Books As you read Tao Lin’s latest novel, Taipei (Vintage Contemporaries, 250 pages, $14.95, ), you will know when a character leaves to go to the bathroom. You will know when a character goes to Ur   More

Books In August 2010, a project called PDX 2 Gulf Coast took a group of 22 Oregonians to the Gulf of Mexico to get a firsthand look at the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that had devastated the e   More

Books One of the signal pleasures of a nostalgic soap opera like AMC’s Mad Men-—or, more recently, ABC’s Pan Am—is the consistent appeal of discovering that our predecessors’ morality is roundly   More

Books Sara Wheeler’s The Magnetic North: Notes From the Arctic Circle (FSG, 315 pages, $26) quite literally describes a circle: Wheeler—a London-based journalist—travels counterclockwise, in pie-sha   More

Books Until relatively recently—within the past 50 years, say—no one had to be told not to waste their food, and certainly not as an ecological or even public issue. It was simple common sense: Who th   More

Books Cover songs are, of course, more than familiar—usually it’s the first step to becoming a musician at all. Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha (Publication Studio, 296 pages, $20)   More

Books When one thinks of things associated with the politically unstable Balkans region, modern poetry isn’t exactly at the top of the list, although the    More

Books “The first time I put on a dress, I was 37.” That’s a surprising statement coming from female impersonator Walter Cole, better known as Darcelle XV, doyenne of the West Coast’s longest-runn   More

Books In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a young man named Ishmael leaves his home in New York for several years of adventures aboard a whaling ship. After sailing the seas collecting sperm oil, when it c   More

Books If you run in certain circles, you hear it every day: The publishing houses are dying, and books are therefore dying. Writers, we presume, are all also dying. The    More