Books New Yorker Shane Jones’ debut novel, Light Boxes(Penguin, 160 pages, $14),is a fable about the inevitability of sadness. It chronicles a town where misery takes the form of the perpetual gloom o ...   More

Books While most girls her age were getting ready to graduate high school, Jillian Lauren was dancing at the Kit Kat Club in New York City—working both as an escort and a theater-company intern. In th ...   More

Books A kid dies, a man commits suicide, a friend kills a friend and a wife cheats (maybe). And that’s just in the first 84 pages of Keith Lee Morris’ new short story collection Call it What You ...   More

Books When they turn out the lights on the last newspaper in America, this is what readers will have lost: the spare, exhilarating prose of old-school newspapermen like Craig Welch. In Shell Games (William ...   More

Books On the very first page of his new book, When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (Public Affairs, 195 pages, $22.95), rock critic Greil Marcus (Mystery Train, Lipstick Traces) compar ...   More

Books An Orangina bottle, soap in an old sock, and a pair of boots: These were Frank Meeink’s seemingly innocuous stepping stones in his rise as a notorious neo-Nazi leader. Autobiography of a Recove ...   More

Books In all the hullabaloo over healthcare reform, one issue I never heard addressed by either the talking heads or the screaming ninnies on the Mall is the unfathomable gulf of education that separates th ...   More

Books Former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt keeps a low profile these days, but Portland writers keep resurrecting him—or characters based on him—in their novels. There was Phillip Margolin’s Execu ...   More

Books What happens when an English teacher from Ohio stumbles onto the world’s longest-running war and a resulting humanitarian catastrophe bleeding through two troubled Southeast Asian countries? If ...   More

Books The sentences in Mark Gluth’s debut novella are short. Like this. All of them. The title is a tip-off: “Kroftis.” That’s an anagram for Kristof. Writer Agota Kristof, that is. ...   More