She's reading at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside, at 7:30 pm tonight.

• Via

Dammit. Via Jo Walton, I just found out that John Christopher, the author of, among other things, the Tripod Trilogy, died over the weekend.

I first encountered the Tripod books in fourth grade in Salt Lake City, Utah, where Mrs. Dunn read aloud each of Christopher's original three books, followed by their prequel, to our class. That kicked off a tripod and sci-fi obsession during which I read and reread and reread again all of the books. I've still got my original paperbacks, plus a box set-style cardboard sleeve for them that, when I was around 11 or 12, my dad helped me rescue from a garbage can in a bookstore in West Yellowstone, Montana. (I already had all the books, and they were going to just throw the box away.)

Going back to the books a few years ago—I think an acquaintance insisted The Hunger Games had taken quite a bit from them, thus inspiring a reread—I found I enjoyed them just as much as I'd hoped I would. (Powell's has them for cheap.) More than anything else, Christopher's exciting, melancholy series played a key role in my burgeoning nerdiness as a kid—from post-apocalyptic landscapes to big ideas to creepy aliens to character-based adventures, I can trace a lot of what I love about sci-fi back to things I first encountered in The White Mountains.

This is big news: In a few weeks, the Independent Publishing Resource Center will be packing up the letterpresses and moving to new digs at 10th and Division. The lease has been signed; projected move-in date is March 1.

This announcement smacked me with some nostalgia—maybe the same way I would've felt about Rocco's closing if the pizza had been any less terrible. The little stretch of Oak Street that also houses Counter Media and Reading Frenzy has long been one of my favorite blocks in the city, and one that hasn't changed too terribly much in the 13 years since the IPRC opened shop. But there's absolutely no doubt that the IPRC has outgrown their current home, and the new space is almost four times larger than their current home. Other details from the IPRC announcement:

2500 square feet of open, ground-floor workspace with 15' vaulted ceilings
330 square foot conference room (second floor)
900 square feet of ground-floor administrative offices
Small loft space
Fully accessible roof deck with views of downtown and the west hills
double-wide work sink with a high pressure sprayer, which will allow us to create an IPRC screenprinting studio
Roll up garage door
Directly across the street from future Max line
Directly off the #4 and #70 buslines, as well as several bike routes
Great neighbors like Ford Food + Drink, Genies, Los Gorditos Burritos, Double Dragon, Acme bar and beer garden, Pinball Publishing, Free Geek, New Seasons Grocery and more.

Here's a look around the current space, if you've never been in there:

Tonight at Backspace, a release party for the I in team, the first book of poetry from Eirean Bradley, host and organizer of the Portland Poetry slam. (oh hi steve, what Blogtown poetry ban.) In addition to Bradley, whose above poem made me laugh 3 times, tonight features readings from Smalldoggies Magazine co-founder, Matty Byloos, two-time National Poetry Slam Champion Mighty Mike McGee, and more.

That's tonight at 7 pm, $5.

This Oscar-nominated animated short from Moonbot Studios is absolutely delightful and if you don't mist up a teeny bit you are probably a sociopath.

(Apparently the film also served as the basis for a well-received eBook app.)

The Hollywood Theatre will be screening the Oscar-nominated shorts—both animated and live-action—beginning February 10.

• Ton Koene

In this week's paper, I reviewed The Fault in Our Stars, the newest from popular YA author John Green. It's about two teenagers with cancer who fall in love and it's really, really good—one part sad, funny teenaged love story; two parts interrogation of why anyone should even bother getting out of bed in the morning, much less bother caring about any one or anything, since we're all gonna die and be forgotten one day anyway. It's pretty great. I also interviewed Green a couple days ago, and the transcript of our conversation just went live. We talk about what people can expect from his sold-out performance at the Bagdad on Sunday; we talk about the relationship between authors and readers; we talk about how teenagers use technology. It was a pretty interesting conversation; here's a snippet, where we talk about Tumblr (Green has a huge social media presence):

When I was researching for this interview, I kept falling into teenager Tumblr vortexes.

[Tumblr] particularly fascinates me because it's the place where young people don't think there are old people and so they act in a way that they would never act if they knew we were watching, which is interesting.

Do you find yourself looking at Tumblr or other social networking sites to keep your teen references current?

I don't. I think most of my critics would say I don't stay contemporary, in terms of my views or in terms of my novels. All of my pop culture references are usually from 1992. Kids in my books always like Neutral Milk Hotel. They never like what people are listening to now. Superficial pop-culture connections aren't ultimately that meaningful to readers and also they change so quickly, particularly now in the internet age where something is only cool for a few hours.

