James Bernard Frost signing copies of A Very Minor Prophet after his downtown Powell's reading in April.

Hawthorne’s spring 2012 title A Very Minor Prophet, by James Bernard Frost, has been doing great with a lot of buzz building around it with the film option recently sold and today’s announcement that the foreign rights to the novel have been sold to Ayrinti Publications in Istanbul! Jim Frost has been doing all sorts of fun readings and events as a part of his spring book tour including a reading at Powell’s City of Books on April 11th a reading at Voodoo Doughnut Too on May 6th and several book events in New Mexico, Arizona and Washington. And there are still plenty of A Very Minor Prophet book events coming up this spring and summer.

Jim will be reading and doing a Q&A after at the newly relocated Independent Publishing Resource Center this Friday, May 18th for IPRC’s certificate program graduation at 6:30pm. And Dante’s will be featuring an A Very Minor Prophet book party this Sunday night, May 20th that promises to be a crazy fun book event with all sorts of special guests, including Portland band Buck Williams, and a PBR sponsored literary Gong Show (!!) with all sorts of prizes. The Dante’s book party starts at 8pm, doors open at 7pm. We’re really looking forward to both of these and hope that you will make it out for them!

What the critics are saying about A Very Minor Prophet…

J. David Santen Jr., The Oregonian, March 24, 2012

Alison Hallett, Portland Mercury, on March 22, 2012

Portland Monthly Magazine, April 2012

Quenby Moone, The Nervous Breakdown, on April 12, 2012

Other People with Brad Listi, April 22, 2012

Back Page with Jody Seay, April 10, 2012

KBAC Santa Fe interview with Honey April 2012

Scott Driscoll on Caleb Powell’s blog, May 10, 2012

PBR Book Club, April 16 2012

Northwest Book Lovers, April 1, 2012

“For all its graphic splatter of Voodoo donuts, Stumptown coffee, ecstatic bike rides, and rambling sermons delivered by a midget preacher to a modest congregation of anarchists, prostitutes, lesbians, and zinesters, Frost’s novel, aside from its likely appeal to twenty-somethings swilling their own PBR-fueled search for identity, is really, at its heart, a touching love story. As well, to his credit, Frost offers a pretty authentic portrait of Portland, Oregon’s underbelly, not to mention life in the damp chilly Northwest.” — Scott Driscol on Caleb Powell’s blog

“Frost’s provocative story crawls through the guts of a subculture, of inner eastside hipsters, Stumptown grounds, high bikes and dive bars, occasionally pedaling free of the farce and rain and disaffection to ascend the city’s hills and the walls of the Columbia River Gorge. His double-columned, letter-sized pages incorporate an anarchic cut-and-paste aesthetic, furthering this novel Portland narrative, which is itself a gospel worth spreading.” — J. David Santen Jr., The Oregonian

A Very Minor Prophet, by James Bernard Frost
Spring 2012
Buy it directly from Hawthorne Books for 30% off, shipping and handling on us!

And I will always love you...

The smell of a full city block of books is akin to a heavy-duty muscle relaxant to any true bibliophile. Powell’s Books is the largest independent bookstore in the world and in true independent business fashion it loves to support other indie businesses, like us! The brilliance of Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel A Chronology of Water, recent winner of the Oregon Book Award Reader’s Choice Award, could not have been contained. However, Powell’s Books staff helped spread the word for many, many moons by showcasing it as numerous staff picks and placing that stunning cover within eyesight of shoppers continuously.

Powell’s Books is a Mecca for any Portlander with an inkling of literary lust. So if you are looking for a specific book or just want to de-stress with a little aimless wandering head to your local anomaly of an independent bookstore.

Powell’s City of Books
www.powells.com
1005 W Burnside
Portland, Oregon 97209
503.228.4651

MemoirFest at University of Oregon Saturday, May 12th features Hawthorne Books author Lidia Yuknavitch!

On May 12th University of Oregon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society Northwest Women Writer’s Symposium presents MemoirFest a symposium with top Northwest women writers. Hawthorne Books author Lidia Yuknavitch will be one of the morning panelists. Yuknavitch is the award-winning author of The Chronology of Water. The symposium will be held on Saturday, May 12 9am-4pm.

The symposium will feature many prominent women authors, editors, and professors disussing topics such as writing and publishing memoirs, truth & authenticity in memoir, sense of place in memoir, and ethics of writing about family and children. We hope that some of you can make it — sounds fantastic!

