Book News Roundup: Bookslut publisher comes to town

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."