Cutlass Press Gins up an Event to Launch KL Pereira's A Dream Between Two Rivers

By Nick Fuller Googins

Jamaica Plain, Boston 

Sept. 6, 2017

KL Pereira’s collection, A Dream Between Two Rivers, had its launch party at Boston’s Papercuts bookstore on Sept. 6, and it was a night of firsts: the first story collection put out by the independent bookstore’s publishing arm, Cutlass Press; the first stop for Pereira on her 12-city tour; and the first book launch I've been to that offered a preposterously large bottle of Tanqueray for the audience's refreshment.

Pereira at Papercuts
(photo by Katie Eelman)

There was also prosecco on ice, and most went for this chilled option after a brutally humid day and on an evening that wasn’t doing much to cut it. Plastic cups sweated in our hands as we waited for Pereira.

She appeared decked out a Ouija board-themed dress, appropriate given that the September moon was nearly full and that Pereira’s stories run the gamut from dark to darker to darkest. She read a “darker” one, her collection’s opening, “The Dark Valley of Your Lungs,” in which a girl with a killer voice (literally) finds a mentor of sorts in a woman with silver hands and feet. The story, creepy on its own, ends in a cemetery, and if that isn’t enough creep, know that it was written in one too: Pereira revealed during the Q&A that she’d penned the first draft one evening in nearby Forest Hills Cemetery. If there had been anybody in the audience wondering how one gets away with rocking a Ouija board dress, nobody was wondering it anymore.

Literary horror has long been in Pereira’s wheelhouse. She told the audience of an archeological dig through the mounds of school-work that her mother had saved. She’d recently excavated her earliest stories, composed at age nine:

• “The Haunted School”
• “The Secret of the Old Piano” (“pilfered from Nancy Drew,” Pereira confessed)  
• “The Fishing Trip” (spoiler alert: a shark devours the young narrator and her father)

In response to a question regarding the generative process, Pereira explained that she’s “always been interested in the weird” and hails from a “family of storytellers.” Her ancestry stretches back to Cape Verde, Colombia, Italy, and the Azores, providing her with a rich library of folktales and legends to draw upon.

It was fitting that A Dream Between Two Rivers launched in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood because Pereira wrote most of the collection there in 2009. She lives now with the witches and the spirits up in Salem, but the audience greeted her as if she’d never left. When she admitted that she was pretty nervous, and a friend had advised her to picture the audience as cats to help, the crowd erupted in reassuring meows.

After the Q&A, I asked Pereira what she’d done earlier that day. She’d been selected for the MBTA’s “Books on the T” program, so she and her publishing team had been guerrilla-dropping copies of A Dream Between Two Rivers in subway stations around the city, she explained. What this means for the rest of us is that Pereira’s unique brand of literary horror is right now making its way through the underground arteries of greater Boston. Innocent commuting souls: beware.

Kindle 2: Evangelist? Adopter? Skeptic? Which are you?

A guest post by Paul Vidich

The Kindle 2, Amazon’s new product has generated a lot of buzz about the future of e-books. Buzz is good because it demonstrates the interest of a community in the promise of a product. This condition, however, is often directly related to the desperation of the community, which is certainly palpable in the corridors of the humbled print empires.

So, what of the Kindle 2? What of the transition to a digital reader such as Kindle, iPhone, or the Sony eReader, all of which promise to enable electronic acquisition and consumption of text on simple to use, portable devices? Format transitions are new to books, which arguably haven’t had a technological shift since Gutenberg, but format shifts have occurred five times in fifty years in the music industry. Are there lessons?

Music’s current format shift is moving from physically distributed goods to electronically distributed goods, and movies are marching down the same path, although several years behind. Typically, consumers don’t adopt new formats unless there is a high order of magnitude improvement in experience – that’s what it takes to get past the switching costs, old libraries made obsolete, new behavior to adopt, etc. This was the case in the transitions from LP to CD and VHS to DVD. Digital music (e.g. iTunes) has caught on because it offers several improvements on the CD: a more convenient retailing experience (browse at home in a store that never has stock outs), ease of acquisition (a download takes less than a minute), the ability to buy a track and not the whole album, comprehensive storage and easy library navigation on the PC, and a simple transfer to a portable listening device with lots of memory.

The conversion to digital music has occurred without improving the sound quality, a major factor in prior format shifts. In fact, the acoustic quality of the digital download is inferior, some say significantly inferior, to the CD. But that hasn’t made a difference to consumers, who value the new experience holistically. Consumers buy downloads, even when the songs are still free on p2p networks, because they value the chain of experiences. People listen to music, but they pay for an experience.

