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?

Comics days. We've put $20 in as a non-reward backer

Who is the Creator?

Kristina Vilciauskaite Shephard.

What do they have to say about the project?

Comics days in Vilnius is the first international comics festival in Lithuania that will be held on 14 - 16 of April 2016.

What caught your eye?

Independant comics festivals are the best. It's important for creators to have a place to gather and share their art, and talk to like-minded people to learn and make community. Think about how vibrant our own Short Run Comix and Arts Festival is.

So here are some folks trying to stage an international comics festival in Lithuania, called Comics Days, and it will be the first of its kind over there. That's a project we can get behind.

Why should I back it?

I'm guessing most of you reading this aren't in Lithuania, or aren't planning to visit for the festival. So, this raises the important question: what's in it for me?

Art and comics! Look at their rewards. For as little as $5 you can get a sticker pack. There are posters, comics, and even original art. And the branded gear is beautiful, as are the posters. I know a few of you reading this salivate at the idea of some rare, cool foreign art in your collections. Here's your opportunity to snag some.

Not to mention you're helping creators overseas get their community going. That's worth a few bucks.

How's the project doing?

21 days to go, and they've only raised about 18% of their $4,500 goal. So, they need the help. Pitch a bit in, let your friends know — those emails that a friend just backed a project on Kickstarter are pretty powerful. Let's see if we can't give them a little bit of a boost.

Do they have a video?

Kickstarter Fund Stats

• Projects backed: 7
• Funds pledged: $140
• Funds collected: $80
• Unsuccessful pledges: 0
• Fund balance: $900

Alex Balk at The Awl published a brief post against longform nonfiction storytelling. Here's a quote from the piece, which I think gets the point across with even more brevity: "Are there some stories so intricate that they actually demand tens of thousands of words to tell them? Sure. Maybe six or seven a year. Everything else you read is padding or awards-bait."

It's purposefully incendiary stuff, and obviously a broad generalization. Personally, I tend to prize pieces of a certain length; here at the Seattle Review of Books, we rarely publish reviews that are shorter than a thousand words, because we think anything less tends to fully fail to develop an idea. I recently wrote a piece for the site that was over three thousand words, but I hope to cut it down a little bit in the editing process.

But in general, I tend to agree with Balk; I've read a lot of longform pieces that have wasted my time. I'm fine with digressions and taking your time to tell a story, but a story should be exactly as long as it needs to be. We've all read magazine articles that have been puffed out to book-length; we all agree that those are terrible. When that happens, we feel manipulated, and it sours the reading experience. Same with longform. That said, I am always in favor of more writers writing more, and if longform is the vessel that gets readers in front of writing, that's a-okay with me.

But rather than arguing about a nonexistent perfect metric for exactly how long a piece should be, I'd rather everyone read this great post by Chuck Wendig about why paying writers is so important. It's titled "Scream It Until Their Ears Bleed: Pay the Fucking Writers," and it's in response to an idiotic Huffington Post editor's bullshit claims that paying writers is "not a real authentic way of presenting copy," that because Huffington Post bloggers write out of passion, their writing somehow has more merit. I don't know how many words Wendig's post is, but I can tell you it's exactly as long as it should be.

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,

I absolutely love Tintin. I have since I was a kid, and still just fall for his outrageous antics. But oh my god, is it racist. So horrible! And, you know, all about white conquest. Do I have to give him up?

Minnie, Belltown

Dear Minnie,

Let's not be histrionic. Lewis Carroll was a monogamous pedophile, Flannery O'Connor was a devout Catholic and Ayn Rand claimed to be human. Even beloved children’s entertainer Ernest Hemingway believed that women have more holes for plugging than spiders have eyes, an old-fashioned but tenacious belief that has been empirically proven untrue without the aid of a high-powered drill.

My point is, if you start eliminating books, ideas, and people whose views make you uncomfortable, what's left? Whale sounds, cottage cheese, and more corpses than a bullfighting birthday party, that’s what.

Sure, Tintin is racist. It's certainly not the most racist thing to come out of 20th century entertainment, and even as it makes contemporary, less racist (fingers crossed) audiences uncomfortable, it's an important historical marker of the sentiment of the times. Ignoring our racist history doesn't erase racism, so feel free to keep cringing your way through Tintin in the Congo. And if you want to assuage your (presumably) white guilt, try tithing to a nonprofit group geared towards battling entrenched racism, groups like Dream Defenders or Black Youth Project 100.

