Your week in readings: The best literary events for the week of July 27 - August 2, 2015

Monday: Tonight’s recommended event is the Seattle Spelling Bee at Cafe Racer, in which adults drink beer and try to spell words of varying difficulty. What could possibly go wrong?

Tuesday: The Literary Mixer, a monthly happy hour event, has been going on for a couple years now. (It started at Vermillion, but the event moved to the Hideout not so long ago.) The concept behind Literary Mixer is as simple and clear as the name of the event: bring the book you’re currently reading to the bar. Buy a drink. Talk to strangers about the book you’re reading, and ask them about the book they’re reading. This is a fun way for shy book nerds to meet new people.

Wednesday: It’s a banner year for the UW writing program. No, not because David Shields has published approximately 35 books this year so far; that happens every year. The reason for celebration is that three UW grads are debuting poetry collections in 2015, and the Hugo House is hosting all three in a reading that’s kind of the equivalent of a literary homecoming party. Sonia Greenfield reads from Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market, Jessica Johnson is the author of In Absolutes We Seek Each Other, and Erin Malone wrote Hover. All three books have already won awards. Go show your hometown pride.

Thursday: Elliott Bay Book Company hosts a group reading to celebrate the launch of a new anthology called BLENDED. Local authors including Samantha Waltz, Gigi Rosenberg, Emma Kate Tsai, Cassie Premo Steele, Kezia Willingham, and Sallie Wagner Brown will read their contributions to the book, which collects non-fiction stories about blended families.

Friday: What better way to celebrate a summer Friday night than with a reading from a sci-fi novel? Ted Kosmatka presents The Flicker Men at University Book Store tonight. It’s a thriller about a quantum physics researcher who accidentally discovers scientific proof of the soul. Of course he immediately is pursued by mysterious forces who want to keep his discovery quiet. Go get your genre on.

Saturday: Even though we just bumbled into August, it’s time to start getting ready for fall, or at least to start thinking about getting ready for fall. Amy Bronee, author of The Canning Kitchen, teaches a canning class up in Fremont’s Book Larder bookshop.

Sunday: One of the Seattle Public Library’s best outreach programs, the Books on Bikes team, will be building a temporary outdoor full-service library on the waterfront today, as part of the Waterfront Whimsea celebration. When they say full-service, they mean it: you can check out books, get a library card, and talk with a librarian about upcoming SPL programs. Bring the kids for games, music, and prizes.

Who gawks at the Gawkers?

Published July 27, 2015, at 7:01am

Paul Constant review Brian Abrams's Gawker: An Oral History.

As Gawker reboots itself after a controversial few weeks, Brian Abrams' new ebook Gawker: An Oral History tells the behind-the-scenes story of how the gossip site came to be.

Read this review now

Our sincerest thanks to Janine A. Southard for sponsoring The Seattle Review of Books this week.

In the hilarious, and well-loved Cracked! A Magic iPhone Story (four stars on Amazon!), the award-winning Southard (a Seattle denizen) shows you how the geeks of Seattle live, provides a running and often-hilarious social commentary on today’s world, and reminds you that, so long as you have friends, you are never alone.

Help support The Seattle Review of Books by reading her excerpt and ordering the novel if you like what you read.

This made the rounds on Twitter today:

Those only familiar with Watchmen through Zack Snyder’s visually slavish but emotionally hollow cinematic adaptation might not get the irony here. Rorschach was created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in the 1980s as an echo of the Steve Ditko character The Question. Ditko is a famous Objectivist, one who believes that heroic fiction should only follow the rules established by Ayn Rand in her fiction and essays. So Rorschach is the ultimate Objectivist: a hate-filled moral toddler who loathes everyone and everything for not being as morally rigid as he is. He’s a parody of the kind of people who, like Ted Cruz, idolize Ayn Rand and her cockamamie “philosophy.”

