Just for your information: "Kill Thurber," a comic by Matthew Thurber published yesterday in the Paris Review, is pretty goddamn delightful if you're a fan of the New Yorker, time travel stories, or time travel stories involving the New Yorker.

• Here's a fun writing contest, from Sierra Nelson's Facebook page:

CEPHALOPOD WRITING CONTEST! (Deadline April 17th): In conjunction with a special cephalopod-inspired photography exhibition by Jen Strongin up now in the Hugo House gallery through the end of April, the Cephalopod Appreciation Society is having its first-ever writing contest. Write a piece inspired by one or more of the images on display in the gallery for a chance to present your writing at this year’s Cephalopod Appreciation Society meeting on April 29th at Hugo House. (Plus prizes!) Contest Guidelines: Open to poetry, short prose, comics, and hybrid forms. Submit 1-3 pieces (no more than 8 pages max) to cephalopodcontest@gmail.com as one Word or PDF file. Be sure to include your name, contact info, and title of your piece(s) in the email, but do not include your name on the submission itself. Winners selected from a Youth Category (up to 18 years old, indicate “YOUTH” with your submission email) and General Submission Category. -- Please share widely!

• This wonderful appreciation of the library card as an object unfortunately has a click-baity headline — "Is the Library Card Dying?" — but it links to some beautiful online library card collections, and so it's worth your time.

• Last night at Emerald City Comicon, DC Comics announced that My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way will be overseeing a mature-readers imprint called Young Animal for the company. Titles include Doom Patrol, Shade the Changing Girl, and — this is maybe the best title in the history of comics — Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye.

• Here's a headline that says it all: "Adult colouring book craze prompts global pencil shortage."

• Calvin Trillin's obnoxious, poorly written, and racially insensitive poem in the New Yorker was a bad situation and a black eye for the New Yorker's much-vaunted editing process, but it has given rise to some very good response poetry. Fatimah Asghar dedicates her poem "To the White Men Who Fear Everything," to "you who reminded me no sidewalk or park/would ever be mine." Craig Santos Perez wonders, "Have they run out of franchises yet?/If they haven’t, our health has reason to fret." Franny Choi asks "Have They Run Out of White Poets Yet?" ("But then Ezra looked toward the East/to spice up his post-War can of meat...") Talya Zax responds, "Oh Trillin, our food-focused, sharply-phrased poet,/You’ve bungled, you’ve mis-hit, we’re sure that you know it." And Eddie Huang tweeted his response poem:

I wrote this in 45 minutes cause that's all Calvin Trillin gets "Have They Run Out of Pumpkin Spice Yet?" @NewYorker pic.twitter.com/rFNnMreCIN

— RICH HOMIE HUANG (@MrEddieHuang) April 6, 2016

• Shelf Awareness reports that local book distributor Partners/West is closing. The Renton office will stop delivering books on April 1st. This is a huge bummer; it means that local bookstores in need of rush titles will have to rely on Ingram, the largest book distributor in the country. Though most bookstores try to order direct from publishers whenever possible because the discounts are better, distributors are the best way for bookstores to get books in a hurry. Booksellers turn to distributors when a book breaks big on NPR, for instance, or when a customer needs a special order. As an indie bookstore customer this news probably won't affect you directly, but it does mean that local bookstores have one less option for getting books, which could create larger problems down the line. As comic book stores have learned, having one major distributor for your product can be problematic.

• Looking for a good new translated book to read? The Best Translated Book Award 2016 longlist for fiction has been announced. At 25 books long, it's a bit excessive, but there's something to be said for having a nice long shopping list at the ready for the next time you go book shopping.

• Eight thousand library jobs in the United Kingdom have disappeared over the last six years, reports the BBC. This is terrible news for British library-goers, but speaking selfishly, it's a relief to read that this isn't America for once.

• The Comics Journal published a long interview with Underworld artist Kaz, by Seattle cartoonist Peter Bagge. My favorite bit?

Yes, back in the day we were just called weird. Nerds were into science and such. I never thought of myself as a nerd. Geek makes more sense. My friend Jim Ryan called us Lowlife Scum.

• Are e-books the solution to our education crisis? Not so fast, says Juanita Giles at the Washington Post:

Even if our poorest schools had broadband and ample devices, believing that free e-books are the key to ending our literacy crisis is dangerously misguided. Technology is repeatedly touted as a cure for the United States’ educational woes, promising everything from banishing boredom to widespread reform. Interactive whiteboards were the hope a few years ago, and Google Earth was supposed to make our children masters of geography. There is more technology in our classrooms and homes than ever, but too often these expensive technologies yield few gains in learning or gains not commensurate with cost.

• Jia Tolentino at Jezebel asks, "Is This the End of the Era of the Important, Inappropriate Literary Man?" Let's hope so.

• Brandi Bailey at Book Riot has compiled a list of bookish runway fashions. Some of them are just silly — sticking a book on a hat, really? — but it's a fun look at two arts that rarely go together.

• The NRA's gun-happy takes on fairy tales are just as awful as you'd expect. With the NRA, it's impossible to tell the difference between parody and reality these days.

We've already told you that Jessa Crispin is shutting down her book review and news site, Bookslut, after 14 years. This is very sad. The good news is that Crispin reads in Seattle tomorrow night from her new book, The Creative Tarot. She'll be reading at University Book Store at 7 pm, and it's free. And meanwhile, over at the Rumpus, you should read this interview with Crispin that, while recorded before the announcement of Bookslut's closure, certainly seems to offer some foreshadowing to the fact that Crispin is ready to move on:

Rumpus: Do you dislike American literature?

Crispin: Oh my god, so much, right now? Are you fucking kidding me? I haven’t read a novel that’s come out of America that I thought had any value whatsoever since Kathryn Davis’s Duplex, which was two years ago, and there had been a drought before that as well. I think American literature is in a tedious place, horrible place. I can’t even engage with it.

