Mail call for August 19, 2015

How about a little sunset with your books tonight? That second book is hard to see — it's Landfalls by Naomi J. Williams. Looks pretty interesting!

Dancing is like reading with your body

SRoB has already declared what we believe to be the best-looking literary events of the week, but there are a couple of music-themed literary fundraisers coming up that we want you to know about.

Tomorrow night, the good folks behind Lit Crawl are throwing a 90's-themed dance party at Fred Wildlife Refuge, as a way to raise money for the (entirely free) Crawl. It's $5 at the door. As the invitation puts it:

sweet 90s nostalgia + raffle + silent auction + dance off + good feelings + anticipation for the big event on October 22

On Friday, local author-band The Rejections and Trailing Spouses will be playing a show in Elliott Bay Book Company's reading room as a fundraiser for the very worthy Camp Ten Trees. This event, too, is $5, which includes entry and food and drink.

Even we must acknowledge that life is not best enjoyed through readings alone. Go and get your dance on, and support two worthy causes while you do it.

Talking with Doug Nufer, Seattle's constraint-based superhero

Doug Nufer is freed by constraints. Nearly everything written by Seattle’s most valiant bearer of the Oulipian torch is born of one constraint or another; one narrative is told through the stultifying language of corporate biography, another is an homage to old Ace Doubles genre storytelling, a third is a story told only in negatives. His newest novel, Lifeline Rule is a conovowel text, which is a form in which every consonant alternates with a vowel. You read that right; the whole book is a string of alternating consonants and vowels, with no consonants touching and no vowels touching. Some passages of Lifeline Rule require you to read them two or three times in order to squeeze meaning from them, but other passages are clear as a bell, albeit a bell ringing with a weird deep vibration that initiates a tickling feeling in your genitals:

Were we not alive? To cogitate was a basis of a live human, or an ability to live by. But as I more cogitated on usages, ability, humanity, marine life, pirates, et. al., I become more remote, removed in a recovery to be beside my body. Beside my body, my cogitated ego sum arose to make me decide we were yet alive. To so decide was one more level a live human operates on, in an average life.

You have never read cogito ergo sum in language quite like that. This Sunday, Nufer presents Lifeline Rule at Gallery 1412 with a very special guest: Italian Oulipian Paolo Pergola. (Though in Italy they call Oulipo “OpLePo”.) If you’ve never read any Oulipian works, you’re missing out on a splendid tradition. I’d recommend starting with Raymond Queneau’s book-length storytelling experiment Exercises in Style and attending this reading, which will bring European and American constraints-based writing together for a single evening.

You’ve always been a great lover of literary constraints. What interests you about the conovowel form, specifically?

My favorite constraints are elegant and difficult, easy to see but hard to do. Conovowel has a huge lexicon and provides the use of most prepositions and to-be forms, so it's possible to write many sentences that sound normal, but it's very difficult to go on without getting into strange territory. Conovowel is flexible enough so I can apply it to other constraints, and sometimes these digressions into song lyrics, punchlines, and renderings of cartoons, monster movies, scenes from great books, and so on, seem to me to be as important to the book as the story.

Which comes first to you—the constraint or the story?

With Lifeline Rule, the constraint came first, and that's probably how it has been with most of my books. I saw a line in a newspaper where vowels and consonants alternated, and immediately I saw the potential of this constraint. Before I got into it, I checked with friends in OULIPO and others to see if anyone had done it, and it was William Gillespie who coined the term conovowel and used it to write a poem in his collection Table of Forms, published under the name Dominique Fitzpatrick O'Dinn (Spineless Books). So the constraint had a certain provenance but it offered a challenge to do more.

Although constraints are often defined as “arbitrary," even by those who do this kind of writing, I think the content must spring from and express the form. One of the first steps I took was to go through a regular dictionary and make a list of all conovowel words except for arcane scientific terminology (though I did add a science section later), and the idea of having a protagonist who specializes in "codes" and who serves in the "military" as a "marine" seemed not only appealing but also mandatory.

After fiddling with making up sentences and vignettes, I got the feel for the limits I was up against while I wondered how to exploit this constraint to make it tell the story it was meant to tell. In the case of conovowel, what I'm dealing with is an extreme commitment to alternation. Things are always changing. The protagonist goes through obsessively perverse metamorphoses. Even something as basic as sexual orientation gets twisted as he (or he/she) changes into different organic entities. He even turns into non-organic entities. This extreme bent towards alternation applies to the nature of the book, too. How "real" is it? Is it the novel he writes to get his degree or the afterlife musings of someone who was cryogenically frozen and never woke up?

