Powell's Books

To celebrate Small Press Month, we’re proud to host the sixth annual marathon reading of small press authors, Smallpressapalooza. This year’s lineup features readings by Oregon Book Award finalist Carrie Seitzinger, memoirists Lindsey Kugler and Chloe Caldwell, zinester Aaron Dactyl (Railroad Semantics), novelist Barry Graham, fiction writers Nancy Rommelmann, Janey Smith, and Jeremy Robert Johnson, and poets W. Vandoren Wheeler, Thomas Patrick Levy, Mindy Nettifee, Donald Dunbar, and Susan Denning. Hosted by Powell’s small press champion, Kevin Sampsell.

Smallpressapalooza Lineup: March 18, 2013 

6:00 Carrie Anna Seitzinger Fall Ill Medicine
6:15 Susan Denning She Preferred to Read the Knives
6:30 Chloe Caldwell Legs Get Led Astray
6:45 (break)
7:00 W. Vandoren Wheeler The Accidentalist
7:15 Thomas Levy I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone
7:30 Lindsey Kugler Here
7:45 (break)
8:00 Barry Graham The Book of Man
8:15 Aaron Dactyl Railroad Semantics 7
8:30 Nancy Rommelmann Transportation
8:45 (break)
9:00 Donald Dunbar Eyelid Lick
9:15 Mindy Nettifee Glitter in the Blood
9:30 Janey Smith Animals
9:45 Jeremy Robert Johnson We Live Inside You

The winning fiction title, as chosen by you!

There is a temptation to say that poets and fiction writers are separate animals, like aardvarks and zebras, and that it’s pointless for an aardvark to try to gallop on the plains or a zebra to crawl down a hole, but I find myself growing hot under the collar when people lay down absolutes about the difference between the poetic and the storytelling soul. Charles Baxter, a fiction writer who also has published several books of poetry, but who describes himself as an ex-poet in his essay collection Burning Down the House, writes:

“The poets start the party and dance the longest, but they don’t know how to plug in the audio system, and they have to wait for the prose writers to show them where the on/off switch is. In general, poets do not know where the on/off switch is, anywhere in life. They are usually off unless they are forcibly turned on, and they stay on until they are taken to the emergency room, where they are medicated and turned off again.”

—Lucia Perillo, author of Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain, from an original essay on Powells.com

housingworksbookstore:

mcnallyjackson:

carolynkellogg:

Moby-Dick cake.

From Hell’s heart I slice at thee, cake!

Ungraspable phantom, indeed. My favorite party is the sea foam. Can anyone figure out what the quoted passage is? There’s probably a better way to try to read it then trying to turn your head upside down.

This is ridiculously awesome, on all fronts.

aaknopf:

Bonus: read the full excerpt in The New Yorker!

Only 27 days left to wait.

Tomorrow’s great writers are hard at work today, writing and publishing the books that will make them famous. We can’t be sure who they’ll be until we get there — but we could guess… Actually, we did! Save 30% on our picks for tomorrow’s award winners. Read them today and you can say you knew them when.

Josh Ritter wrote a novel. And it’s good! Jill at Powells.com talked to him about his unusual, darkly funny book, titled Bright’s Passage. Read the interview.

Patrick deWitt (author of Ablutions: Notes for a Novel and The Sisters Brothers) is guest blogging this week, and is setting the bar pretty high. Yesterday he shared some ideas for short stories that haven’t reached fruition. Yet.

• A story about a charitable organization called Ski Bums that takes homeless people skiing. This is destined to fail because homeless people hate being cold.
• A story about someone who is the opposite of an exorcist — someone who can make an unhaunted house haunted.
• A story about a Doo-Wop group who reunite after 40 years of hostile non-communication to sing their lone hit, “Baby Factory.”
• “Stevie Ray Vaughn Hotel Proposal”: A proposal for a Stevie Ray Vaughn-themed hotel.

Read more. (So you don’t miss other gems, like “Foghat = good name for a cat or dog.”)