I don’t really expect Ted Cruz to comprehend the fact that Watchmen is an anti-Thatcherite (and also anti-Reagan) work of fiction. But you’d think someone on his staff would urge him to skip the dog-killing sociopath on his list of top five heroes in favor of someone like Superman or, I dunno, maybe Captain America instead?

The Sunday post

(A collection of pieces we noted this week.)

Joe Gould's Teeth

Jill Lepore writes in The New Yorker about the longest book ever written, and whether or not it actually existed.

There ought to be a “Danger” sign. Writers tumble into this story, and then they plummet. I have always supposed this to be because Gould suffered from hypergraphia. He could not stop writing. This is an illness, a mania, but seems more like something a writer might envy, which feels even rottener than envy usually does, because Gould was a toothless madman who slept in the street. You are envying a bum: Has it come to this, at last? But then you’re relieved of the misery of that envy when you learn that what he wrote was dreadful. Except, wait, that’s worse, because then you have to ask: Maybe everything you write is dreadful, too? But then, in one last twist, you find out that everything he wrote never even existed. Still, either way, honestly, it’s depressing as hell. So I got interested in knowing if any of it was true.
What the hell is Wild Animus?

Peter Derk wonders why he always sees copies of this strange book, Wild Animus, in used bookstores.

How is this possible? It's no big surprise to run into A Million Little Pieces or a Da Vinci Code. Those books, the guys who wrote those books, they were everywhere. But who the hell is Rich Shapero? How did his book get this much exposure?

Just what the hell is Wild Animus?

Portlander Ursula K. Le Guin is Breathing Fire to Save American Literature

A wonderful piece on one of the most unique and well-loved American writers, who at 85 gave a barn-burner of a speech at the National Book Awards last year.

To me, and to many others, the miracle of these books lies in the way Le Guin managed to write about enchanted realms and faraway planets without ever straying from the core issues of our own bluish rock. While many fantastical novels and films present starship battles and magic spells as mindless spectacle, Le Guin relentlessly turned sci-fi’s trappings into innovative new avenues to plumb deeper human conflicts. In so doing, she helped hack out the all-important path between science fiction and literary legitimacy that writers like Michael Chabon and David Mitchell walk today—which is why so many big-name current authors credit her with their careers, and more. As the fantasy superstar (and lifelong superfan) Neil Gaiman said as he presented Le Guin’s National Book Foundation medal, “She made me a better writer. And I think much more importantly, she made me a better person who wrote.”

Rahawa Haile's short stories of the day, of the previous week.

Every day, friend of the SRoB Rahawa Haile tweets a short story. She gave us permission to collect them every week. This week is especially notable — she crossed 200.

Hugo House is hosting a one-day poetry broadside workshop Saturday August 8, run by local poet J.T. Stewart, and master typographer John D. Berry. Poets will walk away with printed broadsides of their work.

Broadsides were once the currency of the poetry underground. Learning how to design and print them is a great opportunity, especially if you've never seen your work come to life on paper right before your eyes. Having this level of experience and guidance available to you is a rare opportunity.

Gawker.com to "reboot" on Monday as something "20 percent nicer"

Holy cow, this story has exploded in such a weird way.

Founder Nick Denton plans to relaunch [Gawker], which has been publishing fewer stories since the scandal began, with a heightened focus on newsworthiness over salaciousness, according to a report from Digiday. He told staffers at a Thursday meeting the new Gawker.com would be "20 percent nicer" than its previous iteration, Capital New York reported.

Also, Gawker's parent company, Gawker Media, might be changing its name to distance itself from the Gawker brand. Denton says that any employees who are not happy with this decision are welcome to "quit and receive full severance pay." Of course, this news follows a dumb retraction of a dumb post, which I wrote about last week. But it's interesting, too, that Gawker writers overwhelmingly voted to unionize earlier this year.