Along with this extreme alternation, I get into these situations of extreme ambivalence about topics I wouldn't ordinarily address, such as the nature of religion. Not just, is it good to have a god? Is it good to be a god?

Could you talk about how this visit from Pergola came to happen? I don't imagine we get very many international Oulipians visiting Seattle that often.

Paolo wrote to me after he heard about my novel Never Again, where no word appears more than once. He had been working on that constraint in Italian for OPLEPO, and someone there knew about me and that book. He's also a marine biologist who comes through Seattle, where his wife is from, en route to teach a class in Friday Harbor. My book party happened to present an occasion where he could show what he does.

Are any of Pergola’s writings available for our readers?

Almost all of what he writes is in Italian, and my wine shop/ tourist Italian isn't good enough to make recommendations of his work. Most of it is unavailable here. I might begin by looking up the Wikipedia entry on OPLEPO.

Pergola has also translated Popeye comics into Italian. If you had to write comics about a cartoon character, which one would you write and why?

Years ago when I was writing Negativeland, I read all of the Superman Bizarro comics I could find. I wanted to study how they constitute a scheme of opposition that negates what we expect on Earth. That gave me an appreciation for how difficult it is to come up with a coherent system of opposition because there is often no single opposite to any particular thing or idea.

Super heroes may lend themselves particularly well to constraint writing, and I can imagine how it would be a great project to go through such comics and devise a particular constraint to deal with each hero. I might start with the Flash just so I could call it Flash Fiction.

Every used book tells at least two stories

When you ask Debbie Sarow if there are any rules that Mercer Street Books customers should keep in mind when bringing their books in to sell to the store, she bristles. She has a few basic rules for books she’ll never buy — computer books, hardback books without dust jackets — but Sarow doesn’t like to discourage customers from bringing any sorts of books in, because “it’s the one book that they think is garbage that turns out to be the prize. That’s part of the fun.”

Sarow loves looking through other people’s books. Most book collections betray a few narrow areas of interest — like palmistry, say. But sometimes she’ll find a reader with truly catholic tastes, from comics to cookbooks to poetry to film, and then she considers the books a puzzle to solve. She likes to arrive at the point where she can find connections between the disparate subjects. A book collection is its own form of biography, and Sarow's 15 years in the used book business has transformed her into a very astute reader of those stories.

Even more meaningful? The items that people leave inside their books. Sarow downplays the items she finds at first: “It’s not like Found magazine,” with outrageous flourishes of personality tucked behind every page. Mostly, she says, it’s “letters and grocery lists,” and “not as much money as you’d think.” When flipping through a used book, she’ll occasionally find a piece of foreign currency used as a bookmark, but if there’s a little old lady out there stashing her fortune away in her library, Sarow has yet to encounter her.

And while Mercer Street Books employees still find photos tucked into books, those are dwindling with the advent of digital photography. But there are occasional startling glimpses into other lives.

Mercer Street employee Aaron Bagley talks about his favorite find: a single piece of paper with handwriting on either side. “On one side, a guy had written out all the reasons why he had to leave this woman,” Bagley said. He was “coaching himself” into breaking up with her. But on the other side of the paper, “she had found the list and responded to everything he wrote,” in highly critical terms. On one side, he wrote that she didn’t like his friends; she replied on the other side that his friends were losers. Bagley recalls one specific thing the man wrote to himself on the list: “take the bike. It’s the only thing you can call yours.”

Other items, though much less dramatic, contribute to the emotional value of the book. In a copy of the French Laundry Cookbook, Sarow found a receipt from the restaurant for a dinner totaling over 1300 dollars. The receipt, handwritten and elegant, is more than a bookmark, it’s a memory that, combined with the book, tells a new story. Sarow can’t bring herself to separate the receipt from the book. “They belong together,” she says, and they’ll be sold as a pair.

Mail call for August 18, 2015

Sign up for Hugo House fall classes now

Today's the day! Hugo House's fall registration period is open to the general public. Some courses to look out for: Sarah Galvin's class in drafting and editing poems; a yearlong prose manuscript class with Peter Mountford; a yearlong young adult class with Karen Finneyfrock; a one-day class from Maged Zaher titled "How Not to be Yourself: Techniques of Othering;" a class by Jonathan Lethem; and a class in novel-writing by Megan Kruse, whose debut novel knocked our socks off last month. Plus a ton of others. You'll also find some perennial Hugo House favorites including Greg Stump and David Lasky on comics, David Schmader's legendary brainstorming course, and Charles Mudede's class on writing about Seattle.