The internet wasn't so much an issue when you first started writing.

Yeah, I mean, my first book had a phone booth in it. The whole plot basically hinges on a phone booth. Amazon listed it as historical fiction. Maybe that's why.

Check out this website, which challenges people, National Novel Writing Month-style, to write a letter for every day in February:

In the month of February, mail at least one item through the post every day it runs. Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture, or a cutting from a newspaper, or a fabric swatch.

Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.

All you are committing to is to mail 24 items. Why 24? There are four Sundays and one US holiday. In fact, you might send more than 24 items. You might develop a correspondence that extends beyond the month. You might enjoy going to the mail box again.

I love writing letters. I don't do it as much as I would like—I owe letters to two good friends at the moment—but it's a fine way to get perspective on what's going on in your life, and an even better way to gain a deeper understanding of your friends. And coming home to something personal in the mailbox is one of the great pleasures. I think this is a great idea.

Adam Johnson recently released a fascinating novel about North Korea called The Orphan Master's Son, which I reviewed here in conjunction with his appearance at Powell's a couple weeks back. The Paris Review has a great interview with Johnson about how he researched the book, why irony doesn't exist in North Korea, and how The Orphan Master's Son isn't so different from the speculative fiction he began his career writing:

You’ve said elsewhere that a friend helped you gain access to North Korea for a government tour of the country. Who was the friend and how did he get you in?

My friend was part of an NGO planting apple orchards in North Korea. He also worked with orphanages in the South. He was originally from North Korea and was an orphan of the Korean War. He had good relations with both sides and had done nothing but humanitarian work for decades there, so he was trusted. He believed in my book and used his influence to help me.

What was your stated purpose for the visit?

There were four of us, and we were officially called VIP tourists. My friend was treated with great enthusiasm. I was just ignored, which was wonderful. I was looking for bits of verisimilitude and I was free to collect that. I wanted to know: Are there trashcans on the street? Are the streets concrete, pavement, or brick? Were there fire stations? Did people have mailboxes on their houses? What type of shoes did people wear?

The whole thing is worth a read. (As is The Orphan Master's Son, for that matter.)

I wrote about how much I like Ryan Boudinot's Blueprints of the Afterlife in this week's Mercury; Paul Constant's also got a great review of the novel up at The Stranger. You should read the whole review, but if you are lazy and don't like to click on things, here is where it ends up:

Everything in Blueprints doesn't quite land as smoothly as you'd like on the last page—these kinds of brainy big-idea novels almost never do—but the plot is almost beside the point here. We already know from his short fiction that Boudinot can do plot. What we weren't sure he could do was write a novel that would crack open our skulls, pour a whole universe inside, and leave us begging for more. Now we know. More, please.

Boudinot is reading tonight at the Hawthorne Powell's, 7:30 pm.

•I've got an interview with Naked Girls Reading Portland co-producer Sophie Maltease about why she's putting on Saturday's event, and what to expect.

•Ryan Boudinot's post-apocalyptic/sci-fi/whatever Blueprints of the Afterlife is my favorite book so far of 2012. It includes:

-A to-scale replica of New York City, built on Bainbridge Island
-Clones
-Clone orgies
-Messianic clone babies
-An Xavier Institute-esque school for gifted youngsters
-Humans who can "hack" other humans
-A sentient, hostile glacier
-A refrigerator that never runs out of food
-A masturbating ghost

I love it. He's reading at Powell's downtown on Hawthorne! on Monday.

•And finally, Thomas Ross gives an enthusiastic endorsement to the debut novel from Carter Sickels, The Evening Hour, about a nursing aide/drug dealer in a small West Virginia mining town. Sickels reads at the downtown Powell's on Sunday.

Provocative headlines aside, tonight's reading is going to be awesome. Housefire, that local independent publisher of ill repute, will host a reading at the Jack London bar. There will be a selection of films by Jean Painlevé from Science is Fiction and Housefire editors, founders, and pretty much entire staff will read pieces. That's Lindsay Allison Ruoff, Robert Duncan Gray, and Riley Michael Parker. They'll be joined by special guest and contributor Kirsten Alene Pierce. Only people with three awesome names need apply. The night will wrap up with a performance from the band Curious Hands.

The event begins at 7 pm. There is a suggested donation of $5.

