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.

Willy Vlautin’s Lean on Pete is reviewed by Nadine O’Regan:

Lean On Pete is an absolutely wonderful book. If I read a better novel this year, I’ll be surprised. Relying on simple language – the story is told through Charley’s sturdy first person narrative – it has a ring of authenticity to it, and qualities of grace and sympathy that make it impossible to put down: I read it almost without pausing for breath.

Ben Parzybok’s short story Birds is up on Strange Horizons:

I like secrets, don’t you?

Better, I like secret pockets, secret boxes. Niches and coves and crannies. I like hideaways, which is why I built mine. Here, are you comfortable? I like hot things in cold places. I like small flashlights in inside jacket pockets, anything on a ledge.

I like you, how under your skin is your secret heart pumping, making you run. I like the glimmer in your dark eye. I like how, secretly, you like to be taken advantage of, if the circumstance permits it just so. I like you here, in my nest, my city perch, eye glass in your hand, spying out the passersby below.

It has rained for a week straight, the week in which you stumbled a refugee into my camp.

It’s been a honeymoon. Behind the billboard advertising an island getaway, atop the odd little building owned by the bead seller, above the city. We sit and talk—even better, we sit and don’t talk.

Here, let me show you this. I have a paperback, it’s a book of magic tricks and here is my small flashlight, let’s pull the tarp close. We’ll learn a trick or two and tell secrets.

Monograph Bookwerks, which opens May 5th, gets some love on Shelf Awareness:

artists John Brodie and Blair Saxon-Hill are opening Monograph Bookwerks, dedicated to books on modern and contemporary art, design and architecture, in Portland, Ore.

The store’s specialty will be artist monographs from 1900 to the present. It will also offer new, used and rare books covering architecture, design, photography, fashion, artist biographies and art criticism. Monograph Bookwerks will also sell studio pottery and mid-century ceramics, fine objects and original artwork.

Besides their careers as artists, Brodie owns Le Happy, a creperie restaurant and bar and Saxon-Hill is an immigration paralegal.

Monograph Bookwerks is located at 5005 NE 27th Avenue, Portland, Ore. 97211; 503-284-5005.

Zachary Schomburg reveals his first poetry love on Memorius:

Fifteen years ago, I was an undergraduate journalism major at College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, MO, when I enrolled in my first poetry workshop. I didn’t know anything about poetry, and I couldn’t have named any living poets. At some point early on, the instructor changed my life by introducing us to…

Here is the book trailer for Phillip Margolin’s new release Supreme Justice:

Image credit Book People