Phew! That's a lot of links.

Our thanks to sponsor Kelley Eskridge

Our sponsor this week is a real treat. Not only is Kelley Eskridge's Solitaire A New York Times Notable Book, a Borders Original Voices selection, and a Nebula, Endeavour, and Spectrum Award finalist, but shooting on a feature based on Solitaire begins later this month in Australia.

Read a full chapter here on the site. We give you great things to read in partner with our sponsors. It's our way of fighting horrible internet advertising.

Lunch Date: Turkish food with Boots Riley

(Once in a while, I take a new book with me to lunch and give it a half an hour or so to grab my attention. Lunch Date is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)

Who’s your date today? Boots Riley: Tell Homeland Security — We Are the Bomb, a collection of lyrics and interviews from the Coup frontman. (Riley will be at University Book Store in conversation with Jesse Hagopian on Thursday of this week.)

Where’d you go? Cafe Turko in Fremont.

What’d you eat? The beet hummus ($6) and the village salad with chicken ($10).

How was the food? I’m a big fan of Cafe Turko. It’s always way too busy, and the staff is always way too overworked, but it's a great place to get stuffed on healthy food. The beet hummus, especially, is something that I have to order every time. It’s bright like Play-Doh but it’s absolutely delicious. The salad, too, was lovely, with crisp greens and spiced grilled chicken, doused in a baslamic dressing.

What does your date say about itself? From the publisher’s promotional copy:

Provocative and prolific, Boots Riley has written lyrics as the frontman of underground favorites The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club, as well as solo artist, for more than two decades. An activist, educator, and emcee, Riley's singular lyrical stylings combine hip-hop poetics, radical politics, and wry humor with Bay Area swag. Boots Riley: Collected Lyrics and Writings brings together his songs, commentary, and backstories with compelling photos and documents.

Is there a representative quote? On the song “5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO,” Riley says: “It’s funny because — many times by my detractors — I get called a little too heavy, or my work gets called dogmatic. But actually, most of my lyrics are pretty tongue in cheek. I would probably not make a song about literally killing a CEO. Not because I don’t have a problem with it per se, but because that wouldn’t be a fun song. The things that I think motivate people into action are not doom and gloom, and not anger and rage, the things that I think actually motivate people into action are optimism and hope.”

Will you two end up in bed together? Yes, but this book annoys the hell out of me and I want to talk about that for a second. Boots Riley is one of those multi-media collections of lyrics and artist interviews — kinda like Jay-Z’s Decoded, only in softcover — that overdoes the graphic design. This book is seriously overproduced. Rather than publishing the lyrics like poetry, the book’s designers often lay the lyrics out diagonally across the stage, superimposed over what is supposed to look like a piece of notebook paper. I guess this is to demonstrate passion, or to highlight that the lyrics are a piece of writing?

But you know what highlights the writing in the lyrics more than cheesy graphic design tricks? The lyrics themselves. 
Riley’s politics might offend some readers — oh my God, a political rapper! — but nobody can deny the artfulness of his lyrics. Rather than splashing the pages with a bunch of color and photographs and giant pull quotes, Riley’s words would be better served if presented as poetry.

The thing is, i can’t even tell who all this graphic design is supposed to benefit. Is the book’s ADHD layout intended to draw in music fans? But Riley’s fans are already pretty literate — Slavoj Žižek blurbs this book, along with Dave Eggers — and they don’t likely need to be drawn in by pretty pictures. It’s a case of too much design interfering with the message of the lyrics, which are often about finding meaning in a superficial world. I’m reading this book in spite of the design, not because of it.

Waking Up Strange

Don’t sleep in a parked car.

You awake, windows fogged, hands on the wheel,

the dash and controls suddenly foreign,


like a safe word repeated too often. What queer

drives brought you here? You hurtle ahead but the car

is still. You wake up turning the wheel


and avoiding its meaning. Turning a pink plastic wheel.

Pounding a rubber clown horn like a little girl. And harbor strange

fears of waking up driving. Of waking up lost. You awake in a car


and can’t find your car. Turn the wheel and it locks. You’re an alien.