• Seattle poetry statisticians the Vis-a-Vis Society have published some of their most recent work on their website. Recent projects include a race between ending phrases and a spaghetti western.

• Zainab Akhtar, founder of the popular comics criticism blog Comics & Cola, announced that she's shutting down the blog because the culture has become too "toxic."

Being a woman, being Muslim, being brown, and writing about comics in a culture that is inherently hostile to your presence- I'm empty

— Zainab Akhtar (@comicsandcola) March 16, 2016

• Director Michael Mann is launching a publishing imprint called Michael Mann Books. One of the first books will be a prequel to Mann's film Heat.

• If you read this story about awesome publisher Dalkey Archive Press's recent move to Texas and you don't fall immediately in love with Dalkey Archive Press, you're probably on the wrong website.

• Seattle ice creamery Full Tilt debuts a Nancy Pearl-themed ice cream on April 10th, reports Seattle Metropolitan. What does Nancy Pearl ice cream taste like? It's peanut butter with a fudge swirl.

• Harper Lee's estate has reportedly killed the mass-market edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. This is going to make the book inaccessible for public schools around the country. What's this mean? Alex Shephard at the New Republic writes:

Why does this matter? Mass-market books are significantly cheaper than their trade paperback counterparts. Hachette’s mass-market paperback of TKAM retails for $8.99, while the trade paperbacks published by Hachette’s rival HarperCollins go for $14.99 and $16.99.

• On Friday, On the Media ran an excellent podcast about the publishing industry, featuring interviews with experts about Amazon Books, e-book sales, and other topics. If you're looking for proof that the publishing industry's death has been greatly exaggerated, this podcast is a great place to start.

• And while we're talking about podcasts, 99% Invisible's most recent episode explains the culture that has built up around Mein Kampf in post-war Germany. German libraries have a system for dealing with books about sensitive topics. They store the books in what's called a "Giftschrank."

The word, a combination of “poison” and “cabinet,” has a variety of meanings in different contexts. At its most literal, a Giftschrank is a space for storing controlled substances in places like pharmacies. Colloquially, it can refer to spaces reserved for all kinds of hidden and forbidden objects, ideas or stories.

• Lit Crawl Seattle announced the date for this year's crawl: October 27, 2016. Save the date. (And if you didn't attend last year's Lit Crawl, here's our roundup to give you an idea of what you missed.)

• The MFA in Creative Writing program at Whidbey Island's Northwest Institute of Literary Arts is in serious financial trouble. Here's a letter from a student outlining the problem — "We are devastated to learn that, in the middle of our semester, we have no idea if we will continue," she writes — and here's where you can donate to help.

• Amazon has announced that they're opening a second Amazon Books physical location, this time in San Diego. In case you haven't read my review of the first Amazon Books, here's a taste of what San Diego is in for.

• This is something that anti-e-book commentators have been warning for years, and it appears to be coming true in Great Britain. Barnes & Noble's Nook e-book business is shutting down over there, and Nook users just received a warning that they're working "to ensure that you have continued access to the vast majority of your purchased NOOK Books at no new cost to you." Note that "vast majority," there. When you "buy" an e-book, you're really just licensing it; it's not like buying a physical book, it's like purchasing software. If the deal changes — if an e-book supplier goes under, for instance — you might not have access to your books anymore. Sounds like some British e-book buyers are about to learn that the hard way.

• Harper Lee's will has been sealed. Someone is going to write an amazing biography of Harper Lee at some point, and they're going to report on what really happened in the last years of her life. I hope that book comes out before I die.

• Brandon Hicks's "Profiles of Cartoonists" at The Rumpus is a very funny, if unfortunately typo-ridden, overview of the sad state of professional cartooning today.

• After yesterday's gossip that Amazon is considering opening hundreds of Amazon Books locations nationwide in the next few years, Shelf Awareness, the industry news site which first broke the Amazon Books story, now says Amazon's plans are more modest, likely in the range of a dozen or so stores. We at the Seattle Review of Books have heard that, too, from people in the industry. Amazon, of course, could do away with these rumors immediately, but Amazon doesn't comment on stories like these. Amazon never has any comment.

• We heard some gossip last night that a long-running and much-beloved local reading series might be ending for good this year. We hope the rumors aren't true, but we're on the story and will let you know as soon as we hear something solid.

• If you are a woman who makes comics, you should apply for Trailer Blaze, the Short Run festival's Ladies Comics Residency. If you're selected, you'll take up residence at the Sou’Wester vintage RV park and lodge in Seaview, WA from April 10th through the 15th. Applications are due by February 19th.

• Speaking of Short Run news, here's the announcement for this year's festival dates:

SAVE THE DATE: NOVEMBER 5, 2016 The 6th Annual Short Run Comix & Arts Festival at Fisher Pavilion, Seattle Center.

— Short Run (@shortrunseattle) February 3, 2016

• If I may editorialize in this news roundup for a moment, I'm glad Short Run is returning to Fisher Pavillion; it gave the festival a convention-like feel. If you'd like to learn more about the show, my Short Run 2016 wrap-up is here, and Martin McClellan's is here.

• Congratulations to the University of Washington Press, which just landed a grant that will do some good in the publishing industry:

A four-year, $682,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded to the University of Washington will help four university presses and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) create a pipeline program to diversify academic publishing by offering apprenticeships in acquisitions departments.

• Believe me, if you had the access to publisher catalogs that I have, you'd be blinded by all the whiteness of the authors. University press catalogs are often the worst offenders. This is a big get for UW Press, and I can't wait to see the new titles that come out of it. It will also likely launch a few careers in the publishing industry, too, and the publishing industry desperately needs some diversity.