Dog of the Week

That's Schroeder. He was being very well-behaved, waiting for his human, sitting under a table by the window. He gave me a very friendly lick of the hand when I said hello.

Is Schroeder named for Schroeder from Peanuts? I actually forgot to ask. I hope so, though. He's great, as was his moody, memorable creator, Charles M. Schulz.

Hello, Friday!

• Ed Park (author of the wonderful novel Personal Days) offers an appreciation of the way-too-underappreciated Charles Portis. For a little more Portis talk, check out this Bookworm interview of Walter Kirn, whose novel Mission to America was influenced by Portis's Masters of Atlantis.

• Ed Champion talks to J. Robert Lennon. Check out Lennon's new books. You'll enjoy them.

• SOME FREE STORIES! The new Smokelong Quarterly is up. It features two of my favorite writers, so check out Dan Chaon and Ray Vukcevich if you have a chance.

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No events today. Maybe go outside and enjoy the fact that our heat wave has broken. Take the dog out. The dog could likely use a nice long walk.

Hello Tuesday

• The Man Booker long list has been announced.

• Jacket Copy on six literary feuds. Who doesn't love a good literary feud, huh?

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Join us tonight for a visit from science fiction author and Clarion West faculty member Rudy Rucker. Here's a selection from his bio:

"An influential cyberpunk ally and the originator of the term 'transrealism,' Rucker is an inspiring lecturer and a proponent of 'gnarl,' the creation of art that lives at the boundary between order and chaos."

Gnarl! He'll be at our U District store at 7pm.

Good Morning, Monday

• Victor LaValle's new novel, Big Machine looks to be a breakout for him and has garnered comparisons to Thomas Pynchon and Ralph Ellison. His previous, The Ecstatic is a favorite of mine.

• Texan David Douglas looks just like Hemingway.

• Merce Cunningham has passed away. Speaking as someone who writes about books under a photograph of one of Merce's artistic and romantic partners, I'd just like to say, Bye, Merce. Thanks for everything.

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Tonight you can join our friend and coworker Nick DiMartino in our U District cafe to talk about this month's Nick's Book Club pick, That Mad Ache by Françoise Sagan.

It's Friday!

• Tod Goldberg on Comic-Con.

• Alison Bechdel has posted an image from her upcoming book.

• Arthur Phillips writes about writing about music.

• Writer Justin Taylor is looking for people with literary tattoos for a book. Got one? Want to be in a book? Send a photo!

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Tonight in our U District store, we welcome Portland's Jay Lake, a three-time World Fantasy Award nominee. He'll read from his new book, Green. The fun starts at 7pm.

Good Morning, Thursday

• The New York Times blog Papercuts asks Aleksandar Hemon about his favorite music.

• Jeffrey Eugenides (who, if the photo that accompanies this piece is to be believed, works part time at a Jiffy Lube) was fired by the Academy of American Poets for writing on the job. The Virgin Suicides, his fantastic first novel, is 16 this year.

• The fall promises some incredible fiction from some powerhouse authors. Will it help a down industry? (We certainly hope so.)

• Bookshelves of Doom embeds this video of Will Arnett (GOB from Arrested Development!) reading from Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume.

• Indie author Shane Jones has sold the film rights to his amazing little book Light Boxes to Spike Jonze. (Shane and I share a publisher, and I'm ecstatic for him. I was an early advocate of that book, and seeing it go from the manuscript Shane emailed to me to its long search for a publisher to print to small press success to a possible film by some very creative filmmakers is heartening.)

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Tonight University Book Store Bellevue will be out at the Bellevue Regional Library to sell books for David Morrell and his book Shimmer. The Seattle Times reviewed the paranormal thriller here. The fun starts at 7pm.

Happy Tuesday, Everyone.

Tonight, our U District store welcomes Clarion West faculty member David Hartwell. Hartwell is Senior Editor for Tor Books. He has edited or co-edited scores of anthologies, among them The Year's Best SF and The Year's Best Fantasy. A veteran instructor of four CW workshops, he founded the influential New York Review of Science Fiction. Hartwell works with many of the field's top authors, including Gene Wolfe, Greg Benford, and Michael Bishop. He has received the Eaton Award and the World Fantasy Award. Hartwell will appear in conversation with the remarkable local writer Eileen Gunn, whose book Stable Strategies and Others remains a favorite.

Also, we'll be at the Bellevue Regional Library to sell some books by Sarah Dunant. Dunant and Seattle Times book editor Mary Ann Gwinn will discuss Dunant's latest novel, Sacred Hearts. It's about a 16th Century daughter of noble birth forced to live in a convent in the Italian city of Ferrara. As the defiant girl schemes to escape, she finds scandal and conspiracy in the Renaissance world.

Good Morning, Monday

• Frank McCourt passed away on Sunday.

• Today, forty years ago, man first walked on the Moon. (By the way: we did. We REALLY did.) Read about it in Buzz Aldrin's book Magnificent Desolation.

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Tonight we are very pleased to welcome back to our District store our friend Paul Collins, who will read from his new book The Book of William. If you love Shakespeare like we do, we know we'll see you there.

Good Afternoon, Friday...and have a nice weekend!

• Kindle's crack.

• An annotated list of 61 essential post-modern reads from the LA Times book blog, Jacket Copy.

• Salman Rusdie had dinner with Thomas Pynchon! "He was extremely Pynchon-eque."