University of Oregon’s MemoirFest
When: Saturday, May 12, 2012 9am- 4pm
Cost: The symposium is free but seating is limited. You can reserve a seat by emailing your RSVP to Peggy McConnell, CSWS: peggym(at)uoregon.edu
Where: Gerlinger Hall, Alumni Lounge, 1468 University, UO campus

Come out for Jim's Dante's Sinferno book party 8pm Sunday, May 20th....

The life of the Hawthorne intern is mysteriously very under-documented. Today, we give you a little peek into the obscure reality of a day-in-the-life of one—notice the dashes; this is not to be confused with Morgan Spurlock’s recent Hulu venture. (I’m really poor and can’t afford the cost of a copyright infringement lawsuit). This is the true story of the beautiful merger of a man, a midget, a small press, and a little intern with big dreams.

James Bernard Frost’s new novel, A Very Minor Prophet, launched April 1, 2012 and focuses on the eccentric antics of protagonist Barth Flynn, and his interaction with the unique denizens of Portland, Oregon. The novel revels in the world of the weird: post-apocalyptic tall bike gangs, sagacious midget prophets, Eucharistic re-visioning of donuts and coffee. A Very Minor Prophet is a celebration of humanism, anti-consumerism, and the thriving world of the unconventional.

One of Hawthorne’s most creatively-formatted and imaginative novels demands a creative tour beyond the assumed scope of typical book tour-dom. A Very Minor Prophet is literary subterfuge; it dismisses the mainstream and, instead, opts for the creative fringe. The 8 ½ x 11 format and zine artwork-infusion are prime examples of this offbeat literary attitude. The uncommon construction of the novel parallels the quirky Portland individuals who populate its pages.

So, what do you get when you mix a midget in a cassock, Voodoo Doughnuts, and Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR) grenades? Why, an epic book tour, that’s what! My first intern assignment was to figure out how to integrate the novel’s adoration of PBR with a real-world, real-time thing. Let’s just say that the distributor of the protagonist’s beer of choice (and mine) is like the hops-illuminati. After blood, sweat, tears and a little cross-coastal communication, I made contact! A big thanks is owed to the Rock, Paper, Scissors PBR crew up in Philly—I wasn’t kidding about my cross-coastal detective initiative— and the badass Rose City Rollers. The kind folks at PBR agreed to jump into the literary fold and hook up with Hawthorne on an event. It only took about a million emails and some mild stalking, but it was totally worth it. As for the venue, the choice was clear: Dante’s.

From appeasing and winning over the owner of Dante’s, to working around stringent OLCC specifications, to metaphorical eyelash-batting with the PBR rep to keep him happy, this event was quite a handful. After much ado (and I would be kidding myself if I thought the planning part of this event was over), we have an awesome event lined up: A Very Minor Prophet and Hawthorne will be taking over Dante’s May 20th at 8 p.m. The night will be chocked-full of delicious debauchery: a reading from the novel, a full-scale Gong Show with PBR swag (yes, you read that right, a Gong Show), a performance by Portland band Buck Williams, and the delightfully-wicked Sinferno show. Seriously, we were not kidding around with this event.

But Dante’s isn’t the only Portland staple recognized in this impending tour. Jim will be/has done readings at Powell’s, Voodoo Doughnut, Stumptown Coffee Roaster, and Mississippi Pizza Pub. Jim’s reading venues will not only feed your mind, but also your stomach.

For Jim’s entire book tour schedule, see our News, Events & Readings page.

A Very Minor Prophet Book Party
8pm (doors open 7pm) Sunday, May 20th
Dante’s
350 West Burnside, Portland 97209

A Very Minor Prophet takes on a Portland subculture through the lens of Barth Flynn, a barista floating through life. As he meets Booker, a dwarf preacher, he enters a zany world of underground sermons. Barth helps distribute Booker’s sermons in zine form. This unique story required a unique style of book. It needed to have the edge of the zines.

Frost includes cut-out images and enlarged fonts that make for a great zine-like feel. The images bring to life this gritty world and allow the reader an intimate experience with the characters. The zines give a dynamic reading experience while breaking away from the normal patterns of block text in most other novels.

Discover the art of zines and how to make your own at the Independent Publishing Resource Center. The IPRC has some big news as well — they just moved to a new and much larger location. Now you’ll have more opportunities to grab a spot in one of their highly coveted workshops. The new location is 1001 SE Division across the street from the Ford Building.

Get inspired by James Bernard Frost’s A Very Minor Prophet at his upcoming book event at IPRC on Saturday, May 19th at 7:30pm, at a Zine 101 course or one of their many other workshops! 