Previously appeared in Tar River Poetry.
Hip hop: the animated series

Fantagraphics author Ed Piskor announced this morning on Facebook that the rights for his wonderful comic book about the history of hip hop, Hip Hop Family Tree, have been sold to Hollywood. Specifically, it's in development as an animated series, and Piskor assures his fans that it's "not one of those dime-a-dozen 'options' you hear about," meaning there's real progress underway.

Is this the first time a Fantagraphics comic has ever been adapted into an animated series, or am I forgetting about a canceled attempt at a Love & Rockets TV show? I would love to see Jim Woodring's Frank series get adapted into an HBO animated series for stoned adults; given that Woodring got his start in the Hanna Barbera animation studio, it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch.

OMG Gutenberg

Published August 17, 2015, at 12:00pm

Martin McClellan review Alix Christie's Gutenberg's Apprentice, Gutenberg's Apprentice (paperback), and John Man's Gutenberg.

Alix Christie explores a fictionalized version of the making of one of the greatest books ever printed, and the men who drove the fifteenth century startup that created widespread literacy.

Read this review now

Your week in readings: The best literary events from the week of August 17 - August 23

MONDAY Our week starts off with the August edition of Nerd Nite at Lucid Jazz Lounge. As with every Nerd Nite, this one features two very different speakers. First up, Marielle Saums will discuss the history of bananas. Then, electrical engineer Krunal Desai, who press materials inform us “bailed on the auto industry to work on spacecraft,” will discuss why modern cars are so difficult to fix but so easy to hack.

TUESDAY The Central Library hosts a tribute to the dearly departed Northwest author Ivan Doig, with authors Annie Proulx, Linda Bierds, David Laskin, and Myra Platt all sharing memories of Doig and reading pieces in his honor.

WEDNESDAY It’s back to the Central Library for you: sci-fi author John Scalzi will read from The End of All Things, which is the newest volume in his Old Man’s War series. Scalzi is an excellent novelist who is also an Important Figure on the Internet. He’s not afraid to be political — specifically, he’s not afraid to be a feminist — and he’s often a voice of reason when Twitter events begin to fly out of control, as they so often do.

THURSDAY University Book Store hosts The Coup frontman Boots Riley, who’ll be reading from his book of lyrics, poems, and essays, Tell Homeland Security - We are the Bomb. I’m a fan of the lot of The Coup’s music, but I think their song “Wear Clean Draws" is a stone-cold classic:

FRIDAY Tonight, you're returning to University Book Store, as author Nina Ansary appears in conversation with with Steve Gutzler. They’ll be discussing Ansary’s new book Jewels of Allah: The Untold Story of Women in Iran.Get a load of this, from the description of the event:

By digging into the actual impact of government policies, religious beliefs, and social norms, Ansary reveals the unintended increase of educated women following the repeal of gender equality laws, the influence of increased access to textbooks and women's magazines, and the powerful female voices and accomplishments by women in both Iran's past and present.

SATURDAY Elliott Bay Book Company hosts a reading with Pushcart Prizewinning author Ottessa Moshfegh. She’ll be reading from her novel Eileen, the story of a secretary at a boy’s prison who escapes from a terrible domestic situation.

SUNDAY Seattle’s very best Oulipian writer, Doug Nufer, shares the stage with Paolo Pergola, a member of the Italian Oulipian group OPLEPO. Pergola will read constraint-based pieces in English and Italian. Nufer will likely read from his new book, Lifeline Rule. (Pergola’s bio also mentions that he has “translated Popeye into Italian.”) This is all happening at Gallery 1412. Nufer’s readings are always a blast, and while we’re often visited by authors from around the country, we are not always visited by European writers. So we should give Pergola a warm Seattle welcome. Is that a thing? A "warm Seattle welcome?" Well, if it isn't, we should pretend that it is.

Our thanks to sponsor Darin Bradley

Our thanks to sponsor Darin Bradley for his support over the past week. One reviewer said this about his novel Chimpanzee “So if you took Twelve Monkeys, add The Time Traveler’s Wife but subtract the time-travel, multiply by 1984, factor in Strange Days and divide by Fight Club, you get Chimpanzee.”

The Seattle Review of Books relies on sponorships to bring you poems, interviews, reviews, notes, and advice every week. Go read a chapter from Chimpanzee, and if you like it, consider picking up a copy and telling him you heard about it here. It's all part of our campaign to make internet advertising better.

