A family of six flees a war-torn country, after American troops abandon it and let “invaders” from the other half of what used to be the same country conquer the portion they used to protect. The family has to sneak out by boat, crammed in with others, across an open sea, and hope for help…
“There’s a world going on underground,” a great man once growl-sang, and Satania just is the book to explore that hidden underground world. One might think the naked redhead at the center of the cover is Satania, but no — she’s Charlie (short for Charlotte), the teenage force behind an underground expedition to find her…
We all love a good story. And a behind-the-scenes story can be even better than the story told in the book itself. “Heroic editor spends years of his life trying to assemble a massive, global collection with contributions by the best in the field, but the book never sees the light of day” is a…
Karen Reyes is ten years old in 1968, and she loves monsters. Monster movies, monster magazines, the idea of monsters — imagining that there are real monsters around her in her normal Chicago life. She’s also seriously bullied and outcast, with no real close friends as the book begins. And she’s telling us her own…
Monsieur Jean is the semi-autobiographical — a novelist rather than a cartoonist, and somewhat Everyman-ized — central character in a series of slice-of-life comics stories by the French creators Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian. Much of that series has been collected in English as From Bachelor to Father, after about half of it originally appeared…
These may not actually be the absolute 10 Worst Book Covers in the History of Literature, but they’re definitely on the shortlist. My favorite is right here: Double Penetrator! Try to tell me that was inadvertent! Just try!
My plan to reduce the stack of read but unreviewed books by reviewing one a day has fallen sadly afoul of events — and the particular “event” in this case was the fact that Thing 2 (my younger son, now 11) and I have been playing a lot of Lego Indiana Jones 2 the last…
It’s not at all true that all unhappy families are different, no matter what famous writers may say — there are only so many kinds of unhappiness, and they recur again and again. And unhappy families breed unhappy people, who again fall into types — the sullen teenage boy, the cold and controlling mother, the…
The end of the year is fast approaching, which means Certain People (I name no names) realize that they need to use up their vacation days or lose them. Changing subjects entirely, today I took off from work, and most of what I did was bop into the city to do some book-shopping. (I had…
My only current paying freelance gig has been shot out from under me yet again; Realms of Fantasy magazine is being shut down for the third (I think) time in as many years. SF Scope has the full story. Thanks to all of the owners of RoF for pouring money into it, even though that…
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth Written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou; Art by Alecos Papadatos; Color by Annie Di Donna Bloomsbury, September 2009, $22.95 Ever so often, there’s an object lesson that proves the saying so many of us like to make: that comics aren’t just for adventure stories, that they’re suitable…
Manga-format comics have a tropism for high school even stronger than that of sunflowers for the sun – it is possible to find manga without a hint of high-schoolery in them, but serious digging is required. But you couldn’t loose an arrow in a manga warehouse without hitting at least one book about girls in…
