COMIC BOOK TATTOO, Various Artists

The Portland/Tori Amos/Sandman connection revealed.

Books Comics and music. On the surface, they seem a strange combination—it’s not like you can weld music to print the way you can build a soundtrack into a film. Still, in the past few years the ...   More

 

Wednesday, July 16, 2008 Brandon Seifert

David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

It’s like Hamlet, but with puppies.

Books Let’s stop rewriting Hamlet. It’s a great play, but it’s done now. It was written; now it’s read or performed. Rewriting it is like reheating leftovers: Mainly you just think a ...   More

 

Wednesday, July 9, 2008 JOHN MINERVINI

While They Slept, Kathryn Harrison

A triple murder hits close to home.

Books “He came up. He had blood all over him, and he said they were all dead.” Those are the words 16-year-old Jody Gilley said to the 911 operator after her 18-year-old brother, Billy, beat the ...   More

 

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 WHITNEY HAWKE

Andre Dubus III, The Garden Of Last Days

A stripper, a big tipper and two towers.

Books The Garden of Last Days (Norton, 384 pages, $24.95) sets itself up to be pulp, but give it time. Author Andre Dubus III, who also wrote House of Sand and Fog, has achieved some Houdini-caliber misdire ...   More

 

Wednesday, June 25, 2008 JOHN MINERVINI

Joseph O’Neill Netherland

A new novel set in post-9/11 New York simply isn’t cricket (it’s Seinfeld).

Books Khamraj “Chuck” Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian immigrant of Indian descent, is found floating facedown, murdered, in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. Chuck is a philosopher/schemer who dreams of ...   More

 

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 MATT BUCKINGHAM

Sasa Stanisic, How The Soldier Repairs The Gramophone

What kids talk about when they talk about war.

Books “I want to make unfinished things,” says the young Aleksandar Krsmanovic in Sasa Stanisic’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (Grove Press, 345 pages, $24). He will paint &ldquo ...   More

 

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 MATTHEW KORFHAGE

Betty Roberts, With Grit And By Grace

A woman on top, for all the right reasons.

Books One of Oregon’s most redeeming qualities is this: One person can make a difference here. In the case of Betty Roberts, that difference is huge; and when the history is written of Oregon in th ...   More

 

Wednesday, June 11, 2008 RICHARD H. MEEKER

Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes

Finally, some valuable intelligence on the agency that was supposed to have provided it for us.

Books If only the Central Intelligence Agency had ever analyzed itself as clearly as New York Times reporter Tim Weiner has done in his penetrating history of the agency’s first 60 years. Perhaps Wein ...   More

 

Wednesday, June 4, 2008 HENRY STERN

Brendan Mullen, Live At The Masque

The burn-hot, burn-fast punk life, while it lasted.

Books In 1977, Scotsman Brendan Mullen, self-described in his latest book, Live at the Masque: Nightmare in Punk Alley, as “a recent illegal immigrant to the USA,” was looking for “a cheap ...   More

 

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Adam Leith Gollner, The Fruit Hunters

Books Adam Leith Gollner’s first book, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession (Scribner, 272 pages, $25), reads like a travel guide through a Technicolor universe of ...   More

 

Wednesday, May 21, 2008 Patrick Haas