***

No events this evening. Enjoy the sun.

Dog of the Week

Dog of the week, it's been good to have you back. We've had quite a dog dry spell at University Book Store, but the last few weeks have brought a new crop of four-legged, furry friends to our store, and we've been happy to share images of them with you.

Up there is a little boxer puppy named Bjorn. She didn't want her photo to be taken at first—preferring instead to sit in the photographer's lap—but when her human picked her up, she managed to pay attention and pose for the camera. Good girl, Bjorn.

Buenos Días, Thursday!

• Malachy McCourt has said that his brother Frank—author of Angela's Ashes—is gravely ill and "not expected to live."

• Aram Saroyan talks about the Beats on the Poetry Foundation's website.

• The film version of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men will be out in September.

• Shop Independent. Be Independent. Be Green, Too.



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Tonight we host local author and playwright Lisa Mantchev. She'll be reading from her theatrically fantastic novel Eyes Like Stars. Join us at our U District store for the event.

Good Morning, Tuesday

Here are some book-related links from the interweb.

• James Wolcott on his problem with the Kindle: You can't see what people are reading. (Which is, in fact, one of Sherman Alexie's problems with the Kindle.)

• Discovered on the NYRB classics blog, here's Jhumpa Lahiri in conversation with the wonderful Mavis Gallant. Get Gallant here.

• Happy Bastille Day, Seattle!

***

Two events tonight. Here in the U District store, we are welcoming Nalo Hopkinson, author of The Salt Roads and Clarion West faculty member.

And at the Northgate branch of the Seattle Public Library, David B. Williams will read from his book Stories in Stone].

Good Morning, Monday!

Here are a few things that caught our eye in the literary sites on the internet.

• Laila Lalami, pioneering lit blogger, had her novel Secret Son chosen as the 2010 Seattle Reads book.

• From the New York Times, this essay about the novel The Ugly American.

• From The Onion: Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended.

• Local author Boyd Morrison goes from self-published on Kindle to book deal, and Galleycat notices.

***

Tonight, University Book Store is selling books for the Colum McCann reading at the Seattle Public Library's Central Branch. The event begins at 7pm. McCann will read from his new novel, Let the Great World Spin.

Of McCann, Peter Carey says: "Colum McCann is a giant amongst us—fearless, huge-hearted, a poet with every living breath."\

Here's a review of the book from The Seattle Times.

Good Afternoon, Friday!

Book-related stories that caught my eye today.

• Oregon indie publisher Tin House turned 10. Happy birthday.

• Hemingway wanted to spy for the KGB? (H/t to Paul Constant at The Stranger.)

• The New York Review of Books Fiction issue includes this fine essay by Michael Chabon.

***

No events tonight. Our staff will rest.

Good Morning, Thursday.

Hey there. Here's a quick tour of the online literary world.

• Mental Floss magazine lists the longest-running novel series for readers who want to spend the Summer (and Fall, and Winter, and Spring, and next Summer, and next Fall, etc.) reading about only one character, group of characters, or setting. (Did you know that including spin-offs there were 709 Mac Bolan books!)

• HBO will be making a television series out of Jeffrey Eugenides novel Middlesex. Also potentially exciting: HBO's collaboration with one of my favorite writers, Jonathan Ames, on the series Bored to Death.

• Nabokov's The Original of Laura will come out in December, but one week before the pub date, an excerpt will appear in Playboy, giving his readers a chance to pull out that "I only read Playboy for the articles" joke.

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Tonight University Book Store welcomes science fiction/thriller writer David J. Williams to the store. He begins at 7pm, and will be reading from his book Burning Skies, which Philip K. Dick award winner Stephen Baxter called "Tom Clancy interfacing with Bruce Sterling."

Dog of the Week

Here's Brody. He's young. I expected him to be a little more energetic—being that he's a puppy and all—but apparently he was tuckered out from all the attention he'd been getting before I came at him with the camera.

Good boy, Brody. Nice posing.

Good Morning, Tuesday!

• Charles D'Ambrosio interviews Nam Le. That's a lot of short story genius, there.

• Slate reprints an article on History's Greatest Pedagogical Animals. (Have you seen the new Smokey the Bear ads? Now he's intimidating the careless with implied threats of violence! Good for Smokey.)

• Check out author Matthew Spektor's website for his upcoming novel That Summertime Sound. It includes an excerpt from the book read by James Franco.

***

Tonight at 7pm, our U District store is hosting Clarion West faculty member Elizabeth Bear. Join us!

Good Morning!

Here's a little tour around the net's literary side.

• Via Bookslut, here's Bill Watterson on Krazy Kat. (Watterson, of course, was the cartoonist behind the beloved and much-missed Calvin and Hobbes.)

• University Book Store favorite Kelly Link won a Locus award for the novella Pretty Monsters. Congratulations, Kelly!

• The Poetry Foundation's Travis Nichols (who recently moved to Chicago from Seattle) eulogizes Michael Jackson and Michael Jackson's haircut.

*

No store readings tonight.Our hard-working Events Staff will have to find some other way of filling their evening. Possibly by entering a creative writing contest of some sort.

Dog of the Week

This is Buck. He's nine months old. And 100 pounds!

He joined our Bellevue staff for their Dog-lover's Open House in February, and has doubled in size since. Doubled.

Good boy, Buck. Keep eating.