Floating World Comics Dream Team. Anders Nilsen’s new collection of comic strips and ink illustrations, Poetry is Useless, contains a little comic where he’s trying to summarize his enormous opus Big Questions (2011, Drawn and Quarterly) to a woman on a plane. ”Six hundred pages. Little birds in the middle of nowhere. A crashed airplane. […]
Suzette Smith
Suzette Smith is the arts & culture editor of the Portland Mercury. Go ahead and tell her about all your food, art, and culture gripes: suzette@portlandmercury.com. Follow her on Twitter, Bluesky, and Letterboxd.
Posted inBooks
With Small Backs of Children, Lidia Yuknavitch Reinvents the Novel
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH takes risks! She is anything but boring. If I were writing this article on a wall, I would write “Lidia Yuknavitch starts shit,” and mean it in a very positive way. With her 2012 Oregon Book Award-winning The Chronology of Water, Yuknavitch held firm that her book was an anti-memoir—a novel written about […]
Posted inBooks
Risky Business
The Uncompromising Lidia Yuknavitch
The uncompromising Lidia Yuknavitch reinvents the novel.
Posted inTheater & Performance
Sketchtastic!
The Aces Are at the Top of Their Game in For Your Pleasure
The Aces are at the top of their game in For Your Pleasure.
Posted inMovies & TV
All Good Things
When Marnie Was There: The Last Movie from Studio Ghibli?
When Marnie Was There: the last movie from Studio Ghibli?
Posted inBooks
Neal Stephenson’s Latest is a Palindrome—And His Most Accessible Work to Date
William Morrow I’m still reading Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. I finished it a month ago but I’m still reading it. I’ve been going back over different sections—like the engineering wank parts I skipped the first time through. There are people who will read Seveneves primarily for these wank parts (I see you, technocrats) but the real […]
Posted inBooks
Neal Stephenson’s New Space Epic
Seveneves Is His Most Accessible Book to Date
Seveneves (yeah, that’s a palindrome) is his most accessible to date.
Posted inFeature
How to Get Someone to Take You to the River
How to Get Someone to Take You to the River
Posted inArtsy
Going to Linework NW? Here’s Your Essential Guide to Small Press Comics Releases
Portland spring emerges from her dainty (organic, grass-fed) clamshell and unpacks her greens, her rains, some guys that want to yell at you, and a hot mess of new releases from small press comics publishers. So it’s appropriate that the small press comics festival Linework NW also happens in spring at the beautiful Norse Hall. […]
Posted inBooks
A Terrible Pretty Okay Book, Reviewed in Doodles: Rachel Brathen’s Yoga Girl
Suzette Smith Suzette Smith Suzette Smith Suzette Smith
Posted inMovies & TV
Things Get Emo in Insurgent
INSURGENT “Please—I need help. Miles Teller won’t stop staring at me.” Far in the future, the farmlands surrounding Chicago become a tropical paradise. That’s right: Super-hot-in-the-summer, super-cold-in-the-winter Chicago is now a hippie dream where people wear light fabrics and sleep in hammocks. Of all the things in Insurgent—the second installment of the YA sci-fi action […]
