Seattle's Antidote to the Kindle

I recently wrote a piece for the Huffington Post talking about why I felt independent presses should accessorize more and how this could help to subsidize their publishing efforts. I mentioned a couple of presses that I felt did a good job of this, carelessly omitting one of my favorite indies, our good friends at Chin Music (and they probably have the coolest shirts of all!). Their shirts are perfectly in line with my belief that they are the best designed press making books today.

While I'm on the topic, I may as well recommend a couple of their books:

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, is a moving depiction of Katrina, made all the more soul-stirring because of the knee-jerk emotive pull evident in the writing (it was written, edited, and produced within the first few months following the catastrophe).

Goodbye Madame Butterfly is my favorite book they've published. Written by Sumie Kawakami, the book delves into the sex lives, marriages, and relationships of modern Japanese women. Most interesting to me, is the story of the youngest female interviewee, whose view of marriage and sex is the most traditional of all, perhaps indicating the cyclical nature of generational trends.

Their newest book is Big in Japan, by M. Thomas Gammarino, which I haven't yet read. Gammarino will be reading at KGB Bar in NYC on December 21 with our own Xiaoda Xiao.

Brooklyn Book Festival

We're getting amped up for the Brooklyn Book Festival this weekend, at Brooklyn Borough Hall. We'll be in booth #8, which is somewhere in the thick of it, arm's-length from the Small Beer (#6) and the Coffee House (#5) tables.

We're also pretty excited to have a handful of titles to display from our pals at Chin Music Press and Featherproof Books. Both are killer presses with excellent titles, so it should be nice to have us all under one . . . canopy.

You'll be able to check out some Two Dollar Radio titles at future fair, festivals, or book-related happenings that Chin Music or Featherproof are at, including Portland's Wordstock, Seattle's new book fair, and AWP.

(Speaking of awesome-ness, we saw the guy with the fun tattoo at a posh hotel/bar in Chelsea where we were killing time before our distributor's open bar during sales conference. I forget the name of the place, but I'll remember that tattoo anywhere. I did a Google image search for "fun" and his pic showed up.)