Dan Webster

This is a week for poetry happenings in Spokane. On Tuesday, the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour will hit town. The 50-city tour, sponsored by the Seattle-based publisher, stops at Auntie's Bookstore at 7:30 p.m. with readers Joshua Beckman, Anthony McCann, Katy Lederer, Catherine Wing, Erin Belieu and Melanie Noel.

Sometimes you have to lie to tell the truth. That's something that every writer of fiction knows. Especially writers of fiction that tackles history. Or politics.

The art of the spoken word has been an essential part of life since humans began emanating grunts with rhythm and rhyme. From Tupac Shakur to Billy Collins, Rita Dove to Robert Wrigley, poets portray this thing we call existence and all its complex striations with an authenticity that has nothing to do with embedded reporters, political campaigns or TV reality shows.

This is usually a slow time for authors shuffling through Spokane. But a couple who will read from their respective works on Wednesday at Auntie's Bookstore just might prove interesting.

Page 84 is what grabbed me about the oversize paperback book "Rain Check: Baseball in the Pacific Northwest" (Society for American Baseball Research, 128 pages, $14.95). It shows Tommy Davis, who would go on to fame as a Los Angeles Dodger, in full stretch, a couple of feet above the ground, looking into the camera while snaring – seemingly – a ball hit to the wall.

There are words that, whether spoken or written, connote much more than their basic meaning. Microsoft, for example.

Jess Walter's new novel is getting a lot of attention. As it should. For one thing, the Spokane author's previous book, "Citizen Vince," won the 2006 Edgar Award for best mystery novel.

There's a lot of talk being thrown about these days equating dissent with treason. Much of it, of course, is put out by talking-head commentators who have something to sell – a book, or a radio or television program. Opposing that point of view is a book that just crossed my desk. "Dissent in America: The Voices That Shaped a Nation" (Pearson Longman, 788 pages, $35), by Ralph F. Young, a senior lecturer in Temple University's department of history, includes writings from some of the most distinguished names in American history.

Seems like all little girls go through a horse phase. To a certain extent, Paula Morin is still living hers. Only she's turned her interest into a book, "Honest Horses: Wild Horses in the Great Basin" (University of Nevada Press, 392 pages, $24.95 paper), from which she will read at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Auntie's Bookstore.

Pamela Aidan not only writes about the world of Jane Austen, she lives it. Aidan, a resident of Coeur d'Alene for the last three years, is internationally famous for the novels she has written from the perspective of Fitzwilliam Darcy, the romantic lead of Jane Austen's 1813 novel "Pride and Prejudice."

We all have our fantasies about what a novelist's life is like. Here is how former Arizona resident Linda Lael Miller recently described her "typical day" in her writing life:

First novels don't tend to win awards. But Kathleen Alcalá's did. "Spirits of the Ordinary" won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award in 1998. And that is one of the reasons why we've chosen the Seattle-based author's book as the July read for The Spokesman-Review Book Club.

Publishing can break your heart. "Legitimate" publishing, that is. Ask any writer you know and you're likely to hear stories about agents and editors and other aspects of the New York-based book business so horrible that you'll end up reaching for Zoloft.

I received a call from the grammar police the other day. Those are the people who pick and poke through the words that we writers print for public consumption, often catching us making the silliest of mistakes in grammar, vocabulary and/or punctuation. Sometimes, though, they are wrong.

Not to be left out, Susan Creed of the Spokane Public Library wants to add her own summer-reading recommendations. Creed, a reference librarian at the library's downtown branch, was responding to the list of summer reads that I wrote about on May 28. Here are her suggestions:

Doing book publicity is a delicate art – of sorts. Take Mark Fuhrman's new book, "A Simple Act of Murder: November 22, 1963" (HarperCollins, 240 pages, $25.95), from which he will read at Auntie's Bookstore on Monday.

When you look at the specifics of Norman Maclean's life, not much indicates that he had what it takes to write the piece of poetry we know as "A River Runs Through It." Career academics don't typically retire to write masterpieces.

If you're reading the rest of the Today section, you'll eventually stumble over a story about recommended summer vacation reads. One of the responses that I received was from the staff at the Whitman County Library in Colfax.

Defunct Books is doing its best to promote book talk. The downtown bookstore, which is at 123 S. Wall St., has created a Web site that provides readers, as owner Greg Delzer says, an "online location for discussing books and book-related issues."

It's hard to believe that "Howl" is more than half a century old. But it's true. Allen Ginsberg first read his poetic scream of countercultural outrage publicly at San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore on Oct. 6, 1955.

Marilynne Robinson is out to prove Thomas Wolfe wrong. Wolfe wrote a novel titled "You Can't Go Home Again," but that's exactly what Robinson will be doing next Sunday.