SK Webb Roundfire Books ($20.95) This time-travel tale entertains while offering an intriguing hypothesis for the spate of odd sightings, or UVEs (Unexplained Visual Experiences), happening across the globe. Turns out these seeming hallucinations are tears in space-time, glimpses of past ages, and one such UVE nets a bona-fide, unintentional Victorian time-traveler, Mary Stepney. While […]
Nell Beram and Carolyn Boriss-Krisky Amulet Books ($24.95) Yoko Ono turned 80 years old on February 18, 2013, but two new books remind us that in actuality, she’s timeless. Collector of Skies is a full-fledged biography masquerading (successfully) as a picture book: a wealth of photos adorns the text, depicting each iconic moment in this extraordinary […]
Reconsidering Yoko Ono Lisa Carver Backbeat Books ($18.99) Lisa Carver’s Reaching Out with No Hands honors Ono’s central status as a pioneering, groundbreaking artist by questioning her work each step of the way. It’s a highly personal and idiosyncratic account—at one point, Carver (herself a performance artist as well as writer) says, “I feel such intense appreciation […]
Christopher Wakling William Morrow ($15) Told from the point of view of six-year-old Billy Watson, What I Did masterfully captures the restless childhood imagination that often flies free from reality. What Billy did was get his father, a loving yet volatile man under pressure at work, in deep trouble with child protective services. Christopher Wakling’s discerning grasp […]
Jon Chad Roaring Brook Press ($15.99) It isn’t often that artistic innovation, high-level education, and just plain fun get crammed into the same package, but such is the case with Jon Chad’s marvelous children’s book Leo Geo. The book’s designed as a skinny vertical strip, as befits its topic: a journey to the center of the […]
Matthea Harvey and Giselle Potter Schwartz & Wade Books ($17.99) Not even Gérard de Nerval’s pet lobster can rival Ruby Small’s pet glacier Cecil. Only the fertile and peripatetic mind of poet Matthea Harvey could cook up this children’s story of a recently calved glacier taking a shine to this normal little girl in a […]
Panio Gianopoulos Nouvella ($10) Panio Gianopoulos’s debut novella A Familiar Beast spans seventy-two pages in a 4”x6” format, but it reads like a long short story–think Alice Munro or perhaps an elaborate yarn from Stuart Dybek. The novella covers familiar territory for short fiction: domestic strife, confronting one’s relationship to nature. But with Gianopoulos’s knack for urban […]
Derf Backderf Abrams ($17.95) It’s increasingly evident that “graphic novels” are the perfect vehicle for memoir, breezily conveying the evanescence of memory in a way that prose and film just cannot. Take My Friend Dahmer by Derf, creator of the alternative comic strip The City. The book tells the saga of growing up with the weird kid […]
Argos Books Editors Argos Books ($12) Still need a calendar for 2013? Check out the amazing poetry calendar from Argos Books—each month features a different poem by the likes of Eileen Myles, Mark Bibbins, Cecila Vicuna, Harryette Mullen, and other joyful noisemakers. It's a chapbook you can hang on your wall, really—and it's got a […]