Mercury Staff Two-and-a-half hours’ driving time from Portland and just across the state line from Astoria sits the Sou’wester Historic Lodge & Vintage Travel Trailer Resort, a longtime favorite of Rose City writers, artists, and oddballs. Five years ago, when the folks at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop—one of Portland’s favorite not-giant booksellers—were dreaming up a getaway […]
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Mother Foucault’s + the Sou’wester + Poetry = The Fifth Annual Airstream Poetry Festival
The fifth year of this magical, seaside poetry festival is looking to grow.
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The Memory Police Review: Remember Yoko Ogawa’s Dystopian Warning
These days one can’t throw a racist member of the White House staff without hitting a work of fiction that directly reflects our current dystopia. And here’s another such novel—though the metaphors of Yoko Ogawa’s excellent new work, The Memory Police, could be applied to any number of oppressive states throughout the ages. An unnamed […]
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The Memory Police Review: Remember Yoko Ogawa’s Dystopian Warning
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa PANTHEON These days one can’t throw a racist member of the White House staff without hitting a work of fiction that directly reflects our current dystopia. And here’s another such novel—though the metaphors of Yoko Ogawa’s excellent new work, The Memory Police, could be applied to any number of […]
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Toni Morrison Is Dead
View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Atlantic (@theatlantic) on Aug 6, 2019 at 9:14am PDT Toni Morrison’s boundaries seemed to extend beyond death. Beyond life, too. But Monday evening, her publisher, Knopf, confirmed Morrison passed away in a Bronx hospital. She was 88. Morrison was the author of eleven novels (including […]
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Pickathon Comics Day 1: Sarah Mirk’s Zine Comic “We Need One Another’s Sweat”
The Mercury sent four comics artists to Pickathon this year to make comics about the festival. Look for a new comic every day this week! Former Mercury news reporter Sarah Mirk was an obvious choice to start our Pickathon Comics series. She’s been making a zine every day of 2019—even when she hurt her wrist […]
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Simon Hanselmann Reads His Sexy, Druggy, Hilarious Bad Gateway Tonight
FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS Simon Hanselmann has seen some shit. The Tasmanian-born comics artist—who now resides in Seattle—writes and draws comics about the druggy, sexy, hilarious adventures of a witch named Megg, her cat familiar/boyfriend Mogg, and their werewolf drug dealer roommate Werewolf Jones. Hanselmann has always said these adventures were inspired by stories from his own […]
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We Can’t Help But Root for The Drug Addict Go-Getters in Simon Hanselmann’s Bad Gateway
Simon Hanselmann has seen some shit. And now so have we.
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Kristen Arnett’s Freak Flag Flies at Full Mast in Mostly Dead Things
AUTHOR PHOTO BY MARIA JONES Kristen Arnett has amassed a large following on Twitter, in part for refusing to reveal the location of a lizard to 7-Eleven’s corporate Twitter account because she didn’t want to “narc” on her new reptilian friend. She had met the lizard in the course of her regular wine run to […]
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Let Love Have the Last Word Review: Common’s New Memoir Explores His Day-To-Day
Atria Books Originally published by our sister paper, The Stranger. What millions of us learned when we first heard rap in the late 1970s is that rappers often boast about things they do not have, about glamorous lives they do not live, about credit cards that are not in their wallets. “I got a Lincoln […]
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All Fascists in Chuck Wendig’s Apocalyptic Wanderers Are Coincidental
DEL REY / AUTHOR PHOTO BY EDWIN TSE “Wanderers is a work of fiction,” reads the edition notice at the start of Chuck Wendig’s new novel. “Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely […]
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Anna Merlan’s Republic of Lies: What Conspiracy Theories Get Wrong and Right
METROPOLITAN BOOKS / AUTHOR PHOTO BY TOD SEELIE “The world is more chaos than we like to imagine,” Bryce Reh tells Anna Merlan in her book, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power. “The faster we come to terms with that, the more fluidly you can deal with it.” Reh […]