Today’s Featured Book Event:
Smallpressapalooza (Powells City of Books, @5:00pm): Powell’s hosts the third annual Smallpressapalooza, a five-hour marathon of readings from some of the best small-press writers of the Northwest and beyond. This year’s line-up includes Alex Wrekk (Brainscan zine), Shawn Granton (editor of The Zinester’s Guide to Portland), Matthew Stadler (Publication Studio), Jeff Burk (Shatnerquake), and many others. Check the Powell’s Calendar for a full schedule of readers.
Other Book Events Today:
CAFFEINATED ART # 86 (Three Friends Coffee House, @7:00pm): Erotica author Elva Maxine Beach and local poets Celestial Concubine and Dan Raphael will read from their work. Check out Reading Local’s interview with Ms. Beach here.
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Today’s Featured Book Event:
It’s Raining Cupcakes (Powells Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, @2:00pm): Lisa Schroeder, the popular author of I Heart You, You Haunt Me, delivers a sweet treat for tweens in It’s Raining Cupcakes (Aladdin), a novel that’s baked to perfection.
Other Book Events Today:
NW Author Series: Write What People Remember (Wilsonville Public Library, @3:30pm, $5): Naseem Rakha presents “Writing What Works: How to Learn from What You Read and How to Write What People Remember.” Naseem Rakha is an award-winning journalist whose stories have been heard on OPB, and NPR. Her first novel, The Crying Tree, has been selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Series and is currently a nominee for the 2010 PNBA Book Award.
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From what we could find (please contact us if you have an event you would like us to add to this or future schedules), the local book events for the week of March 13, 2010 through March 19, 2010 are:
Saturday March 13-
Gala Celebration Honoring Local Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (Barnes & Noble-Clackamas, @3:00pm): Come celebrate the talents of the SCBWI-Oregon. Sixteen authors and illustrators of children’s and teen’s books will be here to present and sign their books, including Emily Whitman, Carmen Bernier-Grand, Lisa Schroeder, Dale Basye and Nancy Coffelt.
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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.
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.
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Today’s Featured Book Event:
Dave Eggers Booksigning (Powells City of Books, @12:00pm): Join us when bestselling author Dave Eggers signs copies of his most recent books, The Wild Things and Zeitoun (McSweeney’s). A riveting work of nonfiction, Zeitoun explores the life of a prosperous Syrian-American who chose to stay in New Orleans through Hurricane Katrina — and then abruptly disappeared. Loosely based on the picture book by Maurice Sendak and the screenplay co-written with Spike Jonze, The Wild Things is about the confusions of a boy, Max, making his way in a world he can’t control. Please note: This is a booksigning only; the author will not read from his work.
Other Book Events Today:
First Friday: Art and Letters (Downtown Camas, WA, @5:00pm): Local authors will sign, sell, and read from their books in shops and locations throughout downtown Camas. A collection of signed books donated by the authors will be raffled to benefit the nonprofit Friends of the Camas Library. Authors and local students will read from their works in the new Journey Community Church located on 4th Ave in downtown Camas.
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“Watching you is, in fact, what your government does best,” Shane Harris told an audience of about 45 at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne. Which is a pretty good crowd for a Monday night. Portlanders like to keep a close watch on their civil liberties.
A native Portlander, Harris lives in Washington, DC, where he writes for the National Journal. He was in town to promote The Watchers (Penguin Press HC), his new book about the rise of terrorism surveillance in the United States, told through the stories of five men who have been instrumental in this effort.
Well spoken and well groomed, Harris addressed the crowd confidently. He explained how writing about intelligence, homeland security and counterterrorism for the National Journal gives him access to all sorts of covert folks. Intelligence is a strange beat in journalism because it’s built around secrets and deceptions. “If there’s ever a story that lands in your lap,” he said, “be very careful.”
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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.
The New Low-Maintenance Garden (Timber Press) by Valerie Easton, gets a nice cover shot and spotlight in the San Francisco Chronicle:
We’re gardening in a new millennium, with challenges such as limited space, dwindling natural resources and less free time, yet most of us do it the way our grandparents did, says Easton.