The Sunday Post for August 16, 2015

An Accomplished Writer Takes a ‘MasterClass’ From a Gargantuan Selling Writer

Writer Joyce Maynard takes a $90 “MasterClass” in writing from James Patterson.

In the 42 years I have worked full time—day in, day out—as a writer, producing, so far, 15 books (a couple of memoirs, a collection of essays and a bunch of novels). I have made it onto The New York Times list for a lifetime total of four weeks—back when the movie version of my novel Labor Day sent the novel that inspired it very briefly onto the charts. Other than that one heady moment, I have labored, like most of my writer friends, in one level or another of financial challenge. But I have held onto the undying faith that any day now, things might change, and all those readers out there who have been buying books by people like Jodi Picoult and James Patterson would suddenly realize what they were missing, and pick up one of mine, instead. And then I, too, would be one of those writers whose books the person on the seat next to you on the airplane always seems to be reading.
Off the Books: For some communities, the controversial labor practices of Andrew Carnegie outweighed the potential benefits of his libraries.

Jacqui Shine Looks at Andrew Carnegie’s libraries, why he built them, and if this legacy tips the scales away from his actions against nascent organizing labor. Some of his motivations will ring true to lovers of Horatio Alger tropes:

Carnegie’s philanthropy consisted not of handouts, but of investments in civic institutions. He was particularly interested in libraries because he believed that “self-help is the basis of every improvement, material, intellectual or spiritual, and that no mode of public benefaction could be chosen which exacted cooperation from the individual to such an extent as the public library.” The library was also a symbol of his own self-making. In his autobiography, Carnegie credited access to a benefactor’s library as the force that kept him “clear of low fellowship and bad habits” in his youth.

The Story Is the Thing: On Lucia Berlin

Lydia Davis on Lucia Berlin:

Things actually happen in the stories—a whole mouthful of teeth gets pulled at once; a little girl gets expelled from school for striking a nun; an old man dies in a mountaintop cabin, his goats and his dog in bed with him; the history teacher with her mildewed sweater is dismissed for being a Communist—“That’s all it took. Three words to my father. She was fired sometime that weekend and we never saw her again.”

Is this why it is almost impossible to stop reading a story of Lucia Berlin’s once you begin? Is it because things keep happening? Is it also the narrating voice, so engaging, so companionable? Along with the economy, the pacing, the imagery, the clarity? These stories make you forget what you were doing, where you are, even who you are.

At Sea With Joseph Conrad

We end up talking about Conrad and London a lot in the SRoB Slack channel (not as much, as, say, Chimamanda, it should be noted), but if even if you are as against Conrad as some in our group, it’s worth looking at this Maya Jasanoff piece for the illustrations (but since you’re there, give it a read too, won’t you?)

The tall ship Corwith Cramer stumbled into the Celtic Sea, engine roaring, 7,500 square feet of sail furled up mute. Its two masts ticked against the horizon like a metronome set to allegro. I joined a row of pallid sailors crouched at the leeward rail. Foam-lathered swell swung for my face, then reeled abruptly away. By the third time I threw up over the side, the “wine-dark sea” of Homer’s poetry just looked like the basin of a billion vomits.

Misery loves blame, so I blamed Joseph Conrad, whose fiction had brought me here. Before Conrad published his first novel in 1895, he spent 20 years working as a merchant sailor, mostly on sailing ships, and fully half his writing — including “Heart of Darkness,” “Lord Jim” and “The Secret Sharer” — deals with sailors, ships and the sea. These loom so large for him that as I have researched a book about Conrad’s life and times, I have felt it essential to travel by sea myself.

Rahawa Haile’s short stories of the day, of the previous week, for August 15, 2015

(Every day, friend of the SRoB Rahawa Haile tweets a short story. She gave us permission to collect them every week.)

Seattle Writing Prompt #2: Writing the city

Ask any writer: the two most difficult parts of the writing process are 1) sitting down in the seat to write and 2) figuring out what to write about. We can't help you focus on your work, but we can try to help you find inspiration in the city around you. That's what Seattle Writing Prompts is all about. These prompts are offered free to anyone who needs them; all the Seattle Review of Books asks in return is that you thank us in the acknowledgements when you turn it into a book.