Kisses,

Cienna

Christine Marie Larsen is off for the next few weeks, no doubt hand-assembling brushes from rarified animal hairs, gathering pigment from the mineraled rocks atop the highest peaks, and making paper from the miraculous cotton rags used to clean the paintings of the old masters in the Louvre.

In her absence, you can always see her work in our archive of the Portrait Gallery. She'll see you all in a few weeks.

If you were to ask me to nominate one cartoonist to create a comic book adaptation of a Todd Solondz film, I would, without a second thought, choose Nick Drnaso. Like Solondz's films, the world in Drnaso’s new collection Beverly is ugly and mundane; unattractive Americans live their boring lives in bland surroundings — cut-rate hotel rooms, tract housing. Drnaso draws his figures with simple lines, often at the middle distance. He rarely employs close-ups; his characters lack detail or much by the way of physical nuance. It’s a kind of bland suburban hell.

Put simply, Drnaso tells the stories of creeps. A young boy embarrasses himself in spectacular, sexual fashion on a family vacation. A lonely man gets a massage. A young woman reports a horrible crime that puts the community on edge, though the details start to fall apart on closer investigation. You wouldn’t want to spend any time with the people in Beverly. At best, they’re bumbling and a little bit slow. At worst, you’d move away from them if they tried to sit next to you on the bus.

And yet, Drnaso is a masterful storyteller. With great economy and supreme confidence, he constructs whole worlds — worlds of mundanity, filled in with rainbows of beige — and he populates them with people who don’t experience desires so much as vague fumbling in the general direction of happiness. The most innocuous protagonist is a mother who is excited to take part in a television market research survey; it’s such a small want that when it collapses in disappointment, the sadness somehow feels even more profound.

Beverly will make its readers uncomfortable. That must be part of Drnaso’s plan. Rather than skip through the awkward sitcom the aforementioned woman is excited to watch as part of her marketing survey, Drnaso lays the whole TV show out in tiny panels, and it’s just as bad as the most mediocre TV show you’ve ever watched. ”Sorry for the way I acted earlier,” the bland father says to his bland wife as they get into bed at the end of the show. “You and the kids are too good to me.” His wife replies, “Oh, honey, you’re too good to us!” Turns out, you can make a comic that’s just as awkward as bad network television. All it takes is a whole lot of talent and a ferocious willingness to maintain a chilly distance between you and your readers. Like the worst television, you can’t look away from Beverly — you’re hypnotized by all the horrible beauty.

The thing you realize within a few seconds of talking to University Book Store’s Caitlin is that she reads a lot. Like, a lot. She estimates she plows through about five books a week, on average. “I read fast,” she admits. “Partly because when I was in college, I would do theater, and I would also have to read James Fenimore Cooper or Moby Dick” for class assignments. Every time I see Caitlin, she’s gushing about some book that just came out, or that is about to come out, or that will be out in a month or two. Few booksellers in the city are as capable at forecasting the near-future of books as she is; talking to her is a window into your immediate reading future.

Caitlin has been a bookseller since 1994, when she started at a branch of Media Play, a short-lived attempt at a multimedia chain store concept by Sam Goody that she describes as “their answer to Barnes & Noble and Borders.” When I admit that I’ve never heard of Media Play before, Caitlin says that’s not unusual: “they opened a lot of locations really fast and probably too close to each other,” and the chain burned out in a matter of years.

Caitlin had just graduated college with a degree in literature, so she had hoped for a position in the fiction section, but she was assigned to the children’s section. She didn’t know much about kid’s books, but she accepted the challenge gracefully: “I just read the Newbery Award winners and some of the old Newbery winners and the Goosebumps books and dove right in.”

From there, she went on to work at Barnes and Noble — first in Portland and then at the University Village branch — before joining University Book Store in 2007. It was a dream job for her. Even as a Barnes & Noble bookseller, Caitlin spent a lot of time at University Book Store as a customer. “I knew Brad because I would sell him my used books. I found some of my favorite books from their staff recommendations.”

About a year and a half ago, Caitlin became a buyer for the bookstore. She meets with publisher sales representatives and evaluates the prospects of upcoming titles — she’s already buying for summer and fall of this year. Basically, based on sample chapters, sales copy, and advance reader copies, she tries to predict what customers will want to read three to six months from now. A lot of the selection process, she says is based on “a hunch,” though if an upcoming title is “something I love or a coworker loves, it gives me a better feeling for the book.”

