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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.
Eraser Head Press publisher Rose O’ Keefe discusses Bizarro fiction on Fantasy Magazine:
Q: What are the most common misconceptions folks seem to have about Bizarro fiction?
A: There are a lot of misconceptions, but the only one I want to focus on right now is the reason why bizarro was created. Most people believe bizarro was created so that a bunch of outsider writers would have a genre to call home. This isn’t the case. Bizarro might have a strong community of writers who are as tight as family, but the genre was formed based solely on reader demand. There are a lot of people out there who view “weird stuff” as a genre. They actively go out looking for books and movies that are weird in the same way that some people seek out books/movies that are scary or romantic. This is our target audience. It is a bigger audience than people realize and it is an audience that has been mostly ignored. With the little niche genre of bizarro, we are just trying to fill a void that we see in the publishing world.
Powell’s City of Books is profiled in the Dallas Morning News “Travel” section:
The word “City” in Powell’s City of Books is not to be taken lightly.
Powell’s isn’t intimidating from the outside. It looks like any other downtown storefront you might find. All I wanted on my first trip was a Sunday New York Times and a magazine or two. I walked in not expecting much, save for an amount of unusual that’s par for the course in Austin-like Portland.
My friends and I agreed to meet at the front of the store in two hours – plenty of time to explore, we thought. But when it was time to go, I’d thoroughly cruised only the shelves in the Orange Room and had yet to find the newspapers and magazines.
FallofAutumn.com discusses offset prinitng with Eberhardt Press founder Charles Overbeck:
Bookselling This Week profiles recently opened indie bookstores, including Portland’s own Green Bean Books:
The store is unique because of “its secret dioramas hidden in the shelves, refurbished vending machines that dispense homemade finger puppets, mustaches and beards, miniature journals and pencils and tattoos,” said Green. “Two neighbor boys down the street decided to collect all the finger puppets in the finger puppet machine last summer. Then they went home and hand-sewed a little bed to tuck them all in.”
Lisa Shannon’s A Thousand Sisters is reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press:
It is rare for readers to open a book and discover with immediate joy that it will deliver far more than it has promised.
If there is any justice in the highly unpredictable world of modern publishing, A Thousand Sisters will emerge as the iconic example of that exquisite experience.
At first glance, this memoir about one American woman’s journey to activism on behalf of the women in Africa appeals to a narrow market, primarily “do gooders,” feminists, and weekend runners, as strange a group of bedfellows as one can imagine.
Within a few pages, however, in a hauntingly lyrical and intimate narrative, Lisa Shannon is guiding anyone willing to go with her into the landscape of the tallest questions of human experience, the questions we avoid because they cast shadows and gloom over the contentment of daily life.
Image credit Book People
