“When most Americans know the name of the Secretary of Treasury, that can’t be good.” San Francisco political satirist Will Durst has been churning out these sage observations for years, and now he has a new book to add to the resume: The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing: Common Sense Rantings from a Raging Moderate. In between a packed election-year schedule, Durst manages to squeeze in two Litquake appearances, the first for opening night with Porchlight Storytelling on October 3, and then the Progressive Reading Series on October 8.

A recent study by Swedish book publishers has discovered that 85 percent of the best-selling books in Sweden are available for free downloading from websites. Rather than outrage, Brazilian writer Paul Coelho acknowledges it’s a new world we live in, and is actually giving his own books away for free. Coelho believes that if people are allowed to swap digital copies of his books, it actually increases sales. After he uploaded the Russian translation of his 1988 novel The Alchemist, sales in Russia went from 1,000 per year, to 100,000, and then over a million. He will speak more about this phenomenon at the Frankfurt Book Fair in mid-October.

It’s no secret that the U.S. is doing a rotten job of dealing with the 12 to 15 million undocumented immigrants working in this country. The new Voice of Witness anthology from McSweeney’s, Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, compiles 24 first-person stories of this struggle into a unique and moving oral history project. Excerpts are available via NPR. Phase II of the Lit Crawl on October 11 features a panel discussion about the book, held at the McSweeney’s office, with Corinne Goria, David William Hill, Joell Hollowell, Annie Holmes, and the book’s editor Peter Orner.

UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library begins moving its rare book collections back into the completely refurbished building, this time without mice.