So what’s on the horizon? She’s recently read and enjoyed The Door, by Magda Szabo; Heidi Heilig’s fantasy adventure The Girl from Everywhere; and Kill the Boy Band, an upcoming young adult novel by Goldy Moldavsky about “four friends who get a room in a hotel the night a boy band is also staying in the hotel.” Caitlin describes it as a story of “super-fan teens gone mad” that brings to mind “Heathers mixed with the Jonas Brothers.” For upcoming picture books, she recommends Penguin Problems, a September release “about a penguin who has a lot of problems,” and Lane Smith’s There Is a Tribe of Kids, which is out this spring.

Caitlin has worked longer at University Book Store than at any of her other bookselling jobs, in part because it’s “a great place to work. It’s a store that really, really cares about its employees,” which means that “a lot of the employees have been there for a long time,” which in turns creates a sense of continuity that most bookstores can’t replicate. But when you get down to it, she says, “I feel lucky to be surrounded by books. I grew up surrounded by books. I work surrounded by books, and I work with people who love books.” She makes it sound like paradise.

After a long weekend, we're left with too much news for one single Book News Roundup to contain!

• Capitol Hill Seattle Blog has the skinny on V2, the new temporary arts space in the old Value Village building on Capitol Hill's 11th Ave. Literary tenants include Bumbershoot producer One Reel and possibly Hugo House, and the space will be broken up into "performance areas, rental studios, classrooms, offices, and storage."

• Starting on March 6th, the Henry Art Gallery will be free on Sundays. Don't think this is book-related? Piffle, I say! A few years back, the Henry hosted a brilliant exhibit about the history of indpendent publishing, including a few early e-books and some very interesting publishing projects. They also host author events and publish four or five books a year.

• "I was literally 30 minutes from saving the company," former Borders CEO Mike Edwards says in Paula Gardener's story about the death of the once-popular national bookselling chain. If this story makes you too nostalgic for Borders, please go read my account of what it was like to work at Borders, which will hopefully remind you that the chain had a lot of big problems that led to its eventual collapse.

• Two Sylvias Press's annual chapbook contest is now open for submissions. The reading fee is $15, but the payoff is pretty great: the winner gets $400 and 20 copies of their finished chapbook. A poem by the winner of 2014's chapbook contest, Cecilia Woloch, was recently featured in the New York Times Magazine.

• We've already suggested two great events for tonight, but we just learned about this event happening in the Husky Union Building on the UW campus tonight, and we wanted you to know about it: an evening of Arabic Poetry and Music, featuring poetry read in English and in Arabic by students. Some Seattle-area publications want you to think that Seattle isn't an international city of literature; that's just not true. This reading is just one great example of how Seattle's literary scene represents the whole world on a regular basis.

• At the Comics Reporter, Dan Clowes has written a remembrance of Alvin Buenaventura, a prominent comics editor and publisher who passed away last week. Clowes writes, "he was inexplicable, the most singular human being I've ever met. There's nobody else in the world even remotely like him."

• Over at The Intercept, Masha Gessen has written about the sad state of self-censorship in the Russian publishing industry.

• If you're an artist in need some inspiration, here's Seattle cartoonist/Short Run co-founder Kelly Froh's wonderful appearance on the Seattle Channel show Art Zone with Nancy Guppy.

In his introduction to the Hugo House’s Lit Series event on Friday night, event programmer Peter Mountford called “what goes around comes around” the “immaculate conception of clichés.” Most clichés, he said, have very clear, recognizable origins, but “what goes around comes around” has existed for as long as language has existed, and it can’t be broken down into any simpler parts. It’s one of the clearest, simplest concepts that exists in written language.

Which makes sense. Repetition holds a strange power for humans. We use repetition to calm ourselves and others, but repetition can also be incredibly annoying. Artists will use repetition as an artistic device, by mirroring an event at the beginning and end of a piece of art to demonstrate a change in the audience’s perception. Critics like to repeat an artists’ words back to the artist, as a refutation or a bolstering of a point. One of the easiest ways to get a laugh is to bring down an arrogant character with their own words or actions. Just about everyone on earth, regardless of their religion has a basic understanding of what karma is.

So the four artists the Hugo House asked to respond to the cliche — Seattle poet Sierra Nelson, author Heidi Julavits, Seattle musician OC Notes, and celebrated poet D.A. Powell — were dealing with elemental stuff. The pleasure of the Hugo House’s Lit Series is watching how many different ways the theme can be interpreted. But there was a risk with this particular assignment: the simplicity of “what goes around comes around” could also be a problem with creative interpretations of it — if this idea seems hard-wired into our brains, maybe that understanding might resist deeper explanation?