I haven't read that many good books about graffiti. Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude is the first one that comes to mind, though I know I've read others. Why isn't there more good fiction about graffiti? Don't writers love to write about writers? And aren't graffiti artists just another kind of writer, explaining the city around them?

If you're having trouble finding inspiration, go take a walk. Focus on noticing the graffiti. When you find a piece that speaks to you — maybe it's half-finished, maybe it's clever, maybe it's crude — try to write about it. What was the artist trying to say? What are the different ways the piece could be interpreted? Where's the artist right now?

If you're unable to go out for a walk, my friend Renée Krulich has a world-class Flickr stream on which she documents seemingly every single piece of graffiti in Seattle that she can find. They're all organized in albums alphabetically by artist, from famous names like John Criscitello to sticker artists like 'Phones. Personally, I'm fond of Sti(c)kman and Allo, but you can choose whomever you like. Or maybe you finally want to get to the bottom of the eternal Seattle question: what's the deal with SHITbARF? There must be a novel there. At least.

Seattle Arts and Lectures is hiring

Do you want to help kids learn how to love writing? Seattle Arts and Lectures is looking for a new program director for their Writers in the Schools program. It sounds like a tough job, but it's definitely worth it:

The WITS Program Director is responsible for establishing and maintaining high quality writer residencies, creating and managing the program budget, leading development of program strategy, supporting classroom teachers and writers-in-residence throughout the year, stewarding relationships with schools and other program partners, recruiting new schools and writers, program assessment, and collaborating with staff and board members on fundraising, public relations, and marketing as well as general SAL administration.

And if program-directing is not your thing, you could also consider the Community Engagement Coordinator position. The application deadline for both positions is August 31st. Go do it.

The Help Desk: Does dog-earing make me an infidel?

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,

Is dog-earing the pages of a book morally, ethically, or spiritually wrong? What about underlining?

Brooke from Capitol Hill

Dear Brooke,

In a world where Ted Nugent, Donald Trump, and Mark Driscoll can all boast of being New York Times bestselling authors, I have a hard time labeling anything short of a ham sandwich wrapped in pages of the Koran as morally, ethically, or spiritually wrong (especially if the infidel sandwich is thrown its own ticker-tape parade in Mecca during Ramadan).

But I digress.

A good book should have a much longer lifespan than you and far more friends than could fit at your funeral. So yes, there is an etiquette to how you handle good books and this is it: Use pen only for inscriptions. If you want to underline or respond to select passages, do it in pencil so that when you’re dead, your loved ones can read your thoughts and then carefully erase them. If you highlight anything outside of a school textbook, you are a dick (even then, turning text an aggressively hard-to-read shade does not make it more knowable. Learn to take notes like a civilized person.)

Finally, don’t dog-ear pages. On the scale of infidel sandwiches, this gaffe is more upsetting than sacrilegious (think Jesus stumping for Subway’s new gluten-free tuna melt). Still, if you can’t find one old receipt, gum wrapper, divorce decree, etc. to mark your place in a book then you're about as useful as Trump's thoughts on the economy, Driscoll's thoughts on women, and Nugent's thoughts on everything else.

You’re welcome,

Cienna

Mail call for August 13, 2015

Of bookstores and Black Lives Matter

Jarek Steele, the co-owner of St. Louis's wonderful Left Bank Books (no relation to Seattle's wonderful Left Bank Books), published a blog post about an anonymous letter he received in resopnse to a Black Lives Matter window display in the store:

There was no return address, and it wasn’t signed. It was a very short message on a note card telling us that we had lost a customer. In it, the person said we stoked the flames of enmity between races and promoted division. The person asked us why we insisted upon doing that.

Steele walks a fine line in his open letter, explaining why the store maintains an open conversation about race even as tons of white folks think the matter should be closed forever. He doesn't sarcastically mock the customer, instead concluding that "I want you to know that our door, hearts and arms are open to you and all others always." Steele even adds: "If you do make the switch to Amazon I hope that you’ll keep reading." How many bookstore owners would be that forgiving?

While everyone who's ever worked retail enjoys watching bad customers get what they deserve every now and again, Steele does excellent work walking the fine line between "the customer is always right" and "don't read the comments." His response is earnest, honest, and as full of questions as it is full of answers. You should read the entire letter, because I haven't seen a better example this year of why booksellers are so important as gatekeepers for community conversation.

(Many thanks to @boygobong, who shall henceforth forever be immortalized as the SRoB's very first hot-tipper.)