Spring 2021
Sins of the Bees
Review of Annie Lampman's novel Sins of the Bees » More ...
Literature
Spring 2021
Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots
DJ Lee
Oregon State University Press: 2020
Places can possess us. Think of the stubbled, ochre hills of the Palouse in the chaffy light of October. No place possesses me more than the landscape defined by two rivers, the Lochsa and the Selway, where the rumpled land of the Bitterroot Mountains lies in the V between them.
Nearly 20 years ago, I told the writer DJ Lee, a Regents Professor of » More …
Summer 2020
Salmon Eaters to Sagebrushers: Washington’s Lost Literary Legacy
Review of Salmon Eaters to Sagebrushers: Washington’s Lost Literary Legacy » More ...
Summer 2020
Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition
Buddy Levy
St. Martin’s Press: 2019
Lt. Adolphus W. Greely, commander of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, assessed the situation from the edge of the ice floe upon which he and his men were stranded.
It was dire.
They were adrift on a raft of ice, and it was 11 degrees Fahrenheit—cold for the time of year but not as low as the sub-zero temperatures they regularly experienced during their two years of exploration and data collection, … » More …
Spring 2020
Mao’s Kisses: A novel of June 4, 1989
Alex Kuo
Redbat Books, 2019
Deng Xiaoping learned to play bridge in the early 1950s. Little did he realize that appropriating state transportation to take him and his team to tournaments would result in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and his being transported far from Beijing for reeducation through manual labor.
But Deng wasn’t just a Goren Prize-winning bridge player. He was, after his rehabilitation, China’s paramount leader during a time of civil crisis. The spring of 1989 brought … » More …
Winter 2019
Stripland
Review of Stripland, a novel by former Washington State University professor of English Joan Burbick. » More ...
Spring 2019
Arts and science
Storytellers, not machines, should decide how to act on data, according to the Matthew Jockers, the new dean of Washington State University's College of Arts and Sciences and the author of "The Bestseller Code." Jockers combines his English literature background with computer programming for literary analysis. » More ...
Summer 2018
Briefly noted
A Day in the Life of a Country Vet
Fred Newschwander ’74 DVM
2018
Mostly true stories, anecdotes, and illustrations about the animals and people from the life and career of a retired mixed animal veterinarian.
Notes in the Category of C: Reflections on Laboratory Animal Care and Use
Steven Niemi ’82 DVM
Academic Press: 2017
Niemi’s professional analysis and experience informs ways to improve laboratory animal care and use. His book characterizes the current state of the industry and speculates on its long-term future. Niemi, director of the Office of Animal Resources at Harvard University, has spent a lot of time in … » More …
Winter 2017
Homer on a flash drive
Plato is sitting at the feet of his mentor Socrates, writing down what the old philosopher says. What Socrates is saying, ironically, is that writing is bad for you: It rots your memory. Preserved in Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates’s opinion of the then-emerging technology sounds strange to us now—until you recall that that’s pretty much exactly what pundits in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been saying about TV, video games, and texting.
Dene Grigar, director of Washington State University Vancouver’s program in Creative Media and Digital Culture, laughs and nods. She’s also the president of the Electronic Literature Organization, an international team of scholars and … » More …
Winter 2017
Lit Bits: Electronic literature on the web
“Redshift & Portalmetal” by Micha Cárdenas. Your planet is dying. You have an apparent choice: travel to the Ice Planet and start over, or stay and try to help. Every layer of this piece is rich with video, audio, and a textual narrative that triangulates between science fiction, philosophy, and a sort of future-tending Romanticism.
High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, an Interactive Poem was created and conceived by the High Muck a Muck Collective. You enter this gorgeously illustrated and written story by clicking on a lottery card–an appropriate visual metaphor for taking your chances on a narrative that determines itself as … » More …