At Portland’s Nationale, The Artist as Shopkeeper

While visiting Portland last month, I visited a number of excellent shops with Yeti editor/publisher Mike McGonigal. One of these spaces was Nationale, which offered both a smartly selection of books and zines and contained excellent art. (At the time that I was there, they were preparing for an exhibition of Carson Ellis’s work.) I also noticed a stack of books by Don Carpenter, whose novel Hard Rain Falling remains seared into my brain. The Carpenter novels, I learned, were there as part […]

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Conversation: Lisa Wells

Interview by Tobias Carroll As we head into the middle of November, I think it’s safe to say that Lisa Wells’s collection Yeah. No. Totally. (released by the Portland-based indie press Perfect Day Publishing) is a safe bet to be recorded as one of my favorite books of the year. Through the work collected here (mostly essays, with one short story — more on that balance below), Wells examines the city in which she lives through various manifestations of culture […]

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Conversation: Kevin Sampsell

After hitting up practically every big city in America (and the rest of the world for that matter), it only made sense for the Akashic Noir series to make it’s way out to the Pacific Northwest, and give Portland, Or. an opportunity to examine the seedy side of the “City of Roses”. It would seem for a project like this, there was only one man for the job of editor, Kevin Sampsell. So you finished editing Portland Noir, and now […]

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