OC Notes recognized from the stage that he and Nelson demonstrated a similar understanding of the theme, in particular with reference to karma. Nelson started the night reading a list of words and phrases relating to the theme — dirty dishes, hangovers, ouroboroses — and the audience arrived to discover that every seat in the house had an index card with one of the phrases written on it. (Mine was “Diet Crazes.”) She encouraged people to introduce themselves to each other as the concept written on their card, creating a moment where the poem came alive.

Nelson’s greatest strength is in her scientific approach to poetry, her willingness to throw poems against a thesis in an effort to create a crack where meaning can get inside. She unveiled a number of repetition-based poems — pantoums, blues lyrics — to bring the theme into the form, as well as the spirit, of her work. Along the way, she unveiled several gorgeous little observations, about Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Justin Timberlake, and the stunning revelation that Aplets and Cotlets are the flavor of grief. OC Notes shared Nelson’s spirit of investigation, crossing musical genres and demonstrating a playfulness in his three songs created just for the evening. The last song, a blues-based declaration that “Karma’s calling on the line/won’t you please pick up the phone?” captured perfectly the dread of actions coming back to haunt a person.

Powell was less successful. His interpretation of the theme materialized as a batch of new poems written in the spirit Powell brought to his poetry when he first started writing as a teenager. This kind of neo-juvenilia was occasionally funny, but Powell stuck with the theme way too long, reading what felt like dozens of poems, many of which had titles like “That Pussy Is Tight” and “Fuck Buddy.” At five minutes, it would have been a hilarious interlude. At near twenty minutes, it was interminable.

Julavits addressed the theme with an essay — possibly one that might expand into a book, she mused from the podium — about the possibility that one day her young son might rape a woman; every rapist has a mother, after all. Julavits reflected on her son's infancy, when he screamed and cried and demanded her body with the bone-deep understanding that he might die if she withheld her body from him. She called her father “a total non-rapist,” but suggested that, basically, she didn’t understand how to raise someone who would not rape. While all the other artists responded to the theme with a florid spray of playful work, Julavits dug deep inside, questing around parenthood and free will and destiny and consent. Without the density of her inquiry, the night might have felt a little too light. With her essay, everything came back around to making sense again.

Our thanks to Sagging Meniscus Press for sponsoring the site this week with a truly unique, and remarkable, book: The Too-Brief Chronicle of Judah Lowe, by Christopher Carter Sanderson. On our sponsors page we have three excerpts: from the introduction, which sets the stage, and from each of the two sections of the book, each told through the lens of severe restriction. All art comes from the artist creating rules and restrictions — some of them mundane, such as the choice of paint or the size of canvas, some of them severe (those of you who saw the brilliant film The Five Obstructions will know what we're talking about). Certain artists work within severe restriction, and the work, like it does here, can end up bulging at the seams. You really have to read this.

Sagging Meniscus took advantage of our sponsorship program — new dates are now available through the Summer. 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 the possibilities.

MONDAY Start your week in readings at Third Place Books up in Lake Forest Park. Debbie Clarke Moderow reads from her new book Fast into the Night: A Woman, Her Dogs, and Their Journey North on the Iditarod Trail. If you’ve ever wondered about sled dogs — and c’mon, pretty much everybody has wondered about sled dogs — this is a good chance to learn.

TUESDAY Seattle author Matt Ruff finally debuts his long-awaited novel Lovecraft Country at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight! This event is years in the making — I’ve been waiting for this book to drop since Ruff read a bit from it at Hugo House way back in 2008. I’ve read Lovecraft Country and I can tell you it’s worth the wait; it’s a horror novel that mixes together America’s racist past, the mythology created by H.P. Lovecraft, Lovecraft’s infamous racism, and Ruff’s assured storytelling. This is a book that works on every single level. However, because I’m joining Ruff onstage for a Q&A at this event, that could be construed by some as a conflict of interest. And because we take our selection process at This Week in Readings seriously, we always provide an alternate event for you to consider when there’s a potential conflict of interest.

And so our ALTERNATE TUESDAY event is the February Literary Mixer at The Hideout. I went to the last Literary Mixer and had a lot of fun. Here’s the deal: bring the book you’re reading. Buy a drink. Talk to people about the books they brought and be prepared to talk about the book you brought. That’s it! (You might want to bring a piece of paper and a pen so you can write down some book recommendations, too.)

