November Comics Bestsellers

The fourth book in Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid Series, Dog Days, takes the top slot from, Last Straw, the third book in the Wimpy Kid series. It's followed by Naruto vol. 46; Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks; Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Predators and Prey and Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

Panel Mania: Casper and the Spectrals

For the 60th anniversary of Casper the Friendly Ghost , Ardden Entertainment is releasing a new version of the classic Harvey comic. Casper and the Spectrals will feature Casper's friends Wendy the Witch and a devil, Hot Stuff and is set in Spooky Town, a part of New York City that normal people can't see. This preview features five pages of the first issue, due out on November 11th, as well as the variant covers.

Assouline Finds Upscale Niche

When Wall Street faltered last October, so did the demand for luxury goods. Even so, 15-year-old Assouline Publishing, founded in France by Martine and Prosper Assouline, has managed to maintain its footing by publishing books that are intended to be just as much a luxury brand as watches at Cartier.

Lorena Jones New Publishing Director at Chronicle

Chronicle Books announced yesterday that former Ten Speed Press publisher Lorena Jones has taken over as publishing director. In her new role, Jones will initiate a digital food and drink publishing program, and oversee Chronicle’s food and drink list as a whole.

Editing R. Crumb’s ‘Genesis Illustrated’

W. W. Norton executive editor Robert Weil has overseen the publication of R. Crumb’s new work, 'The Book of Genesis Illustrated', a dazzling effort by Crumb to transform the words of Genesis into comics.

Geek-Speak Japanese Style: ‘The Otaku Encyclopedia’

An American journalist based in Tokyo, Patrick Galbraith combines a scholarly devotion to studying Japanese popular culture with a, well, otaku-like enthusiasm and love of cosplay. This month Kodansha International published Galbraith’s The Otaku Encyclopedia: An Insider’s Guide to the Subculture of Cool Japan with a foreword by renowned Japan expert and translator Frederik L. Schodt.

Kanye West, Bill Plympton Create Book of Illustrated Lyrics

Superstar singer, rapper and producer Kanye West has reunited with animator/cartoonist Bill Plympton to create Through the Wire: The Words and Lyrics of Kanye West, a hardcover book collection of West’s hit lyrics, illustrated by Plympton, that will be released in November by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Comics Briefly

Wimpy Kid: Dog Days Tops Bestseller Lists; Logicomix Creator Christos Appears in New York; 2010 MoCCA Festival Open for Business; Spiegelman and Mouly's Toon Treasury on NPR; Domo Creator Comes to USA; This Week @ The Beat; and This Week @ Good Comics For Kids

Comics Reviews: 10/26/2009

Panel Mania: Graylight

Graylight is by Naomi Nowak, the creator of Unholy Kinship and House of Clay. In this preview, a young woman divulges to her friends a surreal occurance from her childhood. Graylight is due out from NBM in December.

Cooking the Books with Ann Mah

Former Viking assistant editor Ann Mah left New York for Beijing, took a job as the dining editor for the English-language magazine That’s Beijing, and wrote a novel about a young Chinese-American woman who moves to Beijing in the midst of an identity crisis. Mah spoke to PW from Paris, where she now lives, about Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself, which Avon will publish as a paperback original.

Recipe Report: October 26

Short Order: October 26

This week, pics of Mark Peel celebrating at Campanile in L.A., Alicia Silverstone signing copies of her new book at the NYC Wine & Food Festival, Alton Brown answering questions at a B&N in Manhattan, John Besh partying in New Orleans, and Sarah Levy toasting her new baking book in Chicago. Also: news about HarperCollins picking up the self-published culinary novel The Recipe Club, and ATK founder Chris Kimball talks to PW about the Kindle.

Gourmet Today Benefits from Magazine's Closing

Gourmet Today had a lot going for it before the magazine folded on October 5. But now that Gourmet’s final issue is on newsstands, sales of the book have jumped. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has seen sales increase since the magazine closed—which was only two weeks after the book went on sale—and former editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl, who’d committed to touring to promote the book months ago, has been a hotter than usual ticket in light of recent events.

Make Room for Books on Cheese

It's a big season for books about cheese. The coming months will see the publication of books on making cheese at home, building and running a small dairy, and cooking with cheese. There are books about people who’ve devoted their lives to cheese, and even a memoir by one of them. And, of course, there are reference books (which are necessary, since there are some 700 kinds of cheese in existence). Here's a summary of what's coming up.

Review: Knives at Dawn

In Knives at Dawn: America's Quest for Culinary Glory at the Legendary Bocuse d'Or Competition, Andrew Friedman follows a grueling cooking competition through the selection of two cooks from Thomas Keller's French Laundry. His fly-on-the-wall reporting captures both the obsessive, perfectionist mindset of great chefs and their creative spontaneity under pressure—as small a matter as the sudden, intuitive selection of celeriac as an ingredient in a tart becomes a moment of high drama.

Fiction Book Reviews: 10/26/2009

Reviewed this week, new fiction from Robert Crais, Sandra Brown, Stephen Coonts, Ron Rash, Nicholas Coleridge and Jude Deveraux. Also, Leila Meacham delivers a big, fat Texas epic, Canadian radio host Stuart McLean revisits the Vinyl Cafe, Johanna Moran finds inspriation in an old polygamy case, and Susan Abulhawa revisits Palestinian-Jewish conflicts.

It’s the End of the World as We Know It

Vampires may live forever, but the recent vampire trend in YA fiction won't. Author Michael Grant, for one, is "sick to death of vampires," and he is not alone. But when one hugely popular trend ends, what will take its place? Some readers have their fingers crossed for postapocalyptic fiction. Grant, along with fellow authors Scott Westerfeld, Carrie Ryan, and James Dashner, gathered with fans at a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan last Thursday to discuss their latest books...

Com.x is Back with a Bang

Com.x, an independent comic publisher operating out of London, England and Venice, California, launched in England in 2002 with the beautifully designed and drawn comics Cla$$War and Razorjack. But then a long operational hiatus set in. Now armed with new investors and new projects, they’ve had an extremely busy 2009.

A Talk with Guy Delisle: Looking for the Details

Cartoonist and animator Guy Delisle has lived and worked in both Shenzhen, China and Pyongyang, North Korea. He recorded his experiences living in these cities (and in their respective national cultures) in two well-received book-length comics works, Shenzhen (Drawn &Quarterly 2006) and Pyongyang (D&Q 2005), utilizing his unique dry humor, conversational tone, and focus on the everyday to capture the contradictions of the place and the experience of a foreigner encountering them for the first time.