Books

The last thing that sixtysomething-year-old Barbara expects at her casual dinner party is to be dumped by her best friend. Yet that’s exactly what happens in the first few pages of Daniel M. Lavery’s new book, Meeting New People. “We don’t talk about friendship breakups,” explains Lavery. ”I heard that so often that it started […]

Justin Hocking’s memoir A Field Guide to the Subterranean digs into both memory and history—of Hocking’s life and of the minerals and profit extraction in the places he’s lived. It’s an “unearthing,” he says, of both the natural world and the sense of self.  The work is a collage narrative of past events, some of […]

Jimmy McDonough was living in Hoboken, New Jersey, when he was first introduced to the King of the Honky-Tonks. A friend put on a record and McDonough was hooked. “There are times when somebody shows you art or plays you music,” McDonough tells the Mercury, “and even though you don’t quite get it, there’s something […]

“For me… the main thing is just how deep a love can be, and how much everything else can complicate it,” explained violinist and author Ling Ling Huang. She was excavating the layered themes in her novel Immaculate Conception, a nominee for the 2026 Oregon Book Award’s Ken Kesey Award for Fiction. The book circles […]

On Saturday, February 28, Fubonn Shopping Center on Southeast 82nd Avenue will be more than a place to stock up on Asian groceries, get fitted out in an ao dai, and grab Filipino-inflected breakfast at Balong (what more could you want?). In true Portland DIY community spirit, it’ll also be home to Portland’s first Azn […]

Literary Arts announced the finalists for its coveted 2026 Oregon Book Awards this morning, selecting via juries of out-of-state judges just 35 works from 200 submissions. This list always largely dictates our spring reading plans, as we fill in what we may have missed before the ceremony night on Monday, April 20. This is a […]

In Sara Jaffe’s short story “Today’s Problems,” the narrator keeps a living document of national and international headlines—police violence, Israel’s potential annexation of Jerusalem—alongside intimate anxieties, like their own kid’s possible ringworm. The combined list functions as a reminder that “today’s problems” aren’t abstract forces. They express themselves in the strange frictions of everyday life. […]

When Justin Townes Earle rolled into Portland in 2016, he had already lived a long life for a 34-year-old. Born in Nashville, Earle had been making music since he was a kid and earning plenty of comparisons to his father, country rabble-rouser Steve Earle, along the way. Determined to bust out of his father’s shadow, […]