What Are You Playing? Books!

Don’t love Nintendo? Love books? What if they crossbred? In the UK, people will soon be able to read classics on the Nintendo DS. COOL. Nintendo, the Japanese video games has announced a deal with the publisher HarperCollins to make the classics available to read on its DS games consoles. Continue reading 

Your Favorite Bartender is EVERYWHERE

How does the national media love the man Eugeneans voted Best Bartender? I’ll spare you from counting the ways; you can check the press page of his website for that. I just want to mention the two latest, er, mentions: • Last week, The Wall Street Journal did a story on Repeal Day, the growing-in-popularity sorta-holiday that celebrates the end of Prohibition: Continue reading 

Peter Matthiessen Wins National Book Award for Fiction

So now that Peter Matthiessen has won the National Book Award for Fiction for Shadow Country, will the literary world erupt into a noisy discussion about whether a “reworking” of an older trilogy should really be eligible for the award at all? I admit to a bit of skepticism myself, but the book description on Amazon goes to great pains to suggest it’s a totally different thing (except not): Continue reading 

Piercy, Handy, Merkley Win Election

Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy, Lane County Commission candidate Rob Handy and U.S. Senate candidate Jeff Merkley have all won their tough and pivotal election fights. In unofficial final results, Piercy beat Jim Torrey by 2 percentage points. Handy beat Bobby Green by just one percentage point. Merkley leads by three percent with 79 percent of the statewide vote counted. Smith reportedly plans to concede shortly. Continue reading