Made-Up Books

This book may be more for ex-kids like me, for whom the mysterious M. Sasek created a fascinating world of cities and landmarks in the '50s and '60s in his This Is... picture books. This Is Paris, Thi... (Tom)

Mike Muñoz aspires, sort of, to write the Great American Novel, or, more specifically, the Great American Landscaping Novel, but Johnny Evison might have written it for him. Mike is 22, mowing lawns,... (Tom)

Attila is a psychiatrist from Ghana who has made a career of assessing trauma in war zones. Jean is a divorced wildlife biologist from New England. It almost seems enough that Forna has imagined these... (Tom)

What's the line? "It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you?" It's a line that could describe more than one Philip K. Dick novel, but none so directly as in this superb early item in his oeuv... (Tom)

We're glad to say we finally have this year's Caldecott Medal winner back in stock! Wolf in the Snow has the feel of a classic, with a tale of a girl and a wolf pup each lost in the snow that might re... (Tom)

How did I only recently learn about this wonderful picture book from 1964? Created by Remy Charlip (a design and choreography collaborator with Merce Cunningham and John Cage and—fun fact!—the physica... (Tom)

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh boy do I love this book about a boy who, yes, has a hard time getting his shirt off and starts to worry he never will. Right now, it feels like it's both the most enj... (Tom)

Brian Selznick, known for intricate illustrated epics like Wonderstruck and The Invention of Hugo Cabret, reinvents the early-reader book with this fat set of simple stories about a primate private ey... (Tom)

Despite the words "A Novel" on the cover, I found myself struggling to think of Vengeance as anything but true. In part, that's by design: the main character is a journalist named Zachary Lazar who me... (Tom)

Is an elephant a shape? Is a lemon? A bus? I don't see why not, but somehow it's still hilarious (to me, and I expect to a toddler just learning all these rules we've decided on) to see such incongruo... (Tom)

Ever since Vlautin, the singer-songwriter of the longtime Portland alt-country band Richmond Fontaine, started writing novels, I've been hearing how good they are, and I finally sampled one, via an au... (Tom)

You wouldn't think that there was anything new to discover in the ol' "before and after" gambit, but over and over in this bright and appealing board book Jullien, a multi-talented French designer liv... (Tom)

Every so often I feel like reading about rich people in New York. Not just any book—it needs to be a bit sociological (I don't want to ogle, ahem, but to analyze) and if it provides some schadenfreude... (Liz)

I might have raved to you about The Golden Age, London's most recent novel and one of my favorite store recommendations. Gilgamesh, her first novel, is nearly as good, and clearly from the same brilli... (Tom)

Should I be embarrassed to love a picture book that's a spinoff of a viral YouTube video? (Actually a sequel to a spinoff.) Because I'm not. Marcel's quirky, squeaky sweetness survives its translation... (Tom)

While you lament the inexplicable injustice that Krauss and Sendak's marvelous collaboration, A Hole Is to Dig, remains out of print, you can at least enjoy one of its sequels, this little book from 1... (Tom)

The weirdest thing about this little novel is not the six-foot-seven avocado-loving frog-faced humanoid named Larry who escapes from a local research lab. It's the tone in which that fantastic event i... (Tom)

On page 114, about two-thirds of the way through this little novel, the narrator remarks, "The whole evening had taken a dark turn, and I feared for the worst." It's a sentence that could appear in al... (Tom)

In Benway's novel, the surprise winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature this fall, three adopted teenagers, strangers to each other, reckon with the discovery that they have si... (Tom)

When a writer's first collection of stories was Jesus' Son, quite possibly the best American book of the last few decades, it's natural to ask how his second collection, published 26 years later, comp... (Tom)

It seems to be a golden age for oversized, gorgeously illustrated compendiums of facts, and (as you can likely tell, if you follow our kids' recommendations) we are here for it. Add to our favorites t... (Tom)

It seems to be a golden age for oversized, gorgeously illustrated compendiums of facts, and (as you can likely tell, if you follow our kids' recommendations) we are here for it. Add to our favorites t... (Tom)

Until his death last month, few knew that Shepard had been living with ALS, and few also knew that he had been working during that time—dictating when it became necessary—on this last book. It's a mem... (Tom)

Oliver Jeffers has written and drawn many picture books and illustrated others, including the colossally popular The Day the Crayons Quit, but his new one feels special: a welcome message written to i... (Tom)

Audiobook of the Week Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz, read by Samantha Bond and Allan Corduner I'm late in coming to Magpie Murders, but it entirely lived up to the reports I'd heard all year of i... (Tom)