WEDNESDAY Tonight, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reads at The Furnace Reading Series at Hollow Earth Radio. The Furnace is a reading series in which one writer reads their short story with audio accompaniment — music, sound effects, etc. When Sycamore moved to Seattle from San Francisco a few years back, she became a cornerstone of the literary community almost overnight. Her memoir The End of San Francisco is about gentrification and sexuality and what it’s like to watch a city die. That’s going to be a big part of her reading tonight, apparently: press notes say she’ll be reading from an “elliptical essay [that] ruminates on the complexities of desire and belonging in a shifting community.”

THURSDAY It’s a book party to celebrate the release of Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night at Hugo House. Queen, Chee’s second novel, is about an opera singer who is cast in a production that is adapted from her own life story. This is a big, buzzy book that everyone is talking about. After the reading, incredible Elliott Bay Book Company bookseller Karen Maeda Allman will lead a Q&A.

FRIDAY Internationally celebrated Spanish painter Ricardo Cavolo will debut his new book 100 Artists to Listen to Before You Die at Ada’s Technical Books. This is a gorgeous book — part comic, part diary, part fan’s notes — that is published by the very exciting London comics press Nobrow. Seattle cartoonist Fran Lopez will conduct a conversation and Q&A with Cavolo.

SATURDAY Did somebody say "conflict of interest?" Paul Constant will be giving a lecture and hosting a conversation about book-to-film adaptation at the Northgate Barnes & Noble at 1 pm this afternoon. This event is part of a book fair to benefit the good people at Scarecrow Video, which is the greatest damn video store in the entire United States of America. Come out and show them the love.

And your ALTERNATE SATURDAY event is the Bwitch Zine Release Party at Push/Pull. This is a thematic anthology zine — this edition’s theme is “dark fairytale” — that is “for all the girls in the comic scene that want to be heard and express themselves.” This event offers free snacks and drinks, as well as some sort of a musical act, which has not been announced yet.

SUNDAY The Monorail Reading Series happens tonight at the Fred Wildlife Refuge. Tonight’s readers are Lisa Ciccarello, Willie Fitzgerald, and Feliz Lucia Molina. Ciccarello is a poet who has published one collection and eight chapbooks. Molina is the author of two books, with a chapbook and another book on the way. Fitzgerald has published fiction and non-fiction in a bunch of places, including right here at the Seattle Review of Books. A boozy-fun reading from a bunch of up-and-comers seems like a great way to cap out the week.

Samuel R. Delany Speaks

Wonderful interview with the one and only Samuel R. Delany, by Cecilia D'Anastasio.

When he was 11, Samuel R. Delany stayed overnight at a Harlem hospital for observation. It was 1953, and nearly a decade before Delany would publish his first science-fiction novel. He had already realized he was gay. With trepidation, he asked the doctor, a white man, how many gays existed in America. The doctor laughed. “[He] told me it was an extremely rare disease,” Delany says. “No more than one out of 5,000 men carried it.” Rest assured, the doctor added, no medical records existed confirming the existence of black homosexuals. “Simply because I was black,” Delany says, “I didn’t need to worry!”

How Valley of the Dolls went from a reject to a 30-million best-seller

Self promotion was Jacqui Susann's game, and she was so good at it, that she started a viral movement without that crutch, the internet, that we all rely on now. Martin Chilton writes it for the Telegraph.

Her novel Valley of the Dolls was dismissed as "painfully dull, inept, clumsy, undisciplined, rambling and thoroughly amateurish". So how did such a poor book go on to be registered in The Guinness Book of World Records in the late Sixties as the world's most popular novel? The success of Valley of the Dolls – to date more than 30 million copies have been sold worldwide – is a tale of one of the most tenacious and sharp-eyed publishing campaigns of all time.

Liquid Assets

In drought, with water as a diminishing resource, controlling a very limited resource becomes a playground for people who like to make a lot of money. Abraham Lustgarten, in a very long and detailed piece for ProPublica, looks at Wall Street's interest in Western water rights.

Deane is not a rancher or a farmer; he’s a hedge-fund manager who had flown in from New York City the previous night. And as he appraised the property, he was less interested in its crop or cattle potential than in a different source of wealth: the water running through its streams and coursing beneath its surface. This tract would come with the rights to large amounts of water from the region’s only major river, the Humboldt. Some of those rights were issued more than 150 years ago, which means they outrank almost all others in the state. Even if drought continues to force ranches and farms elsewhere in Nevada to cut back, the Diamond S will almost certainly get its fill.