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Fat Is a Laughing Matter
Meeting author-artist Carol Lay in the flesh is wonderfully disconcerting. So closely does she resemble the cartoon version of herself in her whimsical cartoon memoir about dieting, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude (Villard)—tall, brunette, with black horn-rimmed glasses and, yes, a slender figure—that shaking Lay's hand becomes an almost metaphysical experience.
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Fiction Reviews
A Fortunate Age Joanna Smith Rakoff . Scribner , $26 (416p) ISBN 978-1-4165-9077-4 Rakoff’s debut novel is a ponderous, meandering and nostalgic portrait of a postcollegiate group of Gen-Xers awkwardly navigating weddings, pregnancies, betrayals and funerals in pre- and post-9/11 New York City.
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Web Exclusive Reviews: Week of 10/27/2008
This week: the invisible engine of the green market, memoirs of pre-Civil Rights struggle and American immigration, the true story of the fake Cardiff Giant, a plan for Barack Obama and a biography for his wife, and two photo collections of giants in rock. Plus: Lincoln, two mathematicians and one reality TV villain (makes good).
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Poetry Book Has Readers Feeling the Beat
Hip Hop Speaks to Children (Sourcebooks/Jabberwocky, Oct.), a collection of 51 songs and poems edited by Nikki Giovanni, isn’t only turning children on to poetry; the book and its companion audio CD is resonating with adults, too.
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'Nerd' Night in NYC
Author John Green kicked off his national tour for Paper Towns (Dutton) last Thursday evening at the Barnes & Noble in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood.
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Art Spiegelman Breaks It All Down For You
With Breakdowns, Maus, and In the Shadow of No Towers, Spiegelman taught his fellow artists about what he calls the "grammar" of comics, and he taught the larger book world about a new kind of literature that could grab national attention, illustrate painful and personal subjects, and win a Pulitzer Prize.
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The Mainstreaming of Haruhi Suzumiya
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiyais a cult favorite among anime fans, so it makes sense that Yen Press is launching the Haruhi manga this month with a strong pitch to anime and manga fans.
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Funnies Business: Abandon All Revenue, Ye Who Enter
Several publishers are exploring Web comics, but their revenue stream isn't always clear.
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Panelmania: Alan's War
French creator Emmanuel Guibert writes and illustrates the true story of former American G.I. Alan Cope in his new graphic novel, Alan's War, out on Oct. 28th from First Second Books. In this six-page preview, Cope observes the strange days in Prague before the German surrender at the end of WWII.
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Otsuichi's Goth: Nancy Drew meets Dexter
Just in time for Halloween, Tokyopop is releasing the English translation of the light novel Goth by Otsuichi. A manga adaptation of Goth was released in September, and a Japanese live-action adaptation of Goth is slated for release in Japan in December.
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Web Exclusive Reviews: Week of 10/20/2008
This week's Web: just why oil is as bad as it seems, the man who knew what inquiring minds want to know, Marilyn French completes her history of women, two worthy new Holocaust entries, the history of food fraud and the strangling of Los Angeles's air supply. Plus: a slick, sexy photobook from Prince explores his famously impenetrable image, while the leftover polaroids of the "Jazz Baroness" achieve effortless intimacy with greats like Coltrane and Monk.
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Children's Book Reviews
Picture Books The Baby in the Hat Allan Ahlberg , illus. by André Amstutz. Candlewick , $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-7636-3958-7 Ahlberg and Amstutz (previously paired for The Shopping Expedition) overlook few opportunities for humor in this tall tale (even the copyright includes jokes), which gains extra punch from the narrator's repeated insistence that the story is a true one.
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Fiction Reviews
All the Living C.E. Morgan . Farrar, Straus & Giroux , $23 (208p) ISBN 978-0-374-10362-0 Morgan's enchanting debut follows the travails of a young woman who moves to Kentucky with her bereaved lover in 1984. Aloma, herself an orphan from a young age, leaves her job at the mission school where she was raised to help her taciturn boyfriend, Orren, with his family farm after his family is k...
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When the Gift is a Graphic Novel
This year's crop of graphic novels comes in editions from bare bones to deluxe, but there's something for everyone on your list. Collected editions of the medium's historical best—Bill Mauldin and Osamu Tezuka—bump up against clever collage and pop-up books, and oddities like a Japanese Batman manga.
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Nonfiction Reviews
Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love Myron Uhlberg . Bantam , $23 (232p) ISBN 978-0-553-80688-5 In this memoir about growing up the son of deaf parents in 1940s Brooklyn, Uhlberg recalls the time his uncle told him he saw his nephew as “cleaved into two parts, half hearing, half deaf, forever joined together.
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Cornelia Funke 'Inks' Her Final Chapter
This month sees the release of Inkdeath (Scholastic/Chicken House), the third and final book in Cornelia Funke's Inkheart trilogy, which began in 2003 with a book of the same name.
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A New Stage for Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg steps into a new role next week, when Disney’s Jump at the Sun imprint publishes the debut novel in her first chapter-book series, Sugar Plum Ballerinas.
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Portrait of an Artist by a Like-Minded Artist
As a child, Deborah Kogan Ray read Millions of Cats, Wanda Gág’s 1929 Newbery Honor Book, as well as her other picture books. Several years ago, she came across excerpts from Gág’s diaries and immediately recognized a kindred spirit. That inspired Ray to create a picture-book biography, Wanda Gág: The Girl Who Lived to Draw, out this month from Viking.
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A Book (and Contest) for ‘Wimpy’ Fans
Last week, the latest addition to Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Do-It-Yourself Book, went on sale with a 500,000-copy first printing.
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Q & A with M.T. Anderson
M.T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: Volume I: The Pox Party (Candlewick, 2006), about the coming of age of a young, classically educated slave at the outset of the American Revolution, received both a National Book Award and a Printz Honor. The sequel, The Kingdom on the Waves, is in bookstores.
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