Are you up for the job of leading one of Tucson's most wonderful feminist and literary sanctuaries? Antigone Books (411 N. 4th Ave.) is up for grabs.

Here's the email Antigone's subscribers received last night, in its entirety:  

The two of us have owned Antigone Books for more than 25 years, happy to
be part of Antigone's long (43 year) history. It's been an absolutely fabulous time, surrounded as we've been by great staff, great customers, wonderful books and assorted miscellany.

It's getting to be time for us to pass the baton! Hard as it is even for us to believe, we are ready to begin a careful search for a new owner or owners
who will be a great match for the store. Might that person be you or someone you know?

There's no rush on this process. We'll be continuing with business as usual at
the store, meanwhile taking our time to look for the perfect person or persons.

It's National Library Card Month! The Pima County Public Library is teaming up with the American Library Association to ensure that everyone in the community gets their hands on a library card. The best part about the library is that it's free, but you have to have a library card. If you are on the fence about getting a card, the county library has recruited the help of the Peanuts characters like Snoopy to help convince you. 

To learn more about how you can get a library card to one of the 27 libraries in the county visit: www.library.pima.gov

If you're not sure what to use your new library card for, check out book recommendations from Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty, Lucy and Schroeder. 

It's a story of romance and heartbreak and it's definitely not one that any of us learned in high school. Mark Beauregard's latest novel The Whale: A Love Story tells the romantic story of a love that could never be in the late 1800's between Herman Melville, the author of the American classic Moby Dick and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the acclaimed author of The Scarlett Letter.

Since his book hit the shelves, Beauregard has toured across the country promoting his work in New England and states in the southwest. Now, he's back home in Tucson and will be at Antigone Books (411 N. 4th Ave.) on Friday, Sept. 2 at 7 p.m. to talk about his new story and the complications of writing on historical figures.    

Beauregard didn't actually intend to write The Whale, rather he said he was inspired to create the story after he discovered a documented friendship between Melville and Hawthorne during his research for a different novel, which he later abandoned. After further research, he found letters that suggested the acclaimed writers' friendship was something more, which gave him the illuminating idea to write the love story.

"If you think of Moby Dick as being a love letter, in addition to it being a confrontation to the frontier or however else you want to think about it, it completely changes the way we look at literature," he said.  

Author Erica Westly will be having a book reading for her new book Fastpitch: The Untold History of Softball and the Women who Made the Game, this Saturday. 
Fastpitch features an interesting mix of personal stories from eclectic characters, such as former UA player Jennie Finch. 

Detailing the vibrant 129-year history the book shares the origins of a sport played by thousands across the country. 

Westly shatters the idea that softball is a stereotypical "girl's sport" by putting a spotlight on the several male athletes who played in the early years of creation. 

The book share's the unknown history of softball from the perspectives of influential players who experienced the sport's key moments.

Sound interesting? Head over to Antigone Books (411 N. Fourth Ave.), on Saturday, June 18 from 2 to 4 p.m. to meet the author, Erica Westly.

For more information visit antigonebooks.com or call 792-3715. 

A new biography on rock drummer Keith Moon compiled by Ian Snowball is set to be released on June 13.

The name of the book, Keith Moon: There Is No Substitute, pays homage to Moon's unique role in the rock band The Who by referencing one of their popular songs “Substitute.” Moon is arguably one of the greatest rock drummers of all time.

As an early rocker Moon didn’t just help define the rock genre, but also the stereotypical rock and roll lifestyle. Moon’s crazy antics both on and off stage earned him the nickname Moon the Loon. Ultimately his sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle lead him to an early grave, overdosing on September 7, 1978. Moon’s death came less than a month after the release of one of the Who’s most popular album’s Who Are You.

For some extremely lucky folks, summer means time off. Spend some of that time off with your brain on, reading books by local authors. 

I'm linking to Amazon order pages for ease but don't let that stop you from picking these books up from your favorite indie bookstore instead. 

Enjoyed last week's cover story? Author Amy Silverman will be at Antigone Books this Friday, May 20 at 7 p.m.

A short excerpt from Silverman's book:

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of walking through the sliding doors of Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Phoenix, feeling a whoosh as the hot outside air mixed with the icy air conditioning, ushering me inside a grown-up, important place. I loved the gift shop at Scottsdale Memorial Hospital, particularly the flower arrangements you could order that looked like a clown or a shaggy white dog. I didn't know how they did that, but I knew that if I was ever in the hospital (I never was, not till I had babies), that's what I wanted. Years later, as an adult, I was poking around that same gift shop and noticed something in the back of the refrigerator case. A clown flower arrangement! It didn't look as good as I remembered, just a carnation in a cheap vase, decorated with googly eyes and pipe cleaners. But that wave of nostalgia was a huge rush.

Here in the hospital, at the bedside of an elderly grandparent or great aunt, I'd see cousins, aunts, and uncles I hadn't seen in months (or longer), tape my homemade card on the wall, and head down with other visiting family members for what I considered to be an exotic meal in the cafeteria. Even my father, not the most sentimental of souls, often showed up for visiting hours, which tended to involve minor injuries and illnesses. Nothing too serious (I was not brought along on those visits, anyway), and as far as I know, no one in our family ever had a baby with any kind of significant health issue.