A city bus with fan artwork giving props to PBR...

Many of our recent posts have highlighted aspects of A Very Minor Prophet ranging from Portland bike culture to the hipster scene, to the book’s zine format. It makes sense since yesterday — April 1st and therefore April Fool’s Day — was the book’s launch date. Check out photos from the book launch party here.

Lately, we’ve been busy bees compiling lists of book clubs and booking events for Jim’s book tour. Thanks to Chelsee Payne, one of the other winter interns here at Hawthorne, PBR will be sponsoring a book event at Dante’s Sinferno on Sunday, May 20th at 10:30pm.

For those who don’t know, PBR stands for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Why PBR, you ask? PBR cans are great objects to throw at dwarf preachers! Well, at least in Jim’s A Very Minor Prophet. PBR plays a big role in the novel and many of the characters drink a whole lot of it as well as throw cans of it. Ouch!

PBR has been around for a long time, at least before the beginning of the 20th century. Their sales fell in the 1970s, but recently sales have spiked in areas throughout the US. PBR has become a part of the hipster scene in Portland and Jim couldn’t resist including it in A Very Minor Prophet.

PBR inspires fan artwork which is proudly displayed in their art gallery Drink & Draw. Some of the art ranges from the detailed look of a masterpiece to the graphic look of a comic strip to rough sketches akin to fan fiction art.

PBR Book Club

PBR even brings together book lovers as I found when I was doing my research for book clubs. I stumbled upon a small PBR book club based in Kansas and after querying them they chose A Very Minor Prophet as their book club book of the month. In a few weeks they’ll be talking with Jim via Skype for their book club meeting! Dedicated to reading and discussing good books and sitting back sipping a PBR, who can imagine a better way to spend your time?

A Very Minor Prophet
James Bernard Frost
Pub. date April 1, 2012

James Bernard Frost reading from A Very Minor Prophet at the book launch party for A Very Minor Prophet at Mississippi Pizza Pub.

We are so excited to be releasing A Very Minor Prophet by James Bernard Frost on April 1st. This unique book demands attention for its excellent art, design and narrative. It’s already getting people excited with reviews in the Oregonian and Portland Mercury and we had a fantastic book launch party for it last week. You can check out photos from the party on our Facebook page if you weren’t able to make it. The Rumpus Book Club picked the novel for their early release February book of the month. The events below in Portland and beyond are not to be missed! There will most likely be more planned in the next few weeks. If you want to schedule an event please contact lcrain@hawthornebooks.com.

Wednesday, April 11th @ 7:30pm
Powell’s City of Books reading
1005 West Burnside, Portland, OR 97209

Tuesday, April 17th @ 7pm
Reading Frenzy reading
921 SW Oak Street, Portland, OR 97205

Friday, April 20th @ 7pm
Books Inc Marina reading
2251 Chestnut St., San Francisco, CA 94123

Monday, April 23rd @ 7pm
Changing Hands Bookstore reading
6428 S McClinntock Dr., Tempe, AZ 85283

Wednesday, April 25th @ 3pm
Betterday Coffee reading
905 W. Alameda Santa Fe, NM 87501

Sunday, May 6th @ 1pm
Voodoo Doughnut Too book signing
1501 NE Davis, Portland, OR 97232

Friday, May 11th @ 7pm
Elliott Bay Book Company reading
1521 10th Ave Seattle, WA 98122

Saturday, May 19th @ 7:30pm
IPRC reading/signing
917 SW Oak St. #218 Portland, OR 97205-2805

Sunday, May 20th @ 10:30pm
Dante’s Sinferno book event with cabaret-style entertainment and live music
350 West Burnside, Portland, OR 97209

First Thursday, July 5th @ 7pm
Stumptown Downtown book event
128 SW 3rd Ave Portland, Or 97204

A Very Minor Prophet, James Bernard Frost
Purchase the book directly from Hawthorne Books
April, 2012

Hawthorne Books intern, Ginger Craft, thinks that hot coffee and A Very Minor Prophet go very well together.

When many think of Portland the image of rainy days come to mind. As we experience our traditionally drawn out winter the best thing to do is grab a cup of something warm and a new book so I decided to do some Hawthorne Books pairings — drinks + books.

