Books Journalist and former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni has always been proficient in the language of eating. As a toddler he’d plow through two hamburgers, leaving his mouth covered ...   More

Books For most of America’s early history, when all food was local, the best of our emergent cuisine came from the wild. But almost as soon as some of our foundational foods were born from the rich st ...   More

Books Aimee Bender’s new novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Doubleday, 304 pages, $25.95), is based on a neat little conceit: that little Rose Edelstein, aged almost 9 years, can taste the h ...   More

Books The May 2 fire that burned down Great Northwest Bookstore, where Walt Curtis lived in the basement, destroyed the Portland poet and painter’s possessions and archives but reminded the community ...   More

Books Having completed his vivisection of ’80s apathy and excess with the peerless American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis took his gleaming scalpel to literary genres, transforming conspiracy-thriller pul ...   More

Books When the next 9/11-style terrorist attack strikes the U.S., the plot may include bringing down commercial airliners, but it won’t be led by Osama bin Laden. Instead, the attack will be mastermin ...   More

Books Topic sentence: Glenn Beck is a boorish, weepy, fear-mongering, conspiracy-touting demagogue who will demonize any progressive person or group for ratings. If you’re a reader of this newspaper, ...   More

Books Decades before Seattle became known for Microsoft and Starbucks, the city was a muscular place where working men labored hard. Peter Donahue’s Clara and Merritt (Wordcraft, 285 pages, $14) captu ...   More

Books There is perhaps nothing more viscerally American than blue-collar sport: small-town pride writ large, desire, hope, brief denials of reality and death. This is of course the defining theme of TV&rsqu ...   More

Books Biting humor permeates Alain Mabanckou’s slim character sketch of a Congolese watering hole in his new novel, Broken Glass (Soft Skull Press, 176 pages, $13.95). The L.A.-based African writer un ...   More