Charles Aaron and Erik Roldan have put together a three-and-a-half-hour-long playlist of Latin dance songs and club hits “to honor the Orlando victims, who were just looking for a place to dance and feel free that night.”
At a cocktail reception last night, Johnny Temple, the publisher of Akashic Books, announced some of the highlights of this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival. BKBF events will begin taking place on September 12, and will culminate on September 18, which will feature more than three hundred authors—including Joyce Carol Oates, Sherman Alexie, Margaret Atwood, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and Phil Klay—in a variety of panel discussions and reading events. You can find a list of writers who have been confirmed so far here.
Garrison Keillor has announced his retirement from Prairie Home Companion, but he still has plans to work: According to the New York Times, he has “lined up meaty post-Prairie projects, among them columns for the Washington Post, a screenplay, and a book.”
The Financial Times has released the longlists for its Emerging Voices Awards.
Surely eliciting hissing noises from many a Powell’s shopper, Amazon has announced that it will build its third brick-and-mortar bookstore in Portland. An AmazonJobs posting lushly describes its fantasy of the ideal Assistant Store Manager: “You are Right a Lot when it comes to reading customers and don’t use a one-size-fits-all approach to creating a great customer experience. You warmly welcome anyone who comes into the store and then enjoy using your judgment to adapt to the needs of each individual customer. … Customers are drawn to you because you are approachable, authentic, humble, kind, pleasant and confident. You don’t assume anything about the customer’s knowledge on products; rather, you ask great questions to better gauge what the customer wants. You make book recommendations that surprise and delight the customer, and can demonstrate how to use our devices in a simple and accessible way.”
Dissent editor David Marcus and Shellie Sclan have put together Modernism in the Streets, a new collection of writings by the late, legendary New York intellectual Marshall Berman, whose books included All That is Solid Melts into Air and Adventures in Marxism. The new collection will be released by Verso in November.