As we head into spring here at Hawthorne we have an exciting title to look forward to — A Very Minor Prophet by James Bernard Frost launches in a couple short weeks on April Fools’ Day. A Very Minor Prophet needs the strongest cup of Stumptown Coffee you can muster. (Check out Jim’s Stumptown Downtown First Thursday event on Thursday, July 5th at 7pm!) The novel praises the pillars of Portland: coffee, cycling and Voodoo Doughnut. (Jim also has a book event at Voodoo Doughnut Too on Sunday, May 6th at 1pm!) You are introduced to Barth Flynn, a barista that encounters Booker a dwarf preacher who allows Barth to finally believe in something. A Very Minor Prophet is filled with powerful zine-like images that are perfectly paired with a simple mug of Stumptown.

Our fall 2011 title The Luminist, by David Rocklin set in Ceylon — colonia Sri Lanka — should be enjoyed alongside an aromatic tea. This novel tells the heartfelt story of a Sri Lankan servant boy named Eligius and his bond with his British employer, Catherine. As they photograph the haunting history all around them they grow together. A delicate tea ia an excellent pairing for this powerful novel.

Aftermath: Stories is a collection of stories by Scott Nadelson that brings to life suburban Jewish New Jersey. The story “Oslo” uncovers the lives of a Jewish family through the struggles of a thirteen-year-old boy. In the title story a couple attempts to enter a trial separation only to realize that they desperately want to hang on to the marriage. This pairing should be a bit more complicated and full bodied so I’m picking something a little stronger: a dry red wine so you can enjoy these starkly honest and moving stories with a big glass of red.
 
A Very Minor Prophet, James Bernard Frost
The Luminist, David Rocklin
Aftermath, Scott Nadelson

James Bernard Frost's novel A Very Minor Prophet will hit bookstore shelves on April 1st.

In this second installment of my Q&A with James Bernard Frost about his spring 2012 novel A Very Minor Prophet he and I discussed his spirituality and how that is important throughout the book. We also get a glimpse of what he’s currently working on.

Why dive into the life of a misfit preacher? In what way has religion or spirituality played a role in your life?

Religion, at its core, is a set of rules by which to get along with your fellow man.  Spirituality, at its core, is the sense of peacefulness one begins to feel after abiding by those rules. All the other stuff about virgin births, miracles, and resurrection is metaphor. There’s a whole tradition of American religious thinkers and writers who have tried to make these rather obvious points, from Benjamin Franklin to Kurt Vonnegut, and yet millions of intelligent, well-fed Americans live under these really bizarre group delusions about things like heaven and magic underwear. I really don’t understand it, which is why I wanted to explore it in a novel.

Why frame much of the story around the backdrop of the 2004 election? In what way does George W. Bush represent a symbol for this subculture to collectively fight against?


Honestly, I began writing the book in 2004 during the height of those elections, and the book came out of this communal feeling of being ineffectual.  So many of us couldn’t believe the nutty things the Bush administration had gotten away with and hadn’t been held accountable for: starting a war under false pretenses, suspending the right to a fair trial, state-sanctioned torture.  This was America, and Americans didn’t do that sort of thing. It was humiliating. We all wanted to stand on a milk crate in a crowded room of Republicans and scream. And yet…so few people did.



What’s fascinating to me is what’s happened since and how much more relevant this book has gotten.  I end the book with a single image of a milk crate.  To me, it’s sort of the central metaphor for the Occupy movement.  There’s a whole generation of ineffectual people, who know things are very wrong and also have no idea how to change those things, and the only way they can even begin to figure that out, is to get on top of a milk crate half-naked, shout a bunch of disconnected political gibberish, and get sprayed into submission by Robocops.

 It’s like Booker was actually born, and his name was Occupy.

Is coffee a spiritual experience or a type of ‘holy water’ for you as well?


Yes.  This is another way in which I was a pre-hipster.  Near my college in the last ’80s there was this all night doughnut shop where all the gays and misfits of my university hung out. It was really bad coffee, but I very quickly discovered that the only drug that cut into my ADD and allowed me to get work done was caffeine.  Ever since then coffee has been my morning elixir and my muse.  Strangely, I’m most productive in a crowded coffee shop with a rocket-fuel strength French-press.

What is next for your writing? Are you working on another novel? If so what is it about and how have you been inspired recently?


I’m not ready to share the storyline of my next novel, but I will say that it deals with our American obsession with time and money. I’m closing in on the halfway mark, and am excited about it in a way that I’ve never been excited before about a novel. While writing A Very Minor Prophet, I shared a writing group with the author Chuck Palahniuk, from whom I learned some story structure and narrative techniques that I hadn’t been taught in my MFA program. It’s been a joy putting those techniques into practice on a new piece, and it’s shortened my production time considerably. It took me five years to write A Very Minor Prophet—a painful experience in many ways—and I feel like Chuck granted me superpowers, so that I can reasonably finish a well-written, ready-for-film-adaptation novel in nine months.

