Performance When Portland author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, she imagined it as a thought experiment. What would a world be like, she asked, where humans spent most of their liv   More

Performance In 1969, gender was a fixed concept. The world didn’t know Boy George, David Bowie or Annie Lennox. There were no how-to websites for pursuing ambiguous gender expression. Jeffrey Eugenides hadn   More

Books Portland is a city of writers and readers. It’s sometimes overwhelming how much talent we’ve got crammed into this town. To wrap up 2011, I thought I’d offer a list of 10 very notable titles   More

Arts & Books A healthy debate is percolating in response to my profile of Tom Bissell, bandying whether he really is the finest writer in Portland. I contend he is. (Commenter Dan Felder sagely notes that Bissell is a Guggenheim Fellow; he's using the estimated $43,000 prize to finish his apostle-tomb book Bones That Shine Like Fire.) But there are lots of alternatives; as soon as I handed Bissell those laurels, ...   More