Books The local cultural vessel known as the Back Room is about to embark on a new voyage. Literary honcho Matthew Stadler, who has overseen the "occasional series of presentation/symposia/bacchanals" sinc ...   More

Books Diana Abu-Jaber can't stay in one spot—in a geographic or literary sense. Currently, the fortysomething Portland State University English professor spends each fall in the Rose City, winters 3,0 ...   More

Books Viewed from Portland, the publishing world can seem far away, sequestered in the distant East. Author friends have informed me that to be a writer you need to move to New York, where supposedly every ...   More

Books In ancient Greek times Thales said that water was the primary element, and that everything else was derived from it. Anaximenes said no: It's all condensed or thinned from soulful air. Heraclitus was ...   More

Books A product of the tactical disarray that can be DIY self-publishing, Portland writer Mike Daily's second novel, ALARM (Stovepiper Books Media, 212 pages, $19.99), follows Mick O'Grady through his down- ...   More

Books I still remember buying my first comic book. It was 1987, and I stood in a comic-book shop in Gresham. My hands trembled as they held an issue of Transformers, something that inspired in my heart a s ...   More

Books "Not knowing something essential makes you more involved," says somebody in Michael Ondaatje's long-awaited new novel, Divisadero (Knopf, 273 pages, $25). The line is a wink from the novelist himself, ...   More

Books World travel was once a taxing affair. Beyond the hoary old Grand Tour destinations of Europe, an adventurer needed tycoon cash or brass genitalia of Indiana Jones grade. These days, though, destinati ...   More

Books When Ian McEwan was a much younger author with a penchant for writing clinical tales of death and incest—perverse, rudderless parables of the bruising and bruised—the British press dubbed ...   More

Books Khaled Hosseini's first novel, The Kite Runner, struck a national nerve on so many levels it would be unfair to expect his second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns (Riverhead Books, 372 pages, $25.95), t ...   More