Every publication, if it hangs around long enough, will eventually suffer an institutional crisis of conscience. Everything depends on how the publisher and management responds to the crisis: do they throw away the past and forget their mission statement? Or do they get smarter about meeting their mission statement?

I've not always been a fan of Gawker, but I have at least always respected Nick Denton's obvious intelligence. He's built a blog into a media empire. And now he's about to make what will probably be the most important decision of his career. From here, with no real inside knowledge of the situation, it looks like he's making the wrong decision.

Dennis Abrams of Publishing Perspectives writes:

Opening this September is the Book and Bed, a new hotel located in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro neighborhood, that, according to Rocket News 24, literally “invites bibliophiles to sleep in the stacks.”

They can't promise privacy, but they can promise the opportunity to fall asleep while doing something you love. This is not your only opportunity to sleep in a bookstore: Abrams writes, "In Paris, if you’re willing to volunteer time, you can crash at Shakespeare & Co."

So that's two ways to really make yourself at home in bookstores. Really, it's kind of surprising a bookstore bed & breakfast hasn't opened in Seattle yet, isn't it?

The Academy (as in, "I'd like to thank the…") posted this interactive interview with screenwriter John August. It's hard to think of a better advocate for screenwriters than he. Not only has he been answering questions from readers on his blog since for at least fifteen years (well before he was as well-known as he is now), but after falling in hate with the biggest screenwriting software out there, he helped to create an open source plaintext screenwriting standard called Fountain, and then he started a software company to make software to utilize it. Oh yeah, then there's his popular ad-free podcast, and his other little products like Writer's Emergency Pack. Unlike other movie writing coaches, he is someone who talks from experience and success, and is always straight-forward and generous with his message.

I've noticed, in the past few years, more and more fiction writers taking in the lessons of story from Hollywood. Even if you're writing novels, or curious how a good story is crafted, there is a lot to learn from people like August, and watching his career has been an absolute hoot.

Thursday comics hangover: Los Angeles is a magical place

(Every comics fan knows that Wednesday is new comics day, the glorious time of the week when brand-new comics arrive at shops around the country. Thursday Comics Hangover is a weekly column reviewing some of the new books that I pick up at Phoenix Comics and Games, my friendly neighborhood comic book store.)

I swear every month brings a new comic series about a paranormal investigator. It's one of the most overplayed ideas out there — a down-on-his-luck detective who bumps into demons or vampires or some other creature-of-the-week riff. The last iteration of the trope that I bought into was Paul Jenkins and Humberto Ramos's terrible series Revelations, which read like toothless John Constantine: Hellblazer comics. The paranormal investigator is the laziest way to present supernatural fiction, by giving us a jaded main character who explains everything to the reader. Why mess with this stuff if you're not going to try to instill a sense of wonder or horror or surprise in the reader?

The newest paranormal detective series to hit the stands is Wolf, written by Ales Kot and illustrated by Matt Taylor, and I'll be damned if it doesn't somehow crack the code for a successful supernatural PI. Maybe it's because this is an oversized first issue that has plenty of room to breathe, but Kot and Taylor have somehow made a paranormal detective story that actually feels like a detective story. This could be a Raymond Chandler novel, if Raymond Chandler wrote about real vampires instead of the emotional variety.

The first time we meet our hero, Antoine Wolfe, he's on fire. But he's not really in any hurry to put himself out. Instead, he wanders around the back roads of Los Angeles, singing a Robert Johnson song to himself. We learn that Wolfe may (or may not) be immortal. At least, he seems to think he is. Wolfe's Los Angeles is packed with vampires and corrupt businessmen looking to hush up a murder or two. Around every corner is a goon waiting to knock him out and throw him in the trunk of a car. And Wolfe, who is African-American, understands that while the supernatural is dangerous, he's just as likely to get killed by a racist asshole with an axe to grind. The world is a dangerous place for him on multiple levels.

