BIBLIOFILE
Seafood Lover's Almanac
by Mercédès Lee, ed.
(National Audubon Society, 120 pages, $19.95)

Mercédès Lee at the Portland Audubon Society, 5151 NW Cornell Road, 292-9453. 7 pm Thursday, March 22. Free.

My first thought when laying eyes on this National Audubon Society publication was, "My God, what's next, the Condor Cookbook? Should the Audubon Society be in the business of telling us how to cook the very creatures it's sworn to protect?" When I discovered there were only nine recipes in its 120 pages, I felt I could relax. At least they're not telling us to eat fish every Friday. Perhaps the word "almanac" led me down the wrong path, since this is much more a guide than an almanac--a guide to the degree of harm one inflicts by eating particular species, in fact.

Colorfully laid out with fetching graphics and color-coded bar graphs fading from green to red indicating just where on the survival charts each species is hovering, this book is much more likely to tell you where your fish came from and how it was caught than how to cook it.

If a species is about to collapse, this book will tell you. If your favorite seafood is regularly caught by fishing boats illegally harvesting Antarctic spawning grounds, this book will tell you. If your shellfish of choice is disappearing because of pollution, this book will tell you.

It's a pretty volume, even a handsome one, and probably a useful reference if you eat large quantities of seafood, but as a cookbook it's rather scary. Whatever you do, don't read it before dinner. Dining on a guilty stomach is never a good idea. On the other hand, be sure to take it to the fishmonger with you. You don't want to be eating contraband, now do you? Johan Mathiesen

Lemon
by Lawrence Krauser
(McSweeney's Books, 246 pages, $16.50)

Lawrence Krauser appears this weekend at Groundswell Cafe and Reading Frenzy. See Words listings.

Men can be so pathetic when things don't work out for them. Don't believe me? Check out the timeline in literature that clocks the whole phenomenon. Take Hamlet: His father croaks, his mother marries his uncle, and the next thing you know the guy is talking to skulls. Then there's Gregor Samsa. One lousy dream and the guy cracks and morphs into a cockroach. Don't even get me started on all those Nick Hornby pansies. So, where have all the tough-jawed Hemingway heroes gone anyway?

Which brings us to Lemon.

This is the first real novel put out by McSweeney's Press (Neal Pollack's book was more satire than anything else), and it adds a compelling new character to the grotesque canon of sensitive snivelers.

Our protagonist, Wendell, seems to be going through life in neutral, getting by as an over-qualified peon at an Office Space-like company and living in a barely functional NYC apartment with his girlfriend Marge (Homer, anyone?). CAUSE: Marge splits. EFFECT: Wendell's face becomes partially paralyzed and soon he is infatuated with a lemon. Falling in love with a lemon and having to wear an eyepatch can quickly lubricate your grip on reality.

Much down 'n' out occurs, and Krauser uses every opportunity to squeeze various approaches to storytelling. Lemons through art history? Check. A whole chapter devoted to a poem about lemons? Check. Homeless people as prophets? Check. Stream-of-consciousness meditations? Indeed. Krauser, for all his juicing of post-mod, is a very clean writer with a very clear vision. And that, in the end, is what makes this book so heartbreaking. Caryn B. Brooks

1/2 priced shots from the Condiment Bar
by Torre Sathrum
(Alcoholic Screaming Publications, 50 pages, $5)

Reading Torre Sathrum is like being telepathic at the Vern. In each of The Condiment Bar's short pieces, Portlander Sathrum channels the voices of barflies, boomers and bums as they struggle to justify or mourn their existence. There's Kevin, the slumming rich-kid fry cook ("I love this job. I get to play with all the things I couldn't when I was a kid. Fire, sharp instruments"), and John F., an intellectual sleazeball who tries to pick up chicks by simultaneously insulting them and demanding that they buy him drinks ("I'm not promising anything spectacular," he says after suggesting a woman take him home. "I may pass right out when we get there, and I kick the sheets off the bed when I sleep. But I don't snore. And if you wake me before noon (cough) I'll likely strangle you with your own panties").

Sathrum's writing is fierce, mean and bitterly funny. In describing the frustrating aspects of drug deals--and how they parallel the hassle of ordering Chinese takeout--he writes: "The fucking hippies will show up whenever they damn well please smelling like a communal armpit and possibly carrying guitars, certainly underdressed for the situation (any situation)."

But what he's best at (especially in "Down the Chute Where the Boxes Go," a creepy portrayal of a factory worker's numb, sterile existence and eventual freakout) is turning mundane objects into powerful symbols. A cell phone, a cooking range, a certain type of car all serve to illustrate how desperately people cling to these tangible objects as totems against the aching void of incomprehensible human desire. Becky Ohlsen