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From what we could find (please contact us if you have an event you would like us to add to this or future schedules), the local book events for the week of February 20, 2010 through February 26, 2010 are:
Saturday February 20-
Bringing History to Life (Lewis & Clark College, Miller Center for the Humanities, @9:30am): Lewis & Clark College Special Collections in cooperation with the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation will host a series of three lectures by Stephen Dow Beckham, Gary E. Moulton, and Roger Wendlick. Recently all three of these individuals have spent time working on historical projects in the Lewis & Clark College Special Collections, and at this event the three will share their discoveries.
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Today’s Featured Book Event:
Story and Song: A Benefit for Bradley Rosen (The Blue Monk, @7:00pm, $8): Bradley Rosen was recently hospitalized with a staph infection in his spine, and now his fellow Dangerous Writers members are holding a benefit reading to help pay for his medical bills. An impressive line up includes Tom Spanbauer, Margaret Malone, Monica Drake, Cheryl Strayed & Emily Chenoweth. Musical guests include Highwater, Nicole Berke and Closureyes!
Other Book Events Today:
Mapping History: How Narrative Nonfiction Brings the Past Alive (PSU, Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 298, @11:00am): What is narrative nonfiction? How does it differ from other literature? How do writers use it to bring history alive? In this public conversation, award-winning author Paul Collins will discuss how various authors use narrative nonfiction to animate works like The Ghost Map. Collins, a professor at Portland State, is the author of five books and regularly appears on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday as their “literary detective.”
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Today’s Featured Book Event:
Visiting Writers Series: Jon Raymond (Reed College, Psychology 105, @6:30pm): Jon Raymond is the author of The Half-Life, a novel, and Livability, a collection of short stories named as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick for Spring 2009. He is an editor at Plazm magazine and his writing has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Tin House, and The Village Voice, among other publications. For more information, visit the Visiting Writers website.
Other Book Events Today:
Diane Jacobs (A Children’s Place Bookstore, @4:00pm): Illustrator Diane Jacobs will read, sign, and discuss Grappling with the Grumblies. Everyone grapples with the grumblies from time to time, but this lovely (and funny!) book will help your child—and you—discover new ways of dealing with difficult feelings.
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Today’s Featured Book Event:
Penelope Scambly Schott and Henry Hughes (Broadway Books, @7:00pm): Two of Oregon’s most respected poets, Penelope Scambly Schott and Henry Hughes, will be with us tonight to read from new books. Henry Hughes will present his new collection, Moist Meridian (Mammoth Books). It’s a daring mix of savagery and civilization, eros and wit that show us the growing range and depth of this accomplished writer. Henry teaches at Western Oregon University. His first collection, Men Holding Eggs, received the 2004 Oregon Book Award. 
Penelope Scambly Schott, also a winner of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, will be reading from her new book Six Lips (Mayapple). In this collection, the speaker instructs her lover, thinks about what animal she might become in her next life, discusses having one tail, two vaginas, three ears, and so forth, all the time chronicling her mother’s decline. “Nimble and tender, sensuous and biting, deliciously daring, and always grounded in felt experience….Six Lips is one of the strongest, most inventive books I’ve read in years.” –Ingrid Wendt
Other Book Events Today:
And&Review Release Party (Tiga Bar, @7:00pm): Mia Nolting and Rachel Peddersen present and&review, an arts publication based in Portland, Oregon that shares work from local and international artists and writers. A compilation of work that loosely adheres to a chosen theme for each issue, showing both contemporary trends in art-making as well as work from the past.
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Today’s Featured Book Event:
The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 (Powells City of Books, @7:30pm): In The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 (Penguin), visionary social thinker Joel Kotkin looks ahead to America in 2050, revealing how the addition of 100 million Americans by midcentury will transform American families, towns, and industries. “A fascinating glimpse into a crystal ball, rich in implications that are alternately disturbing and exhilarating,” declares Kirkus Reviews. This event is co-sponsored by Bright Lights, a city-design discussion series presented by Portland Spaces and the City Club of Portland.
Other Book Events Today:
PSU MFA Monday Night Lecture Series Features: Barry Sanders (Portland State, Shattuck Hall Annex, @7:30pm): Barry Sanders will lecture about his work! The public is invited (its free, tell your friends).
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