Until Sophie.

Over at Salon, Tucson novelist Lydia Millet offers a modest proposal about giving up on literary fiction and jumping into writing porn:

So we’ve got the unmoving words on the page. That’s the first black mark against us. Second: do we get to the point? How soon? Here’s the answer: no. We don’t get to the point, not for 200 pages at least. Sometimes 3,600, if we’re Knausgaard. At writing workshops they taught us to show not tell — well, showing takes time. We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don’t get to the point, and sometimes when we do our readers don’t notice, in fact. It’s so couched in nuance it can fly right over a person’s head. What was that you said? I couldn’t quite make it out.

Third, sound bites. We don’t have them. No pull quotes. No celebrity names. Few if any pictures. The list of what we don’t have is a long one. Our tools for captivation are few, and often ungainly.

Which is why I’ve settled on porn, come to a decision that my next book after this one will be devoted to relentless, often hardcore pornography. I can’t give you an exact preview here on the pages of Salon, of course: this is a decent website. Plus that would be a spoiler.

All joking aside: Millet's new novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, continues to draw rave reviews. At Slate, Laura Miller writes:

May 1st, 2016 from Zona Politics with Jim Nintzel on Vimeo.

On this week's episode of Zona Politics with Jim Nintzel: UA College of Science Dean Joaquin Ruiz stops by to talk what's going on at the Biosphere—including the One Young World conference, the Landscape Evolution Observatory and some plans for farming—as the giant terrarium's 25th anniversary approaches. He also fills us in on some of the latest news with the Lunar and Planetary Lab's space program. Then Phoenix New Times managing editor Amy Silverman joins us to discuss her new book, My Heart Can't Even Believe It, about how having a daughter with Down syndrome changed her family's life. And then Valerie Trouet of the UA Tree Ring Lab talks about some of her work, including a new study that used tree rings and shipwrecks to recreate a Caribbean hurricane record that dates back centuries.

You can catch the show at 8 a.m. Sunday mornings on the CW Tucson, Channel 8 on Cox and Comcast and Channel 58 on DirecTV, Dish and broadcast. You can also hear it Sunday afternoons at 5 p.m. on KXCI Community Radio, 91.3 FM. Or you can watch it online here.

Here's a rush transcript of the show:

(Nintzel) Hello, everyone. I'm Tucson Weekly senior writer Jim Nintzel, your host for Zona Politics. Today We're going to detour away from politics to talk about science and books. We begin with our friend, Joaquin Ruiz, the dean of the U of A College of Science. Dean Ruiz, welcome to Zona Politics.

(Ruiz) Always a pleasure to be here.

(Nintzel) So the Biosphere is celebrating its 25th Anniversary. You have a big event coming up there this month One Young World Environmental Summit. What's that all about?

(Ruiz) Well, this organization called One Young World specializes in having meetings around the world, in which 18-to-30-year-old leaders meet and discuss whatever the topic may be. The last one was in Thailand. And now they've decided that they want to focus on the environment, specifically a summit on the environment. They're using the Biosphere as the venue, so it's beautiful. We expect to have at least 300 people, maybe even more. Again, leaders. They're either from Apple or Caterpillar or other companies and people from other countries and it will be a day and a half of meetings, conferences. We have inspirational people that are going to come and talk, and to me, the most important thing about the whole meeting is, one, allowing folks from around the world to come and see the Biosphere, and coming to see Tucson and what the UA has to offer with respect to the environment.

(Nintzel) And you have had the Biosphere, now, in the control of the College of Science for almost ten years, and, how's it going out there?

The New York Times gives high marks to Tucson author Lydia Millet's new novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven. Laura Lippman's review begins:

It’s not bragging if it’s fact: Few ­novels surprise me. This is not because I’m a genre writer, but because I’m a genre reader, sampling broadly — crime, horror, romance, speculative, dystopian and, more often than not, literary fiction. (Yes, honey, you’re a genre too.) When I teach creative writing, I ask my students to experiment with their television remote controls. Mute the sound and scan the channels, landing on a film or television show heretofore unknown to you. ­Normally, it takes only seconds to identify, by shot composition alone, whether we are watching a comedy or a drama, a soap opera or a police procedural. We have intuited each world’s rules even if we’ve never articulated them.

But Lydia Millet’s “Sweet Lamb of Heaven” confounded me, delightfully so. After serving as a judge for the 2015 National Book Awards’ fiction category, I have little patience with literary novels that claim to have the propulsive momentum of a thriller, yet Millet pulls it off. About 80 pages in, I scrawled on the title page: I don’t know where I’m going. Then, a few pages later: How do we leave ourselves behind when we read? The main character’s well-earned paranoia infected me; I felt as if Millet had mined my metadata: mom, concerned citizen, conspiracy skeptic, overwhelmed social media user. But I also sensed that Millet was asking me to transcend my own narrow interests, to open my mind to the possibility of a world I had not — possibly could not — imagine.

Read the whole review here.