Monica Drake

15th Annual Oregon Book Awards Thursday Nov. 8th, 7:30 pm Scottish Rite Center The beauty of Oregon’s literary community is in the abundance of writers working in a wide range of forms. One night, I moved through three parties–the gloss of a paid-for publicity event, the determination and spirit of a collective, and the late […]

The Drunken Driver Has the Right of Way Ethan Coen (Crown Publishers) For all Coen brothers devotees, Ethan Coen has expanded his repetoir into poetry. The strength of his verse is in the humor and cleverly aligned words: “We tie his ties now; Mr. Sands/Cannot knot knots, not having any hands.” Unfortunately, too much of […]

SEX: FICTION’S HAMBURGER HELPER How Authors Wrestle with Sex on the Page by Monica Drake WRITING IN THE NUDE When the Private Becomes All Too Public by joelle fraser MY FIRST BOOK TOUR Or, “I’m not a hijacker!” by arthur bradford THE GREATEST WORK OF ART, EVER Nothing Can Top the WTC by Michael Hornburg

Freud said that whoever you are in the sack, that’s who you really are. That’s your real personality. “Freud forgot to say that you’re different in bed with different people,” author Blake Nelson was quick to add, talking about his third novel, User. Nelson’s characters are revealed through sex and elsewhere as young, lustful, callow, […]

Empress of the World Sara Ryan (Viking) “Aside from the whole gender question, Battle is beautiful and graceful and coordinated, and that just confirms that there’s no hope for me. Maybe I can talk myself into a crush on Isaac after all. Of course, I’d have to talk him out of his crush on Katrina, […]

A General Theory of Love Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, Richard Lannon (Vintage Press) With blood in cells in veins running under skin supported by bone and muscle, it’s easy to think humans are entirely individually packaged, sealed inside single bodies, leaving words and sex as our only hopes of deeper connection. But somehow, we know […]

Palooka-Ville Gregory Seth Gallant 10th Anniversary Special re-issue (Drawn & Quarterly) Stories change with each telling, and the meaning of content takes place in context. A comic written in the ’90s, about the ’80s, and re-issued in 2001, takes on the challenge of time. With the re-issue of the inaugural Palooka-Ville, the author has added […]

On Bullfighting A.L. Kennedy (Anchor Books) Because books are written by real people, it’s hard to comfortably criticize a nonfiction work that opens with the writer’s aborted suicide attempt. In On Bullfighting, A.L. Kennedy describes sitting on a window ledge, thinking about jumping. Kennedy is dissuaded not by remembering life’s small pleasures or by the […]

If Only They Knew 2000/20001 Anthology Writers In The School If you’ve lived through grade school, you’ve got enough material to write about for a lifetime. Flannery O’Connor said that. Now, If Only They Knew is an anthology of writing by local high school students, and the wealth of material is endless. These are students […]