Georges Simenon wrote over 400 novels, and The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By was the eleventh (!) he published in 1938 alone, but don't dismiss it as a throwaway. It has a simple premise—Kees Popin... (Tom)

Maybe it's because I'll never get used to a Booker Prize open to Americans, but the only novels I found tempting on this year's longlist were the two most traditionally British. Reservoir 13 and Elmet... (Liz)

Alain-Fournier's The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes in the original French), the only book he wrote before dying in World War I and one of the most beloved of modern French novels, is often described... (Tom)

A dark and sensual fantasy set in a post-apocalyptic world, Runebinder incorporates just about everything I look for in a young-adult novel. It is Avatar: The Last Airbender meets the zombie apocalyps... (Molly)

Speaking of Rosemary's Baby! You've likely seen the Mia Farrow/John Cassavetes 1968 horror classic, but have you read Ira Levin's novel from the year before? It's fantastic: a tale of the occult that,... (Tom)

My first introduction to Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas was through Jim Henson's underrated 1977 TV special (a Christmas tradition in our house when I was growing up). This charming movie was based... (Haley)

Oh what a joy that this book is back in print! I didn't know about it when I was little (though I was the right age for it when it came out in 1973), but it was a favorite to read with our own kids, b... (Tom)

Why is this novel so absurdly entertaining? Shum, who was a casino dealer in Lake Stevens before getting his English PhD, loosely bases his story on an old gambling tale by Pushkin, but it has a seemi... (Tom)

No one ever accused Theodore Dreiser of being an elegant writer, but nearly every sentence in this book howls with things that elegance alone can't provide: desire, drive, hunger, power, exhaustion, a... (Tom)

A mysterious new doorway in their grandmother's room and some equally mysterious paw prints lead Joon and Noona into a land of mischievous and snack-loving animals, and into the world of the tradition... (Tom)

A while ago I was calling Turgenev the Russian Jane Austen—now I've discovered that the country has its own Brontë sisters! Like the British writers, the Khvoshchinskaya sisters were poor but educated... (Liz)

"You'd be surprised what you find inside a wolf," says the duck. Indeed! The mouse, swallowed, is surprised, and you will be too, and also amused. Barnett and Klassen are prolific kid's-book geniuses,... (Tom)

Everyone says that Pessoa's unfinished (unfinishable?) Portuguese classic is best taken not whole, but in morsels, chewed and reflected on, and so, having always wanted to read it, that's how I'll beg... (Tom)

Laura, who read this book long before I did, has always described it as a burst of confetti, and I still can't think of a better way to sum it up. Fans (like me) of Carter's biting and spectacularly i... (Tom)

This is the month for monsters, and you'll find few more appealing ones than the father and child in this rhyming tale. The rhythms and the rhymes are note-perfect for reading aloud, and the monstrous... (Tom)

A copy of this 2015 collection came into the store a little dinged up, so I took it home. I'd always wanted to read Ryan, and it turns out I like her a lot: she makes tiny aphoristic paradoxes mostly,... (Tom)

This is not the sort of epic that jumps through space and history. Instead, it turns on itself, over and over again, circling back to one event—a lynching in 1930—and another related one—the birth of... (Tom)

To call Days Without End "Blood Meridian lite" might sound dismissive, but it's not. (In fact, for many readers, it might be just right.) You can't get any darker than Cormac McCarthy's Western hellsc... (Tom)

This fat new book of verse is unrelated to almost anything else on our shelves, except that it might be a nephew to old Uncle Shelby, Shel Silverstein. With tiny punch-line couplets, silly multi-stanz... (Tom)

Hear ye, hear ye! If you loved Victoria Jamieson's Rollergirl, her second middle-grade graphic novel, All's Faire in Middle School, will not disappoint. Like Rollergirl, All's Faire features a relatab... (Haley)

My Absolute Darling is very easy, and very hard, to read. It is the story of Turtle, who lives with her father, isolated on a wild stretch of the northern California coast. He trains her to navigate a... (Laura)

Those of us who loved the quirkily indomitable spirit of Ishida's first picture book, Little Kunoichi the Ninja Girl, will be glad to see Little Kunoichi return in a supporting role in the story of he... (Tom)

I don't know if it's because the film noir idiom is so familiar or if lit noir (?) is just naturally cinematic, but I didn't so much read In a Lonely Place as I saw and heard it. Hughes's writing is f... (Liz)

I'll be honest: as a book, Chicken Butt might not hold its own on the picture-book shelf next to the emotional depths of Sendak or the sophisticated wit of Ada Twist, Scientist. It is, after all, just... (Tom)