ArtSEA: Gifted $300 million in art, Seattle U plans a new museum

While fall is forever touted as the season for curling up with a book, I’m here to promote spring reading as none too shabby. Sunny patio + new book + midweight jacket = perfection. (And less sweaty than summer reading, fall’s salty foil.)

I’m currently ensconced in the compellingly weird world created by Seattle writer Stacey Levine in her new novel, Mice, 1961. Two orphaned sisters — one of them with a strikingly unusual appearance — navigate coming of age in small-town Florida during the Cold War era. Their movements on one fateful day are traced by a shadowy housekeeper who sleeps on the floor behind a “lint-colored” couch. 

This nearly invisible watcher shifts between recounting small details, like a chewed piece of string, and adopting an omniscient voice that tracks the meta-story: “Certain stories fray to a faraway edge that tastes as unreal as saffron: metal crushed with honey,” she notes. Spooky and strange! I like it. 

Levine will be talking with Olympia writer Anne de Marcken — who also has a new novel, It Lasts Forever and then It’s Over, featuring an undead narrator with a crow companion — at Third Place Books Ravenna (March 27 at 7 p.m.).

More local writers reading:

Performer and playwright Susan Lieu will discuss her new memoir, The Manicurist’s Daughter, about her decades-long search for answers after her Vietnamese refugee mother died following a botched tummy-tuck surgery. (Seattle Public Library, March 19 at 7 p.m.)

Poet Jane Wong celebrates a recent Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for her delectably written new memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City. I wrote about this lyrically told story of growing up in her parents’ Chinese restaurant back in May. (Elliott Bay Books, March 15 at 7 p.m.)

And looking ahead to early April: Longtime Seattle nature writer and essayist Brenda Peterson releases her newest book, Wild Chorus: Finding Harmony with Whales, Wolves and Other Animals. Part memoir, part environmental plea, it begins: “I was raised as a wild animal.” (Elliott Bay Books, April 3 at 7 p.m.)