The Jack London bar is located at 529 SW 4th Ave. It's underneath the Rialto. You have to enter the Rialto get there. I can't stress this enough. Look for the sign on the street if you're confused.

I don't use my Kindle too often, but it does have one function that's really handy for book reviewing: The ability to highlight and save passages while reading, and access them later online. Jo Walton's Among Others—a fantasy/coming-of-age novel about a girl who loves fantasy and science fiction—was one of my favorite books of last year; my review is here, but here's a sampling of some of the passages I highlighted while reading:

There’s no sex, hardly any love stuff at all, in Middle Earth, which always made me think yes, the world would be better off without it.

After the bookshop, I checked out the shelves in the junk shop and bought a couple of things there too. I had so many books I could hardly walk at this point, and of course my leg was terrible. It always is when it rains. I didn’t ask to have my good leg replaced by a creaky rusty weathervane, but then I suppose nobody does. I would have made much greater sacrifices. [...] I should think of it as a war-wound, an old soldier’s scars. Frodo lost a finger, and all his own possibility of happiness. Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn’t supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn’t care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo.

Carpenter says in the Inklings book that Lewis meant Aslan to be Jesus. I can sort of see it, but all the same it feels like a betrayal. It feels like allegory. No wonder Tolkien was cross. I’d have been cross too. I also feel tricked, because I didn’t notice all this time. Sometimes I’m so stupid—but Aslan was always so much himself. I don’t know what I think about Jesus, but I know what I think about Aslan.

Being left alone—and I am being left alone—isn’t quite as much what I wanted as I thought. Is this how people become evil? I don’t want to be.

Now imagine those passages read aloud in a Welsh accent. Walton's gonna be at the Cedar Hills Powell's tonight at 7 pm—I have lost some faith in Tri-Met in the last few days, but as long as the 20 doesn't fuck me over, I'm there. And if the buses do prove unamenable, there's an acceptable alternative at the downtown store: William Gibson is reading from his new collection of nonfiction at 7:30 pm.

Powell's just announced that in March they'll introduce an Espresso Book Machine at their downtown store, which will produce bookstore-quality paperbacks from an extensive catalog of digital titles.

From the press release:

"We are excited to offer this service to our customers, expanding our vast inventory at the City of Books location from one million volumes to nearly limitless volumes," says Miriam Sontz, Chief Operating Officer for Powell's Books. "It is yet another way we can be valuable and relevant to readers and authors as the distribution channels for books continue to evolve. We are thrilled by this opportunity to work with On Demand Books as our business partner in this venture."

It looks like a crappy old printer, doesn't it? A crappy old printer that retails for around $100,000 and can print from over 7 million titles in about 4 minutes. The "business transaction costs are confidential," a Powell's spokesperson told me when I asked how much they spent on the machine, while the prices of the books themselves will "vary on size and production costs but would generally average between $15-25."

Alexis M. Smith—whose debut novel Glaciers is reviewed quite favorably, by me, right here—has a funny little piece on the Powell's blog about her use of a mason jar in her book:

Last fall, I was reading over the final proof of Glaciers when I came across the passage in which my heroine's love interest drinks coffee from a mason jar. I paused, eyes focusing on the words: mason jar. My mind went back to when I started the book, in the winter of 2003-2004. Some of my Powell's coworkers used mason jars with lids in place of Nalgene bottles and aluminum travel coffee mugs (I assumed that, like me, they preferred drinking from glass). I flashed ahead in time to my friends at Dove Vivi, who have been serving water at their tables from vintage quart jars since they opened in 2007 (along with the tasty corn pizza [YUM—eds] and the endearing thrift store assortment of forks, it was one of the things that made me fall in love with them). But by the time I was reading that final proof of my novel, it was 2011, and I had recently dined at two new Portland restaurants in which I was served water in wide-mouth pint Ball masons. I had mentally added them to the list of all the other cafés and restaurants and brewpubs in town already using jars for drinking glasses.

I stared at the page of my novel and thought, "This isn't a unique character trait anymore." In my mind, Glaciers takes place during Bush's second term, but it's not explicit. I just had a feeling it would read differently to people now. I tried to think of something that could stand in for the mason jar. Then I thought about cutting it. I didn't want this character to be a cliché of Portland trends.

She goes on to explain why she decided to include the jar after all. And sure, it seems like a trivial detail, but I picked up on it in my review, as did the Willamette Week.

Smith was on Think Out Loud this morning—you can listen to the segment here, if you missed it.

