Makoto Yukimura Tokyopop ($9.99 each) by Robert Boyd Science fiction comics, like science fiction movies, differ drastically from literary science fiction. In the best science fiction novels, there are limits to how much you can bend the rules of science; plausibility is far more important, and the very best literary science fiction is not only […]
Warren Ellis, Darick Robertson, Rodney Ramos, et al. Vertigo/DC Comics ($14.95) by Rudi Dornemann A comic about a gonzo journalist in a grim but not-quite-dystopian future, Transmetropolitan has managed to be unique in a field where uniqueness is more often aspired to than achieved. One More Time, the tenth and final graphic novel collection, is too […]
Edited by Ben Marcus Anchor Books ($13) by Laird Hunt In his Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno writes of those artists, "of the highest rank," for whom "the sharpest sense of reality was joined with estrangement from reality." Future trajectories of taste and circumstance will determine just how many highest rankers The Anchor Book of New American Short […]
Dan Simmons EOS ($25.95) by Allan Vorda Dan Simmons's first foray into science fiction since his epic Hyperion saga Ilium stretches across over four thousand years in yet another astounding display of writing and ideas, not only about the potential future but the potential past. As with Hyperion, the reader must await the sequel for the story's […]
David Foster Wallace Little, Brown ($25.95) by Scott Bryan Wilson One of the great things about Oblivion, the new collection of stories from David Foster Wallace, is that it absolutely would not get a passing grade in your typical writing workshop. Wallace's refusal to offer resolution, the relative absence of action or dialogue, and the stories' […]
Nicholson Baker Knopf ($15.95) by Andrew Palmer When Knopf belatedly added Nicholson Baker's latest novel, Checkpoint, to its summer list, the announcement generated as much controversy and official nervousness as might have been expected from a novel by a prominent author about two men discussing the potential assassination of George W. Bush. The clamor died down […]
Susanna Clarke Bloomsbury Books ($27.95) by Kelly Everding It all begins with a simple question—"Why was there no more magic done in England?" —and a fantastic and witty history explodes with a Big Bang. In her first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke reinvents an England seeped in magic that lies just below the […]
by Linda Lappin It's a rainy day in Paris as I step off the chilly street into a bright cafe near the Duroc metro station. I have come here to chat with David Applefield, an American expatriate who has lived in Paris for 20 years. He is the publisher of Frank, the longest-running Anglophone literary magazine […]