Made-Up Books

For 20 years now, Bell has been making comics that create marvelous depths out of everyday moments, sometimes with low-key fantastical turns, like a woman who turns herself into a chair so she won't b... (Tom)

As a customer recently pointed out to me, in his lovely new book on Maurice Sendak, There's a Mystery There, Jonathan Cott makes the case that Sendak's 1981 picture book, Outside Over There, is one of... (Tom)

Sometimes all I want from a novel is people saying funny things to each other, and for those times, Drury's first novel is a tonic. He is a master of the deadpan, of the dry, offhand remark that build... (Tom)

This Is How We Do It is not the first book to show kids how other kids around the world live, but it's a particularly thoughtful and appealing approach. Using photographs and descriptions sent to him... (Tom)

Our neighbor Laura McGee Kvasnosky, with many children's books to her name, has collaborated on this charming picture book with her sister Kate: a father-son tale, set in familiar Western landscapes,... (Tom)

What a delicious feast! Golden Hill is Spufford's first novel, after five idiosyncratic books of nonfiction, and it's clear he had a ball with it, delighting in the language and the details of his sub... (Tom)

What's an "ACB"? It's a mixed-up alphabet book nine-year-old Perry is making for her Gran, Honora Lee, who has lost her husband and most of her memory and who lives at the Santa Lucia rest home, where... (Tom)

There's a reason Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel keeps being remade into movies (not only 1988's deservedly celebrated Dangerous Liaisons, but 1989's Valmont and 1999's Cruel Intentions): it's a bril... (Tom)

Dear Cyborgs is a tiny book; in your hand it's almost lighter than air. And the writing has an airy lightness to it to: not funny-light, but nimble and light on its feet, even as it deals with such we... (Tom)

The thing a novel does better than any other kind of art is put you inside the thoughts of someone else, as they fork and forget and turn back on themselves. In this book, Marías's sentences do just t... (Tom)

When Henry Montague's father sends him on a Grand Tour of the Continent, eighteen-year-old "Monty" is only looking forward to unsupervised partying, drinking himself into oblivion, and waking up in st... (Haley)

A familiar tale of friendship is wonderfully refreshed in this photographic tale of two blobs of clay, one gray and one brown, who are given new lives by an artist's hands and then take matters into t... (Tom)

An executive at a fledgling newspaper in Japan, just after the end of World War II, decides, perversely, to gamble the future of his enterprise on a bullfighting tournament (a Japanese bull vs. bull v... (Tom)

Ever since I heard about the big splash The Essex Serpent made last year in Great Britain, I have been anticipating its appearance on our shores. And this wondrous book ended up arriving exactly when... (Liz)

I've been antsy to write about this breathtaking book, but we sold out of our small first batch and waited months for a reprint. Now we have it back in the store (for the time being), so let me declar... (Tom)

What a cozy little adventure! Hilda lives in the mountains and likes to draw, camp out, and wander in the woods: she's awfully appealing, and so is the world she investigates, which has just enough de... (Tom)

The Leavers is a messy book, and I mean that in a good way. It's about messy lives. At the age of eleven, Deming Guo becomes Daniel Wilkinson, after his mom, once Peilan and now Polly, a loud, blunt,... (Tom)

In a perfect world, I would have written about With Animal before Carol and Kelly read at the store last week, but you read when you can, and I only fully dove into this book's strange stories after t... (Tom)

As with so many of the best stories, this one begins with a mistake: specifically, an errant splotch on an otherwise perfect illustration. While this mistake easily evolves into a feature within Luyke... (Kim)

The classic conceit of Harold and the Purple Crayon—a boy's drawings come to life as he creates them—is entirely transformed in Lehrer's new book. Lehrer brings his own wit to the story, but best of a... (Tom)

Énard has become one of France's leading novelists by writing about the Mediterranean as a crossroads of cultures—East and West, North and South—and Compass, which won the Prix Goncourt, France's most... (Tom)

A boy imagines his day, and his father's day, in a small town by the sea. He plays with a friend, eats a baloney sandwich, runs an errand for his mother, looks out at the ocean, while his father works... (Tom)

