Books

“There’s some kind of beautiful darkness in people that I find moving and interesting and profound. There’s something about darkness and humor together that’s a magical combination.” Aimee Bender’s novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own, reaches for that teetering place between humor and tremendous grief. It does this with language that’s quick and surprising, […]

THE LAST TIME I saw Michelle Tea, she was chain smoking outside a bookstore on Market Street in San Francisco. Tiny and beautiful, with cat-eye glasses and little hearts tattooed on her knuckles, she was talking about the safe house she planned to open for writers after her latest memoir came out. I could stay […]

(Seal Press) Michelle Tea writes like an estrogen fever dream: her girl sex stories float through ruptured San Francisco streets reverberating lost romance, broken families, and abused prostitutes. San Francisco is the perfect partner to Tea’s narrator’s simultaneously bleak and romantic viewpoint–it is a city where the interpersonal somehow seems merely geographic. A chance meeting […]

THURSDAY 7/20 Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Book Discussion Group Discuss wildly funny, brilliant Mercury columnist Dan Savage’s award-winning book The Kid. BORDERS BOOKS AND MUSIC, 708 SW Third Ave, 220-5911,7 pm, free David Long The Daughters of Simon Lamoreaux is a book about unraveling a mysterious past, the disappearance of a high school girlfriend, and […]

Thursday 7/13 Gilham Street Writers Carolyn Altman, Jan Baross, Dave Cantrell, Greg Mace, and JoAnn Tracy read excerpts from works in progress. BORDERS BOOKS AND MUSIC, 708 SW Third Ave, 220-5911, 7 pm, free * Promises of mayhem, readings, and cheerleading. MARTIAL ART GALLERY, 18 NW Third Ave, 248-0152, 9 pm Daniel Villasenor The Lake […]

SORRY GUYS, but what comes around goes around. After, oh, a lifetime of movies where women are cast as “the girlfriend,” movies where they are undressed quickly by horny male hands, then flop around motel rooms in their underwear; movies where they stand on the sidelines and wince and squirm and get thrown out the […]

(Doubleday Books) Book reading and signing, Thurs June 22 at Twenty-Third Avenue Books, 1015 NW 23rd Ave, 224-6203 “Minna Men wear suits. Minna Men drive cars. Minna Men listen to tapped lines. Minna Men stand behind Minna, hands in their pockets, looking menacing. Minna Men try to be like Minna, but Minna is dead.” Frank […]

THURSDAY 7/6 Steven Berkoff/ Portland International Performance Festival The Portland International Performance Festival is one of the great summer events, gathering far-flung artist and writers. As part of the free noontime Artists’ Forum Lecture Series, Steven Berkoff will discuss “Making Shakespeare’s Villains and Taking it On the Road.” PSU SCHOOL OF EXTENDED STUDIES, PO Box […]

First Thursday was as busy as it ever gets, the cream of Puddle City’s bourgeois bohemians out for their monthly art schmooze. The sidewalks of the Pearl were so packed, people had to turn sideways to squeeze by each other. A glass blower operated from the bed of a pick-up truck. Laid out on the […]

Thursday 6/29 John Gates Brigham’s Day is a historical novel drawing on the Mountain Meadow’s Massacre, when a group of Mormons got out of line, murdering settlers they feared were sent to destroy them. This is the author’s first book. I’ve heard it’s a powerful tale. POWELL’S BOOKS ON HAWTHORNE, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, 238-1668, […]

LIGHTNING ON THE SUN by Robert Bingham (Doubleday) “Asher waited for the bats. ‘The little rats,’ he thought. ‘Where the hell are they?’ The bats were late and to be late on this particular night was unsettling. Asher never takes a drink until the bats come out of their cave and fill the sky with […]

  Thursday 6/22 Carlos Reyes Reyes has translated the work of Spanish author Josefina de la Torre. De la Torre was first published at 13, and included in the anthology of 1934, Poesía Española. Reyes will read from Island Poems. ANNIE BLOOM’S BOOKS, 7834 SW Capitol Highway, 246-0053, 7:30 pm, Free   Friday 6/23 Jantzen […]