Books Refresh, Refresh, by Benjamin Percy (Gray Wolf Press, 249 pages, $15) This native Oregonian’s tales of absent fathers and longing sons, dreamers and murderous avengers can be taken as individua ...   More

Books We’ve all got the one friend who won’t read anything unless the author is obscure, foreign, dead or all three, which makes Christmahanukwanzaakah shopping downright terrifying. You still r ...   More

Books Winter in Portland! Isn’t it great? You go to work in the dark and come home in the dark. But despite the cold (and dark), there is warmth and security in a crackling fire, and Norwegian novelis ...   More

Books Let’s be clear about one thing: VoiceCatcher (Lulu Press, $17.25, 244 pages) deserves to be read. This anthology is a labor of love—the 10-woman editorial board sifted through 300 submiss ...   More

Books “I don’t recommend the writing life,” declares Poe Ballantine. “At least, not the one where you move around a lot, live alone and work odd jobs.” That life is the subject ...   More

Books A shadow falls in the American memory between the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War that ended in 1848. Where public memory—and high-school history teachers—have failed, UCLA histor ...   More

Books Historians have long pointed to Lewis and Clark as the rare example of a dual command that actually worked. Most such ventures with two leaders fail, the theory goes, because followers need one leade ...   More

Books If we are to believe the movies and all the stories—and we do, we can’t help it—writers are a bunch of drunks. Hemingway, like the manly men of his age, was a girl-drink drunk, thick ...   More

Books Stephen Colbert wants to impregnate you. And not just you: The host/main character of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report says he has way too many opinions to fit onto a half-hour nightly show, &ldq ...   More

Books According to Shalom Auslander, God is a four-letter word. Or, to be more exact, he’s taken to referring to the holiest of holies as “you fucking fuck.” (OK, that’s 14 letters.) ...   More