So, what if any, lessons does this hold for e-books? The Kindle 2 has one remarkable quality and several features that are nice, but my experience, and that of my unscientific sample of other new Kindle 2 owners, suggests that there will have to be several rounds of ergonomic innovation, presentation and display enhancements, and content product ideation for a mass market to adopt the Kindle.

My Kindle 2 arrived via Fedex with my user account already established, so the unpacked device, once turned on, synched immediately to the Amazon store, and I was able to make a purchase without typing name or credit card information. Amazon has made buying and downloading e-books very easy, but the promise of flat screen reading falls, well, flat. The screen is clear, but words on the screen lack a book’s restful quality, the wonderful feeling that the text has been stamped or pressed in place, the feeling of permanence.

If you’re a book lover, repeated reading on the Kindle may help you overcome the loss of satisfying tactility, in the same way that we’ve all learned to accommodate reading PDF files on screen. For me at least, this means that so long as I have a book nearby I’ll always choose the book over Kindle. But books are heavy and the Kindle weighs less than a pound, so I might use the Kindle to take e-books on business trips or on vacation, or a college student might buy an electronic textbook, or even a chapter of a text book (if sold that way), because the trade-offs of weight, convenience, and experience favor the digital version. The Kindle 2, in short, feels more like an evolutionary device and not the revolutionary device that previously transformed the music and movie businesses as they changed from tape to CD, or VHS to DVD.

This week has seen two noteworthy announcements about e-readers. Sony, which expects to release a wireless web connected e-reader upgrade in 2009, announced that its site is making available for free half a million public domain downloadable books. Fujitsu announced the release of a color screen e-reader in Japan ($1,000). And Plastic Logic, a venture start-up that’s raised $200 million, will ship mid-2009 an e-reader that links to newspapers, magazines, and fictionwise.com, the e-book retailer Barnes and Noble recently purchased.

Sony’s free book announcement does begin to change the appeal of an e-reader, although not the consumer’s preference for books. Consumers adopted new entertainment devices (CD players and DVD players) when there was sufficient content to enjoy the device. Sony’s announcement begins to enhance the consumer value proposition. After all, the unique attribute of text is that a word written in 1840 is the identical word used today. The text of Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, published that year, is identical to the text available in contemporary reprints. Technology has not changed the intrinsic value of reading the written word, whereas technology has been fundamental to the continued improvement in audio and video entertainment experiences.

Sony’s decision to open up 500,000 public domain downloads for free, is a significant value proposition. And, Sony’s offer is a fraction of the many millions of public domain documents (books, essays, manuscripts, archive materials, etc.) that have been digitized in the past ten years. Think of Borges, whose seminal short story, “The Library of Babel,” broached the notion of the “catalogue of catalogues,” which in today’s terminology would become “the index of indexes.” The question is: How does all that free content change the value proposition for e-readers, and how does an e-reader differ from a small laptop computer or from iPhone reading applications? The answer, no doubt, has already been written, but we’ll have to wait for it to appear.

Guest Post: Paul Vidich on Digital Distribution of Short Stories

(Note: This post is in response to the Sept. 10 post, Mixed Books? Mixed Feelings, below.)

Paul Vidich left Time Warner in 2006 after 19 years as a senior executive in its AOL and Warner Music divisions, where he was executive vice-president in charge of worldwide strategy and business development. At Warner Music, he negotiated the first major label license agreement with Steve Jobs for iTunes, which set the precedent for Apple’s subsequent acquisition of music rights from the other music majors. Vidich left Time Warner to pursue a career in writing and now attends the MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers-Newark. He is a board member of Poets & Writers and other cultural institutions. His short stories have been published in several online and print publications, including Wordriot.org, Wheelhousemagazine.com, and Mrbellersneighborhood.com.

The nature of the Internet is that it doesn't respect forms that are tied to technologies that it makes irrelevant; the album was the creation of the long playing disc and then the CD--artists recorded albums to fill the space available. Of course, the artists who worked in the medium saw their collections as the work itself, and consumers didn't necessary agree. They often remembered or cared for one or two tracks.

The analogy to books only partly holds up. Certainly, the consumer will have the same desire to pick and choose digital stories according to preference, which threatens any collection or compilation. And to the extent that reduces the buying of traditional books it will change the book industry. On the other hand, many of the consumers who actually read (those important educated buyers of books) have not been sold yet on the value of a digitally distributed book. Many (most?) still like to own the physical product.

I suspect this may change over time. When that changes happens I doubt that consumers will buy digital stories with the purpose of downloading and printing them into custom collections. More likely they'll download, store on a drive, and print them individually as a convenience to read, as they would today with a magazine article. This whole area is quite fascinating and still in its early stages. My take is this: If the technology permits it and the consumer finds value in it, it will happen, industry/profits/intransigence/paranoia notwithstanding.