For all your odd side jobs I was wondering how you got into tax preparation and is that something of a passion for you or a means to make a little money?


Ha. Ha. Ha.  So here’s the deal: I have a reoccurring disease in which every two years I decide that being a writer is the dumbest profession one can have on the planet, and that I should make use of my latent math skills and do something truly useful.  In the last eight years, I have twice taken a semester’s worth of biology and chemistry classes with the thought that I would go to medical school, once taken advance calculus courses to go to engineering school, and once taken an LSAT course so that I could go to law school.  This year’s reiteration of that disease was the thought that I would get a CPA.   The minute I obtained my tax preparer’s license, the absolute terror of getting paid $10/hour to work at H&R Block prevented me from even applying for a job.

The good news is that the experience led me to start a novel featuring a world-weary tax preparer.

Read Part 1 of this Q&A

Coming soon to a bookstore near you! Pub. date April, 1st 2012.

Recently I was able to ask James Bernard Frost a few questions about his newest novel, A Very Minor Prophet. He offered some great insight into his inspiration for the creation of the book. I hope that you enjoy our dialogue that should get you even more excited about picking up a copy of A Very Minor Prophet due out April 1st.

After your first novel, which was much more conventional in design, why did you choose to go for a more graphic and zine look in A Very Minor Prophet? How much collaboration with the designer did you get to have?


The zine look to A Very Minor Prophet: A Novel was a case of the writing driving the book design, rather than me setting out to purposely write a book of unusual design. In choosing to write a novel whose narrator was a zinester, I was basically forced to include zine illustrations in the book, which by their nature are intended to be crude and DIY. 

I was very fortunate to have found a publisher in Hawthorne Books who was willing to take this crudeness and make it professional through thoughtful book design. They did some amazingly creative things with it: the 8 ½ by 11 sizing to make the original art legible; the double columned interior pages that both increased readability and mirrored the book’s biblical themes; the almost Gregorian font choices—these were all ideas that Hawthorne’s book designer thought of, with me looking on and more or less cheering. I feel blessed to have found a publisher who increased the literary value of the book through design work.


Who is the real life subject of the photographed version of Booker? Was the character of Booker based on this person or have an inspirational connection?



I assume you’re talking about the cutout, cropped, and over-photocopied photographs of Herve Villechaize, which Flynn uses to represent Booker in his zines. I’m not even sure where to start with Herve. Except to say, yes, he was very much the inspiration for Booker.



First of all, way back before Shepard Fairey became the graphic designer for the Obama campaign, he was a punk skater who plastered the streets of San Francisco with thousands of stickers of pictures of Andre the Giant. Soon after, parody stickers began to show up, one of which included Herve. When I was in my 20s I would see these stickers everywhere, and thought it was cool that there was this devil-may-care underground art community growing underneath the money-grubbing of the dot-com world.



So that’s one connection with Herve and DIY culture. Secondly, Herve rather famously refused to be called a dwarf or a “little person,” preferring to be called a “midget,” making a similar decision to take ownership of a derogatory term to the way the gay movement recaptured “fag” or the feminist movement captured “bitch.” I have a respect for people who claim their weaknesses, and loved it as a base for a character.



Finally, well, I’m old enough to remember watching Fantasy Island, and on that show Tattoo had such a positive, imperturbable worldview, despite his disability. It made a great ready-made character, someone who had no fear about being the butt of all jokes.

Do you consider yourself a hipster? Why or why not? Do you think of it as a glorified or negative term?


I was a hipster before there was a term called hipster.  Back in the early ’90s, in San Francisco, we used to raid thrift store racks for flannels and skinny brown Wrangler jeans before people knew to do such things.  It was a way to get cheap clothes and look fun and eccentric at parties.  Everyone was an aspiring artist or writer, went to Burning Man, and thought the whole dot-com money frenzy was whacked.



The term hipster sort of crept up on me.  I think it’s what happens when a trend goes on for too long.  It actually makes me sad how derogatory the term has become because the roots of “hipsterism” grew out of a desire to pursue art, music, or writing at the expense of more lucrative careers.  It was a response to over commercialization.  Now, as is the way with cultural co-opting, that movement has been commercialized itself. 



Anyway, I’m not a hipster anymore.  I’m a dad with two kids who hasn’t attended a music show in ten years.

To be continued!