Angela Jane Fountas is a writer of both short fiction and non-fiction. She has a story, titled "Queendom," online at Pindelyboz. Here's the opening:

A bomb drops on Myrtle, Iowa. It was only a matter of time. Mothers make do with what's left in their cupboards; they milk cows and collect eggs. Sorghum fields go to ruin and root cellars overflow. Winter is imminent.

"We won't go hungry," Frances says. Her father is gone. All the men are gone. They are in the sky and on the ground. Some have fallen already.

"Quiet, hush," her mother says.

It's a good, disturbing story.

And Ed Skoog, whose name I will say aloud many, many times over the next two years, is the other writer in residence. He's a poet who has lived in Montana, California, and New Orleans. His lovely poem, Bela, is here. Here's a stanza from that poem:

Several years later, to the publicity dept.

at Imperial Studio, in answer to a questionnaire,

he became Bela Lugosi, twenty-eight,

six-one and blue eyed as a Wichita quarterback.

High spots of life? “It is no one’s business.”

He was unwilling to share his beauty secrets.

Congratulations to Fountas and Ed Skoog. These are both great choices. There will be an event to celebrate their arrival in October, and I can't wait to see what they produce, along with the Hugo House's Belltown writers in residence, Storme Webber and Cienna Madrid. It should be an exciting couple of years for the Hugo House.

An open mic and two readings tonight.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, there's a tribute to Leadbelly, with music, to celebrate the release of a new book called Leadbelly: A Life in Pictures. I think this sounds like a good time, but maybe it's just me; I really like Leadbelly, but I'm pretty much in favor of any blues music at all, as long as there are no goddamned electric guitars involved.

And up at Third Place Books, Kate Veitch reads from Without a Backwards Glance, which is apparently already a bestseller in Germany. It's about a mother's secrets threatening to destroy a family and all that stuff. Booklist says that Veitch is "'Similar to Anne Tyler in her wry affection for her characters and to Anita Shreve in her aptitude for crafting compulsively readable plotlines," which ought to tell you the market the publishers are going for here. I'm willing to bet if you like either of those two authors, you'll like this reading.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

can you help me get rid of this? i'm an engineer and don't know many readers. thanks.

n+1 issue six free to a good home (downtown/cap hill)

I ordered some back issues and they threw in a copy of number six, which I already own. Check out http://www.nplusonemag.com for info.

It's a pretty good issue of a pretty good magazine. Someone should snag it.

In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA) published an 85-page monograph called "Military Advantage in History". Unusual for an office that is headed by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon's "futurist in chief," the study looks back to the past—way back. It examines four empires, or "pivotal hegemonic powers in history," to draw lessons about how the United States "should think about maintaining military advantage in the 21st century." Though unclassified, the study was held close to the vest; a stamp on the cover limits its dissemination without permission. Mother Jones obtained it only through a Freedom of Information Act request. Though the report is far from revelatory, it provides a window into a mindset that unselfconsciously envisions the United States as the successor to some of history's most powerful empires.

"The Roman model suggests that it is possible for the United States to maintain its military advantage for centuries if it remains capable of transforming its forces before an opponent can develop counter-capabilities. Transformation coupled with strong strategic institutions is a powerful combination for an adversary to overcome."

Who you think you are (and how you think you are who you are) has always to do with where you imagine yourself to come from.

Three readings and an open mic tonight.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, J. Edward Chamberlain, who is a breeder of horses, reads from his book about the horse in history. The book is titled Horse. Even if you're not into horses, this looks like the best reading of the night, but that's not an endorsement.

First, at the University Book Store, Eldon Thompson reads from The Divine Talisman: Book Three of the Legend of Asahiel. I understand that it's bad form to judge a book by its title, but you could not drag me to this reading, although I would attend it on a bet.

Third Place Books has a reading that you could not pay me to attend. Vaishali, who is a "part stand-up comic and part spiritual teacher who makes Eastern mysticism accessible to Western minds," will read from YOU ARE WHAT YOU LOVE®. Here is what Vaishali's website says:

“Friends don't let friends go into the light . . . without a spiritual road map to enlightenment.” – Vaishali

Who do you know who can talk about the spirituality of Homer Simpson, Jimi Hendrix, James Dean, or Cheech and Chong with as much aplomb as she can talk about the world’s great mystical traditions or major religions?

Join Vaishali, the author of You Are What You Love®, as she provides her uniquely Vaishali perspective to the big questions in life: Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “What is my purpose?”

Oh my God.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

Chekhov's Mistress, which is a smart, funny litblog, is calling for a boycott of Amazon.com:

Dennis Loy Johnson, founder of Melville House Publishing first explained to me about the difficulties of dealing with the Amazonians several years ago, but it seems their dirty dealings never end. According to The Bookseller.com Amazon is fighting with Hachette Livre to extract more discounts from the publisher and has REMOVED THE BUY BUTTON from their titles on the site (this is, I understand, on the UK Website). Can you imagine walking into your favorite bookstore, picking up a title and heading to the cash register and being told “No. We won’t sell you that book. The publisher hasn’t given us a big enough discount.” I would walk out and never come back.

