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★★★☆☆ In Speech and Debate competitions, there’s a technique used by debaters known as “the spread.” Instead of offering a pointed rebuttal to their opponent’s latest argument, a debater will attempt to overload the...
★★★★☆ The early 20th Century, creepy carnivals, gender-bending teenagers, outsider art: Rarely does a novel tick as many of my boxes on the back cover alone as Curious Toys by Elizabeth Hand. Set in...
★★★★☆ It’s not fair, but one expects perfection from Chris Ware. Author of Jimmy Corrigan, Building Stories, and the recent Monograph, he is one of the most celebrated living cartoonists. Ware transformed the literary...
★★★★★ Winter of 1993 saw the publication of Chris Ware’s first installment of The Acme Novelty Library. A staple-bound book, Acme Novelty #1 was just under forty pages and showed a range of Ware’s...
★★★★☆ In Crusaders, Dan Jones applies his significant story-telling skills to the people who fought the wars for the Holy Lands. Seventeen pages of concise identifications of the major characters reinforce his emphasis on...
★★☆☆☆ With his Ibis Trilogy, published between 2008 and 2015, Amitav Ghosh proved himself an estimable literary force: framed around the Opium Wars of the mid 1800s and set in Calcutta, Mauritius, and Hong...
★★★★☆ Sea Witch Rising is the sequel to Sarah Henning’s fabulous Sea Witch. This time two mermaids seek to become human, and the sea king is irate when Evie, the sea witch, helps them...
★★★★☆ “When a radical change is needed, many argue that it is impossible for individual actions to incite it, so it’s futile for anyone to try. This is exactly the opposite of the truth;...
★★★★★ Consider it Patient Zero, or Pandora’s Box: all of Western Literature can arguably be traced back to Cervantes’s 1605/1615 masterpiece Don Quixote. A picaresque novel about a mad knight errant and his squire...