Taylor's art helps to sell the story's sunbaked Lovecraftian noir by staying simple and realistic. The cars look like cars, the people behave like people — Wolfe punches like a man who took a boxing class, in direct defiance of most ridiculous comics combat styles — and colorist Lee Loughridge keeps everything soaked in nauseating tones of green, so even the most ordinary panels seem to leak out a menace that's swirling just beneath the ink and paper.

Kot seems to know what he's doing here as he lays out the rules of Wolf's magic. We see a surprising array of supernatural aspects in the course of one single issue, but all the different menaces seem to behave similarly; magic is something that visits you and never leaves. It haunts people, including Wolfe, plucking at their sanity like a novice playing with a harp. It's hard to tell who's an eccentric urban mage and who's another schizophrenic, dumped on the street by a system that stopped caring decades ago. In other words, it looks a lot like real life.

Houstonia magazine responds perfectly to racist readers who complained about an advertisement depicting a mixed-race family. Sometimes the customer is not right. Sometimes the customer is a bigot. In times like that, it's okay to call them out on their bigotry, and to tell them they are not welcome to read the publication anymore. The quality of your readers definitely makes a statement about your publication. In fact, it says a lot more about your publication than the quantity of readers.

In a three-decade career Moore refined the Archie Comics visual vocabulary, creating arguably the most iconic take on a set of characters who are now recognized all over the world. The (very good) recent attempt to modernize Archie couldn't exist without the sturdy foundations that Moore built.

It's not every day this kind of historical investigation happens, especially in a relatively new city like Seattle: Seattle Pacific University is home to 43 letters written by John Newton, the slave trader who eventually became an abolitionist. Newton is perhaps best known as the writer of the song "Amazing Grace," which is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. Newton was "part of 'a loose but extensive network of late-18th- and early-19th-century British evangelicals including William Wilberforce who corresponded and collaborated on the effort to abolish slavery throughout the Empire.'" After years of neglect, the letters are now scanned, curated, and available for your perusal online. You can read more at SPU's magazine, Response, and read PDF scans of the letters at SPU's digital commons.

The author of Ragtime has died. He was 84. The first Doctorow book I read was his 2004 novel The March, a story of Sherman's March which ended with a truly horrific scene that sticks with me to this day. I then went back to Ragtime and and Billy Bathgate. Historical fiction is so tough to get right, and Doctorow was a master at it; he never deluged you with details and look-at-my-research flourishes. This removal of authorial ego is the key to good historical storytelling. The reader is comforted by the sense that Doctorow always tells exactly the story he wants to tell, nothing less and nothing more. That's an impressive legacy for a storyteller, even one as celebrated as Doctorow. In his memory, I might have to finally crack a copy of The Book of Daniel I've been keeping for years now.

If you're looking for a road trip template to follow this summer, you could do much worse than Atlas Obscura's Literary Road Trip map:

The Seattle Review of Books is officially an endorser of the city's bid to become designated a UNESCO City of Literature. This is because we believe Seattle is a world-class book city, and the designation would allow us to share our art with other UNESCO Creative Cities around the world. Additionally, if we earned the designation, the city would establish an office to oversee the city's literary scene, which could create some exceptional opportunities for collaboration and community outreach.

Seattle City of Literature, the organization behind the bid, has created a video explaining why Seattle's literary scene deserves the UNESCO City of Literature designation. It's a fine video, even though that introductory scene from Mayor Murray is a little rough — was that the best take? — but on the whole, it's a fine encapsulation of the features that make us such a great city for literature.

Seattle City of Literature's 2015 UNESCO Bid from Tall Firs Cinema/Samudre Media on Vimeo.

If you agree that Seattle deserves a place in the UNESCO Creative Cities network, you can show your support by liking Seattle City of Literature on Facebook.

On Twitter, the delightful author Laila Lalami announced that her historical novel The Moor’s Account "is the recipient of an American Book Award." Account was also shortlisted for a Pulitzer this past year; you should probably read it, is my point.