The New York Times had a story over the weekend that explores small online retailers' attempts to compete with Amazon's prices—citing customers whose desire to "shop local" extends to avoiding big-box retailers online as well as in their communities:

Giant e-commerce companies like Amazon are acting increasingly like their big-box brethren as they extinguish small competitors with discounted prices, free shipping and easy-to-use apps. Big online retailers had a 19 percent jump in revenue over the holidays versus 2010, while at smaller online retailers growth was just 7 percent.

The little sites are fighting back with some tactics of their own, like preventing price comparisons or offering freebies that an anonymous large site can’t. And in a new twist, they are also exploiting the sympathies of shoppers like Dr. Pollack by encouraging customers to think of them as the digital version of a mom-and-pop shop facing off against Walmart: If you can’t shop close to home, at least shop small.

The piece goes on to quote Powells' Emily Powell, who rightly observes that “People come because they want to support an independent and feel good about it, [but] you can only guilt people into coming to you for so long.” Read the whole thing.

Related: Last week Paul Constant wrote about the outcry that ensued when beloved Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl partnered with Amazon for a line of reprints. There's a great discussion of bookstore profit margins in the comments, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

This Sunday the Publication Studio hosts a reading at Portland's Crow Arts Manor featuring contributors to their recent anthology, The Frozen Moment. Edited by local writer/bartender Colin Farstad, The Frozen Moment contains stories, essays, and memories about decisive moments and turning points in people's lives.

A host of local writers will appear at Sunday's reading. Kathleen Lane, Nora Robertson, Gigi Little, Gage Mace, Kevin Meyer, Holly Goodman, Elva Redwood and Dian Greenwood will read their pieces with musical guest Michael Nelson, singer of the band Climber.

The reading will take place at E.A.T. at 850 NE 81st Ave. from 5:00 - 7:00 p.m. There is a suggested donation of $5.

Smalldoggies starts the new year in the best way possible, by continuing their tradition of hosting excellent events with notable local authors in the basement of The Blue Monk. Tonight features Monica Drake author of Clown Girl, Brian S. Ellis, local guy Roy Coughlin, and special guest Chloe Caldwell whose book of essays Legs Get Led Astray will be released in April by Portland's own Future Tense Books.

Be sure and get there on time to catch musical guest Curious Hands at 8:30. Suggested donation is $5. The Blue Monk is located at 3341 SE Belmont.

• Smalldoggies

The bluntly titled reading series Naked Girls Reading seems an obvious pairing for Portland, pride ourselves as we do on our strip clubs and bookstores—and we're finally getting a chapter of the nationwide series, thanks to local burlesque producers Rayleen Courtney and Sophie Maltease.

Naked Girls Reading is just what it sounds like: Naked ladies read aloud literary selections of their choosing (in any genre; this isn't a porn reading). The lineup for Portland's inaugural event features local burlesque performers including Courtney and Maltese, as well as Baby Le'Strange, Kit Katastrophic, and Delilah Sinn. No word yet on what they'll be be reading. Paul Constant reviewed Naked Girls Reading's Seattle arm for The Stranger; the piece actually sold me on the series more than the premise alone did:

Despite the beauty of the five naked women, the titillation part of the evening ended fairly quickly. There was no dancing, twirling, or bending over backward; legs remained primly crossed or tucked together. Unless you're a 13-year-old boy (with remarkable facial hair and a really good fake ID), you're not going to be aroused by the mere proximity of naked women sitting in front of a coffee table covered with Star Wars paraphernalia. Which means that the reading itself has to be good, or else you're going to get pretty fucking bored pretty fucking quickly. Luckily, the reading was very good.

Details: Star Theater, 13 NW 6th, Sat Jan 21, 9 pm, 21+. Tickets here.

Here's the fiction category:

KEN KESEY AWARD FOR FICTION
Judge: Phillip Lopate

Dan DeWeese of Portland You Don’t Love This Man (Harper Perennial)

Patrick DeWitt of Portland The Sisters Brothers (Ecco)

Brian Doyle of Portland Mink River (Oregon State University Press)

Matthew Stadler of Portland Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha (Publication Studio)

There are also some great nominees in the graphic literature category, the first time that award has been offered. (I am particularly fond of Stumptown, a great PDX-set noir by Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth.)

In the creative nonfiction category, both Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water and Sarahlee Lawrence's River House are nominated, two great books that represent, in different ways, the best memoir has to offer—that's a ridiculously tough choice.

Here's the whole list.