The book by Sherry Jones is a work of historical fiction based on the life of Aisha, one of the wives of the prophet Mohammed. Random House paid a $100k advance for the work but when UT Professor Denise Spellberg read an ARC, she denounced the book as a “very ugly, stupid piece of work” (note to authors: Don’t ask her for a cover quote. Ever.) and said, “I don’t have a problem with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate misinterpretation of history. You can’t play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography.”

Wait, wait, before you pound your head on your desk, there’s more. Ms. Spellberg alerted Shahed Amunullah, a guest lecturer and editor of altmuslim.com, who spread the word to a listserv of Muslim graduate students. From there that email appeared the website “Hussaini Youth,” and within three hours, a person published “a seven-point strategy to ensure ‘the writer withdraws this book from the stores and apologise all the muslims across the world.’”

I wonder if The Satanic Verses would be published by any major New York publisher in this day and age? Somehow, I doubt it.

(Thanks to Slog tipper Sweeney.)

A brilliiant new translation of the great writer's least Kafkaesque novel, based on a German-language text that was produced by a team of international scholars and that is more faithful to Kafka's original manuscript than anything we have had before.

So obviously we have to demarcate when Kafka is being Kafkaesque, because he's also produced work that's not very Kafkaesque at all. Maybe they consider Amerika to be Capraesque, instead?

Even today, the pornography would be "on the top shelf", Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. "These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action... It's quite unpleasant."

"Academics have pretended it did not exist," Dr Hawes said. “The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol."

I'm more surprised that Dr. Hawes equates "girl-on-girl action" with bestiality porn. I wonder what his porn collection looks like? Also amusing: the article refers to Kafka as the "literary Kafkaesque genius." Kafka is, indeed, if nothing else, Kafkaesque.

The librarian responded to her e-mail with a very long, very thoughtful e-mail that he then posted to his blog. I think that everyone who's interested in fighting book censorship should read this letter. It's exactly the way to confront people like this.

You feel that a book about gay marriage is inappropriate for young children. But another book in our collection, “Daddy's Roommate,” was requested by a mother whose husband left her, and their young son, for another man. She was looking for a way to begin talking about this with son. Another book, “Alfie's Home,” was purchased at the request of another mother looking for a way to talk about the suspected homosexuality of her young son from a Christian perspective. There are gay parents in Douglas County, right now, who also pay taxes, and also look for materials to support their views. We don't have very many books on this topic, but we do have a handful.

In short, most of the books we have are designed not to interfere with parents' notions of how to raise their children, but to support them. But not every parent is looking for the same thing.

Seriously. Go read it.

(And a big thank you to Slog tipper Davida, who will hopefully still find time to Slog tip from Librarian School in New York City this fall.)

"Rock out like you just got a book published." There's something in the voice of poetry slam poets—a kind of self-indulgent self-satisfaction—that just makes me want to run away screaming. The above three poems haven't changed that opinion at all, especially the third one, which is painful.

There's also a Young Writer's Workshop Reading down at the Elliott Bay Book Company, in which young writers read the work they've produced in their summer workshops. If I had to pick, I would definitely choose this over the Poetry Slam, because I've worked in a bookstore during a youth reading and it was actually a lot of fun; the kids were nervous and everybody was very supportive.

Full readings calendar here.

One such story is The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Barry Graham, which, obviously, pilfered its title from a short story collection by Stranger Genius Sherman Alexie. It's a fun little story, with appearances by Alexie and one or two other surprising celebrities.

Twenty years ago last weekend, Raymond Carver died of cancer at age 50. The Telegraph writes about his influence, which they determine is still growing.

Lish once located Carver's "value" in his "sense of a particular bleakness". Most of his editing seems to have been an attempt to heighten this sense, by cutting introspection, description and anything he felt tended towards the sentimental or epiphanic.

Lish added as well as subtracted - paragraph breaks between lines of dialogue, enigmatic titles and the limited, repetitive vocabulary of what became known as "K-Mart Realism".

I sure do like Raymond Carver a whole lot.

(Via Bookninja.)

_{Holy shit, can you believe it? I wrote a fucking book!}

And also, I love Book Soup Blog's tagline:

"If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!" - John Waters"

Tao admits that he hopes publicity generated by his innovative money-raising strategy will itself boost sales of the book, but he also says that being publicly owned – at least in a professional sense - would boost his motivation.

“People who buy shares will actually help me focus more on the novel,” he wrote on his blog.

(Thanks to Slog tipper Justin.)