Via Annabelle Udo of AsianWeek comes that piece on the nurturing of the Filipino diaspora —

The intersection of Sixth and Mission streets straddles San Francisco’s battle with time and architecture. To the east, a mayhem of bars and grills, the Sony Metreon and the Westfield Mall.

To the west, a mish-mash of parking lots, old brick buildings and empty metered-parking spaces.
Amidst this transitioning neighborhood is Arkipelago Books, a literary diamond in the dust, at home in an area where the city’s first Filipino immigrants resided in the early 1900s.

Via Liz Miller of Bookslut:

The reason I didn't keep a diary in high school was because I didn't have much interest in writing what other people weren't going to read. My portentous teen angst still found purchase, though, mostly in long letters to friends, melodramatic personal essays for class, and the occasional spurt of Really Bad Poetry. Along the way, writing became my way of attempting to understand the world and what I was supposed to do in it. Writing was necessary, then, because I was a teenager, and I had no fucking clue.

Steve Erickson's genre-defying fiction can be as enthralling and difficult as his city—via Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer.

It was only a day or two into the worst of the Southern California fires, and novelist Steve Erickson had just packed the car up so his family could flee their Topanga Canyon house.

They ended up staying put, watching from home the flames that could have been raging from a page of one of his novels. In Erickson's L.A., an unexplained sandstorm, the sudden emergence of an enormous lake in the center of the city and other unannounced breaches of time and space occur almost casually.

From Vishal Khanna, a piece special to Go Triad:

Clear your palette of all expectations.  Get rid of all clichés of what you believe a writer's life should be.  Imagine instead a suburban ranch home just outside of Greensboro's New Irving Park. It's 5:30 in the morning and in a tiny office just behind the kitchen sits Quinn Dalton, her face lit only by the light from a laptop screen. The smell of coffee permeates the room and Dalton types away, stealing time before her two girls, Avery and Alia, crusty-eyed and fresh from dream time, search for mini-bagels and warm embraces from their mother's arms.

From Anne Trubek of Wired:

A small press, growing? How could it be?

Against market trends, Dzanc Books is a small publisher poised to succeed, hiring staff and expanding quickly. And that may be because it sprouted from a blog rather than a traditional printing press, and it is certainly web-savvy.

Since its launch in 2006, Dzanc Books has acquired other presses, signed numerous authors, launched an education program and started an award -- the Dzanc Prize -- to encourage writers to undertake community literacy projects.

Dzanc is growing at a time when there are few independent publishers left, and the remaining ones were hit hard by the recent bankruptcy of Advanced Marketing Services, a major distributor.

"We do not intend to fall into the potholes that sent the hubcaps of our predecessors flying," says co-founder Steve Gillis. "We are not caught in the old template of how publishing has been done."