Alright, alright, Internet, maybe you're not so bad after all! 

"Yesterday [4/15] selections from the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature at the Library of Congress became available to stream online for the first time — the launch of a project digitizing some of their 2,000 recordings from the past 75 years of literature. “I think that reading poetry and prose on the page is important, but there’s nothing that can replace listening to literature read aloud, especially when it is read by the creator of the work,” Catalina Gomez, project manager for the process of putting the archive online, told Hyperallergic."

A bit like the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's massive collection of animal calls . . . but, well, literature. Okay, fine, Internet! You're doing good work. 

Chances are that if you've been in the Oakland store the past year you've either heard or read Brad commenting on John Keene's story/novella collection, Counternarratives. It's taken some time, hemming & hawing, now well into May, but he's finally decided to put it in writing: "This book is the best work of fiction I read in 2015." 

This does not come as much of a surprise, given what he had to say about it in his review for The Quarterly Conversation:

"Counternarratives, in short, is no simple tableau of triumphalism. It is a call to arms of sorts, perfectly in tune with the “Black Lives Matters” declaration we see playing out daily in our cities. But it is also one that is conspicuously absent the attendant chant heard recently in Cleveland, which echoed Kendrick Lamar’s lyric, “We gonna be alright.” Keene, it seems, sees no reason to be so confident that this is so. Queering the script, defying the imperative to be silent, however, does not require confidence or a vision of what progress means. It is, rather, in all its uncertainty and risk, the most basic stuff of—the very matter of—life. It is also the crowning achievement of one of the year’s very best books."

Keene is doing something very special indeed with the short story, and his work (now out in paperback!) is not to be missed. (Note: he will also be at this year's Oakland Book Festival on May 22nd, where we'll be selling books, chatting about books, petting dogs, and generally making small talk. Come by!) 

The first meeting of DIESEL, A Bookstore in Brentwood’s Mystery Book Club will take place on Friday, June 3rd, at 7 pm in the south courtyard of the Brentwood Country Mart. We’re going to be discussing Jessica Knoll’s Luckiest Girl Alive.

The group is free and meets on the first Friday of every month. RSVPs are requested so we have an idea of how many people to expect. If you have any questions, feel free to stop by and ask, call the store at 310-576-9960, e-mail brentwood@dieselbookstore.com or tweet at @dieselbrentwood.

Luckiest Girl Alive is both a national bestseller and a top choice of Diesel customers. It’s a thriller with a protagonist who at first seems spoiled and unhappy with her aspirational life. Gradually, the reader learns about the trauma that has caused her to act the way she does. Reese Witherspoon, who is co-producing the upcoming movie adaptation, described the book as “required summer reading for adults.”

The group is hosted by Diesel Brentwood bookseller and social media editor Alex Melnick. Alex is a veteran bookseller, a recovering computer programmer, and a Santa Monica native. You can read about some of his favorite books here. Feel free to e-mail him with book club questions and suggestions at alex@dieselbookstore.com or tweet at @aemelnick.

P.S. At each meeting, we will decide on the book for a later month. Come prepared with suggestions!

Every day is a good day to listen to James Baldwin read. 

Note: Oakland's Queer Person of Color Book Group will be discussing this very book on Monday, March 28th at 7pm. The group, like all our groups & readings, is open to the public. Hope to see you there, East Bay!

There is a movement afoot these days to highlight the broader civic effects of Amazon’s ever-growing market-share in the sale of physical books. Short version: it’s not just you neighborhood bookstore that’s impacted by monopolistic activity (Paul Krugman’s depiction, not our “biased” one), but the economic stability of your community as a whole.

From a recent nation-wide study, “Amazon and Empty Storefronts”:

ESSENTIAL NATIONAL FINDINGS
​
In 2014, Amazon sold $44.1 billion worth of retail goods nationwide, all while avoiding $625 million in state and local sales taxes.

That is the equivalent of 30,000 retail storefronts, 107 million square feet of commercial space, which might have paid $420 million in property taxes.

A total of more than $1 billion in revenue lost to state and local governments, $8.48 for every household in America.

Amazon also operated 65 million square feet of distribution space, employing roughly 30,000 full-time workers and 104,000 part-time and seasonal workers.

Even counting all the jobs in Amazon distribution centers, Amazon sales produced a net loss of 135,973 retail jobs.

It’s sobering stuff. And we post it not merely to bang the war-drum kettle, but to thank you, our friends and neighbors, for doing your part to resist the deadening of our local streets and workplaces. 

A small leather ball stuffed with the hair of a dead queen is batted back and forth by two of Europe's most innovative artists. They're hung over, Caravaggio probably still drunk; Quevedo, the Spanish poet, seeks victory to maintain his reputation in the eyes of his royal confidante. Across the world, Hernán Cortés, with the help of his indigenous translator, lover and advisor Malinalli, is bringing about a political and religious revolution. Meanwhile, popes and bankers vie for control of land, art and artifacts, their machinations and desires bringing forth a newly vicious historical era. "Never were the connections among politics, money, art, and semen so tight or so murky," Enrigue writes. "Or so unashamedly happy, tolerant, and fluid."

Have I gone on & on about this book enough yet? Maybe I should let the LA Times do the work this time? After that, it’s you’re turn: Sudden Death hits shelves on Tuesday, February 9.

We at Diesel are still mourning the passing of one of our poetry heroes, C.D. Wright. Earlier this week The Paris Review posted Wright's eulogic poem Our Dust and we found it so stirring that we wanted to share.

Our Dust

I am your ancestor. You know next-to-nothing
about me.
There is no reason for you to imagine
the rooms I occupied or my heavy hair.
Not the faint vinegar smell of me. Or
the rubbed damp
of Forrest and I coupling on the landing
en route to our detached day.

You didn’t know my weariness, error, incapacity,
I was the poet
of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch
phone books, of failed
roadside zoos. The poet of yard eggs and
sharpening shops,
jobs at the weapons plant and the Maybelline
factory on the penitentiary road.

A poet of spiderwort and jacks-in-the-pulpit,
hollyhocks against the tool shed.
An unsmiling dark blond.
The one with the trowel in her handbag.
I dug up protected and private things.
That sort, I was.
My graves went undecorated and my churches
abandoned. This wasn’t planned, but practice.

I was the poet of short-tailed cats and yellow
line paint.
Of satellite dishes and Peterbilt trucks. Red Man
Chewing Tobacco, Black Cat Fireworks, Triple Hut
Creme Soda. Also of dirt dobbers, nightcrawlers,
martin houses, honey, and whetstones
from the Novaculite Uplift. What remained
of The Uplift.

I had registered dogs 4 sale; rocks, dung,
and straw.
I was a poet of hummingbird hives along with
redhead stepbrothers.

The poet of good walking shoes—a necessity
in vernacular parts—and push mowers.
The rumor that I was once seen sleeping
in a refrigerator box is false (he was a brother
who hated me).
Nor was I the one lunching at the Governor’s
mansion.

I didn’t work off a grid. Or prime the surface
if I could get off without it. I made
simple music
out of sticks and string. On side B of me,
experimental guitar, night repairs and suppers
such as this.
You could count on me to make a bad situation
worse like putting liquid make-up over
a passion mark.

I never raised your rent. Or anyone else’s by God.
Never said I loved you. The future gave me chills.
I used the medium to say: Arise arise and
come together.
Free your children. Come on everybody. Let’s start
with Baltimore.

We honor the radical King legacy today. Find your mountaintop today . . .

It shouldn't surprise us David Bowie was also a superb reader.

It also wouldn't surprise (or upset!) us if at least a few of these become bestsellers once again.