Short Stories: Portland Lit Around the Web

Every Saturday we will bring you links to articles from around the web featuring members of Portland’s lit community.  Please feel free to pass along any you come across as well, by emailing us at portland@readinglocal.com, and we will include them in next week’s edition of Short Stories.

Over on Salon Ariel Gore “talks about the subject everyone can disagree on — women and happiness.”:

How do you think feminism became the fall girl for women’s unhappiness?

People said, OK, if women are less happy than they were 40 years ago –  which, in itself, would be very hard to measure — then they thought, Well, what happened 40 years ago? Oh yeah — feminism! So therefore feminism failed! It’s this crazy talk because the first rule of research is not to confuse correlation with causality. What else has happened in the past 40 years? Well, hey, maybe women have replaced the time we used to spend talking with friends with TV watching. When you study postpartum depression, there is a very clear understanding that in communities where you see more support, there is less depression. How come nobody said, “Oh, women are unhappy because of TV!” It’s at least equally plausible.

Chris Braak reviews Ben Parzybok’s Couch for I09:

Couch effortlessly evokes those depressing after-school but just-before-life years of weird roommates, cramped apartments, and the yearly ritual of moving one’s furniture and meager possessions to somewhere new. Roommates Tree, Erik, and Thom (Bakker, in a subtle shout-out to the assembled nerditry), after their apartment is inadvertently flooded by the sex maniacs living above them, undertake a seemingly simple task. They need to take their huge, red, handmade couch down to the Goodwill. Things being to grow gradually stranger as the Goodwill turns them away, as everywhere starts to turn them away, and Thom and his roommates begin to think that the Couch itself has a bit of a longer journey in mind.

Tin House gets a nice mention in the LA Times discussion of the future of printed literary journals:

To Los Angeles readers, though, fiction still has an appeal. Melissa Reakers, who runs the newsstand at West Hollywood’s Book Soup, says its most popular literary journals are Tin House, Granta, the Paris Review and McSweeney’s.

McSweeney’s has its frequently updated Internet Tendency, and a few literary journals — including the Paris Review and Granta — are trying to exploit the Web in interesting ways. Are video, audio, interactivity and Internet-speed content the way of the future for literary magazines? Or is there something special about print literary journals — can they get by with informational websites, directing readers to the print product for a complete reading experience?

Publisher’s Weekly covers Hawthorne Books’ first two-book deal with Lidia Yuknavitch:

The Portland, Ore., indie Hawthorne Books has signed a two-book deal with Lidia Yuknavitch for a memoir called The Chronology of Water and a novel, Small Backs of Children. Co-publisher Rhonda Hughes acquired world English and translation rights from Yuknavitch, who did not have an agent in the deal. Yuknavitch was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award for her book Real to Reel.

The Literary Omnivore gives Myrlin Hermes’ The Lunatic, The Lover, and The Poet 4 1/2 out of 5 stars:

Hermes’ style is perfect for something Shakespearean- it’s lyrical and a little formal, but totally accessible. I was very impressed when it flowed into Hamlet towards the end and everything still worked smoothly. The specter of Hamlet, of course, hang over the entire novel. Lady Adriane occasionally tells the story of what is occurring back at Elsinore while Hamlet and Horatio are in Wittenberg. This is just as compelling as Adriane herself, especially how Hermes makes the story her own. It also keeps the novel from becoming too light. The way she uses Hamlet at the end is fascinating- I was a little ambivalent at first, but it’s really grown on me.

Kim Hedges reviews Gina Ochsner’s The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight for The Minneapolis Star Tribune:

“Dreambook” seamlessly integrates several levels of reality. The meat of the book consists of day-to-day concerns: workplace annoyances, family troubles, romances, reminiscences. Set against a backdrop that includes factual details of historical events (including the difficulties of adjusting to life in the “new” Russia), the book can at times feel relatively straightforward. But keeping the reader from becoming too comfortable are delightful, intriguing splashes of magical realism…

Image credit Book People.