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.

Underland Press is profiled as part of the B&N Review Small Press Spotlight series:

Since its inception in 2008, Underland Press has illustrated—by the small run of superior books it has so far published—the value of having a strong and individual creative vision guiding an enterprise, in place of a diffuse and lowest-common-denominator corporate consensus.

Underland is the brainchild of Victoria Blake, previously an editor for the prose-centric offerings at Dark Horse Comics.  With modest capital, intelligent publicity, and a keenly refined taste, Blake has assembled a roster of first-class fantastical authors, all with an eye toward bringing the reader “macabre monsters and magic and men with nothing to lose.”  The fourth book in her line, Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch, has perhaps garnered the most attention, due in part to an ingenious DIY booktour engineered by the author (See our review of Finch here).  But the other items in Underland’s catalogue also stand out as lively, arresting publications.

Powell’s Books explains their approach to Twitter and Facebook over on the Inc. Magazine website:

If you can’t afford to give stuff away, you can always just ask customers to give you some Facebook love for free. That was the approach taken by Powell’s Books, a bookstore in Portland, Oregon. Beginning in 2008, the company placed small graphics at the bottom of every page on its website and e-mail newsletters. These little advertisements entreated customers to “Find us on Facebook” and “Follow us on Twitter.” For a month, Powell’s even used the marquee in front of its store to ask for Facebook fans, which was surprisingly effective, says Megan Zabel, who manages the company’s social media efforts.

Over the course of a year, the company went from roughly 3,000 fans on Facebook to 38,500 and from a few hundred followers on Twitter to more than 12,000. Although the campaign has not directly produced a large revenue increase, Zabel says the fans’ and followers’ online purchases have more than offset the cost of the campaign. In addition, having a large fan base creates the impression of a vibrant community that she thinks will help Powell’s in the long run. “The more fans we have, the more people are proselytizing our brand,” she says. “Word of mouth is one of the most powerful selling tools.”

Riley Michael Parker talks about some of his first loves on The Nervous Breakdown:

I have lived my life in books, have been an avid reader since my youth, and I have been affected by so many great authors – my behavior and outlook of any given year directly corresponding to the fiction I was reading. To try and pin-point when it began would be extraneous, but there were a few authors that really shook me; that surprised me; that made me aware of what fiction is actually capable of doing.

Bart King’s The Big Book of Gross Stuff gets a nice plug on the Parent Map website:

The Big Book of Gross Stuff by Bart King. The Portland dad who really “gets” kids brings it again, this time with a side of slime. The book is full of tween-boy appeal, with info like “World’s Most Disgusting Jobs” (whale feces researcher?), a gross quiz and loads more. Even if you don’t buy the book, visit King’s Web site (ultragross.blogspot.com); it’s a treasure trove o’ grossness. Fascinating fun!

The Bend Bulletin has a great profile and interview up with Elizabeth Eslami:

Eslami, like Jasmine, grew up in the American south. A native of Gaffney, S.C., Eslami is the daughter of a radiologist and a nurse-turned-homemaker. Her father was born in Tehran.

But “Bone Worship” is not autobiographical, she said.

“People ask if it’s autobiographical, but (it is) only in superficial ways,” she said. “When I started writing it, I did feel a connection to Jasmine … She’s full of a lot of anger in a way that I was at 15 or 16 years old. She doesn’t know a lot about her own past and heritage, which leaves her with a sense of emptiness.”

Which is in a way, the heart of the novel.

“It’s … the attempt to understand those closest to us, who are often the most mysterious,” Eslami said. “There is great beauty in that search.”

Image credit Book People.

Related Posts with Thumbnails