Adrian Tomine started making comics in his teens when he created Optic Nerve. In it, he tells stories about people who tend to be searching for answers to questions they seem to think everyone else already knows. After a few years putting out Optic Nerve on his own, it was picked up by publisher Drawn and Quarterly. Tomine is coming to Seattle to promote his first full-length graphic novel Shortcomings. Seattlest used it as......

We were just about to lean into a nice Sunday morning, working on our NaNoWriMo effort, when we opened the New York Times Web site just to see if any disaster had befallen us overnight that may take precedence over our literary venture. What we saw, buried toward the end of the day's headlines, was this: "Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Is Dead." We gasped, choked, looked around the empty basement of Stumptown......

Although the Nobel Prize in Literature is supposed to be awarded in recognition of a writer's entire oeuvre, it's become commonplace for Nobel-watchers to attribute the award to the Swedish Academy making a political statement. Thus when Orhan Pamuk won in 2006, cynical commentators attributed it primarily to a pair of novels, Snow and The White Castle. The novels explore the interaction between the Christian West and Muslim East and the struggle between Modernity and......

Tonight the Elliott Bay Book Co. hosts a trio of writers touring as the "Akashic All-Stars." Akashic is a small literary press based in New York (specifically, Brooklyn--is anything cool left in Manhattan?). Only ten years old, Akashic is a sign of a promising future for American letters. Like the music industry, publishing is being transformed by technology, allowing for smaller firms run by people with both business smarts and passion for what they......

Last night Seattlest went to Town Hall to hear Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini read from his new novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Hosseini's first novel, The Kite Runner was in many ways a phenomenal achievement and by all accounts, the new book has surpassed even the most hopeful of expectations. Hosseini was well spoken, thought provoking. He not only read from his novel but also spoke about his work with the UNHCR (United Nations High......

This month we subject Pauls Toutonghi’s young adult novel Red Weather to the awesome critical power that is Seattlest. The book has nothing to do with Seattle, but Toutonghi allegedly spent some formative years here and he’s old friends with our most frequent contributor, so what the hell? We’re trying out a new “point/counterpoint” format, with contributors Matt Silvie and James Callan facing off. Matt Silvie: Toutonghi does a good job of capturing the tedious......

This week -- after literally years of telling ourselves we'd go -- we finally made it to one of the Paramount's silent movie showings. Now we're kinda kicking ourselves for the delay. Next Monday is the last in this January's series of German Expressionist films: Asphalt. It may not be long on plot. IMDB sums it up like so: Asphalt is set in Berlin. A well-dressed woman (Betty Amann) steals a precious stone from......

Ever desired to follow in the footsteps of Henry Miller, Anne Rice, or Anonymous? The Richard Hugo House is giving you your chance: Richard Hugo House invites writers age 18 and older to submit manuscripts of fewer than 5,000 words to its erotica writing competition. The theme is "One Foot on the Floor" and the deadline is February 1. The winner will receive a $250 prize, a $50 gift certificate from Babeland and the chance......

In this week's Stranger, Franklin grad Brendan Kiley remembers getting hit on by Allen Ginsberg at a 1994 reading. Here's a fact that not many people could tell you--Dan Wilson's first career home run came on the same night. Seattlest was out in Pioneer Square that night, too. Of course, if you know anything about Seattlest, you know we were at the Mariners game. But we did make it back to the reading in time......

Seattlest has come to borrow from you again. The Douglass-Truth library branch is set to re-open on Saturday, October 14th and it couldn't be soon enough. Despite the fact that we've tried vainly to justify our paltry reading habits this summer/fall by blaming it on silly things like getting married, the fact of the matter is that the remodelling project for our neighborhood branch seriously stunted our library habits. Yes, we're that lazy, but the......

To have been at McCaw Hall Friday night, is to have been truly blessed. It was a night filled with smiles, laughter and bottomless admiration – not only for the performers, but also for the people behind the scenes for whom this night was meant to benefit. It was a night which, at one point, brought a couple tears to our eyes. But we’re sensitive like that. People Talking & Singing it was called,......

Those design-obsessed types over at Coudal Partners have just recently posted Field Tested Books, an online compendium of book reviews by lots of bookish (and blogish) people. Not just your ordinary reviews, these focus on books read in specific places and the impact the locale had on the reader's experience (hence, Coudal likes to refer to them as "experience reviews" instead). Local boy done good, John Moe, has his Raymond Carver college moment in Walla......

Seattlest used to subscribe to The New Yorker. Actually, Seattlest still does subscribe to The New Yorker, but since late September we've barely managed to keep up with the cartoons each week, let alone more substantial content. So we feel a bit guilty that someone else had to tell us that the March 6 issue features "The Bone Game," a story by local author Charles D'Ambrosio. Here's how Publishers Weekly summed up the story: "The......

Octavia Butler died at the age of 58 yesterday after a fall near her home in Lake Forest Park. She was the only science fiction writer ever to recieve a MacArthur Foundation genius award.......

That guy that's usually tapping at his laptop and gazing off into the middle distance at the cafe has suddenly disappeared. He's at home furiously typing his tell-all memoir: "The world knew me as a female refugee from the Phillipines who escaped a life of political oppression, violence, prostitution and drugs but now I must reveal myself as a midwestern white boy who lied about it all to sell a few books. The ironic thing......

Face it, you're getting old. Despite your best efforts, Father Time and Mother Nature are doing a number on your body, mind, and soul. You wake up to achey joints, you're worried about your 401k, and you spend your days working for "The Man" instead of following your dreams. So you go to the gym (or at least say you will) realizing it's a losing battle, read books to stay sharp, and try to......

What with all the tear gas, video crews, and Subcomandante Marcos imitators in Seattle in 1999 for the WTO protests, Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper’s resignation seemed a bit anticlimactic. It was ironic (but not deliciously) that “Chief Moonbeam” oversaw SPD’s flirtation with jackbooted riot-gear finery. Previously, the San Diego transplant had been criticized by–-what’s the word? Neofascists?--for speaking out of school about police brutality and for his cultural inclusiveness. After WTO, he resigned and......

What is the newcomer visitor's impression of our fair city? To get an idealistic, naive, oddly balanced, yet sentimentally contemplative exposition on what and how Seattle impresses the self aware and unrushed foreign visitor, you've got to read the opening section of this piece** in the Atlantic Monthly (June 2005). **Click below "Continue Reading", to get the full text - the Atlantic Monthly only allows reading on their site when the article is old. This......

Literature is rife with portrayals of descents into madness. It's rarer in sports, but the Sacramento Kings' performance in their first-round playoff series with the Sonics is an exception. Coming into the series, the Kings were a trendy upset pick. Few pundits gave the Sonics a chance. But the Kings have crumbled. During a game one comeback that fell short, Cuttino Mobley made an obscene gesture at Sonics fans, resulting in a $15,000 fine.......

Who doesn’t love pornography? Ok, how about the pornography business? You probably don't know that much about it, but Legs McNeil does. Legs McNeil, former editor of Spin magazine and former editor-in-chief of Nerve, gets down and dirty with his newest book The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of The Porn Film Industry. In the past, his focus has primarily been on music, including Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, a......

Seattle Spit is hosted at Seattle's one (1!) lesbian bar and it's billed as a "queer/trans" reading, but don't go see it because of that. Go see it because the people scheduled to read this month are amazing. Bobby Anderson will be reading. Anderson has been published in Ploughshares (which is great), Threepenny Review (also great) and the Seattle Review (not that great), and I'm sure this is going to be fantastic material (not sure......