Eben Bayer is coming home to talk about mushrooms. The Vermont native who grew up in South Royalton is  speaking at the University of Vermont today, October 17, about his new line of homegrown furniture. Well, factory-grown. Bayer's company, Ecovative, just released a line of furniture made entirely from mycelium and organic matter, such as corn husks and other agricultural byproducts.

His presentation, titled "Disrupting Everything: How Biological Technology Will Fuel the Sustainable Revolution," is on the fourth floor of the Davis Center at 4 p.m. Its sponsors are UVM's  Community Development and Applied Economics, the Energy Alternatives class, and Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. 

The furniture joins Ecovative's existing line of  biodegradable packaging materials, which are used by corporate giants including Dell and Crate & Barrel, as well as smaller folks such as Rich Brilliant Willing, a lighting designer and manufacturer. Those molded items, Bayer says, are incredibly lightweight. They're also a heck of a lot better for the planet than Styrofoam, or polystyrene, which takes hundreds of years to decompose. Not to mention it's a carcinogen.

Amy Nicole Schwartz sums up her job as "basically dick jokes and boxes." As design director for Cards Against Humanity, the  wildly successful and hilariously inappropriate party game, and its "boring business company" spinoff,  Blackbox, Schwartz  sets the creative vision for her companies' games, projects and subversive PR campaigns.

Believe it or not, there's more to her design responsibilities than laying out black-and-white game cards that read, "Toni Morrison's vagina" and "Watching an orphanage burn" in Helvetica Neue Bold. 

Independent bookstore Phoenix Books announced this week that it is among five contenders shortlisted for the Publishers Weekly 2016 Bookstore of the Year Award. Since opening their first store in Essex in 2007, bookstore co-owners and spouses Mike DeSanto and Renee Reiner have expanded, adding storefronts in downtown Burlington and Rutland.

DeSanto and Reiner claim that 2015 was their best year on record — Burlington sales were up 14 percent — and they recently received another pretty feather in their cap: the 2015 Independent Spirit Award granted by the Book Publishers Representatives of New England.

Reached by telephone, DeSanto and Reiner expressed gratitude about their nomination while also condemning the continual expansion of Amazon.com. "[Amazon] sells everything except human beings on the internet, and I wouldn't put it past them to do that," said DeSanto. "In this sort of climate, to be recognized as a local independent bookstore is remarkable," Reiner added: "[It's] heartwarming, to say the least."

Publishers Weekly will name the Bookstore of the Year in late March. The winner will be featured in its April 18 publication and honored at BookExpo America in May. 

This just in: Local business mogul Alan Newman has purchased a stake in the South Burlington nightclub Higher Ground.

Newman, who has cofounded several notable Burlington businesses, including Gardener's Supply Co., Seventh Generation and Magic Hat Brewing Co., confirmed in a phone call with Seven Days late last week that he has bought out Higher Ground cofounder Kevin Statesir. Statesir opened the nightclub in its original Winooski location with cofounders Alex Crothers, Rob Hintze and Matt Sutte in 1998. For the past five years, Newman has run Alchemy & Science, a specialty beer company that operates as an independent subsidiary of the Boston Beer Company.

"For 30 years I had been a member of the Burlington business community," said Newman. "But for the last five years, I had excluded myself from that community. So what's going on in my head is that I need something to keep me entertained, I could use a way to make a little money and, boy, it would be great if that was something back in Burlington again."