This classic mystery from 1949 follows few of the rules set down by Tey's peers (Christie, Sayers, Marsh) of the "Golden Age" of British crime writing. To begin with, there's no body, and no detective... (Tom)

If urban density is the new watchword of our 21st-century boomtown, perhaps we should all take a look at Barnett and Biggs's unlikely ode to apartment living. Everyone can hear what everyone else is d... (Tom)

A recent roundtrip drive to Portland proved the perfect way to listen to Mohsin Hamid's short new novel (I was done by the time I passed Tacoma on the way back). Exit West's story of two young lovers... (Tom)

One reason traditional mysteries are satisfying is that everything is tied up and explained at the end. But a true horror story never gives you that way out. Fever Dream is a tiny book you can read in... (Tom)

This little book from Finland was hiding quietly on our picture book shelves for a year without my noticing! But I spotted its narrow blue spine, pulled it out, and discovered that it's lovely. A fami... (Tom)

This week, someone absconded (yes, it happens, especially in that corner of the store) with almost our entire Kafka section, but they left this one behind, which is somehow fitting. It's the forgotten... (Tom)

Each year, the rulers of a sorrowful town at the edge of a forest sacrifice a baby to the forest's witch. Little do the rulers know that the witch saves the babes and delivers them to adoptive familie... (Haley)

The Caldecotts, like the Oscars, don't often go to comedy, but this funny book was one of this year's Caldecott Honor winners, and deservedly so. It's written and drawn in the style of a traditional R... (Tom)

George Saunders, the best-known living story writer south of Alice Munro, has, finally, published a novel! And it's a good one, concerning the death of Abraham Lincoln's son Willie and Lincoln's visit... (Tom)

The best picture book illustrations can inspire gasps and "aww"s without a single word of text. The wordless Little Fox in the Forest begins in shades of blue and white as we see a little girl bringin... (Haley)

Li is best known for her prize-winning stories and novels, and perhaps now (see above) for her memoir, but she also recently retold the oldest story in recorded literature, The Story of Gilgamesh, as... (Tom)

Swimming Lessons is the rare kind of book that makes you leave a permanent indentation in your reading chair, that you want to draw out and savor (even while turning page after page because you must k... (Kim)

A few years ago I set myself a project of reading fiction that was written just as Nazism was taking hold in Germany. I wanted to get a sense of how people felt while their world was turning upside do... (Liz)

Remember Antoinette? In Gaston, one of our—and our young customers'—favorite picture books since we opened, she's the poodly pup who falls in love with her friend, the bulldoggy Gaston. Now she has he... (Tom)

There's no pink on the cover of this picture book, and no hearts, but it's a love story for sure. A boy falls in love on the first day of school with a girl who loves birds, so he becomes one (or at l... (Tom)

Almost exactly two years ago, I was writing my review of Cusk's last novel, Outline, which turned out to be one of the best books I read that year. I think Transit, the second in a proposed trilogy ab... (Tom)

Sally Jones is a brilliant ship's engineer. The fact that she is also a gorilla and unable to speak complicates matters when her best friend (a ship captain called "the Chief") is framed for murder. F... (Tom)

Garth Greenwell first came on my radar when he wrote an almost-convincing defense of Hanya Yanigahara's A Little Life. Now his own novel has come out, and I don't need anyone to convince me: it's fant... (Tom)

It feels a little like blasphemy to say so, since Maurice Sendak's tiny, boxed Nutshell Library is one of the world's perfect objects (and the item in the store most likely to make a customer sigh and... (Tom)

In his first stab at psychological suspense, poet and novelist Lasdun proves himself a pro. He takes the most basic narrative tools—a vacation home, a love triangle—and with an ear for inner monologue... (Liz)

Grandad, a well-dressed bulldog, can't find a few things in his cluttered old house. Can you help him? Imagine Where's Waldo, but illustrated by William Morris or Neo Rauch: this is the best kind of s... (Tom)

Is this a new book, or an old one? The stories were written in the 1970s, but not published until now, long after Collins's death at age 46 in 1988 and a year after her groundbreaking feature film, Lo... (Tom)

It's no easy trick to weave three generations into fifteen stories, tracing lines of heredity, loyalty, and betrayal, holding onto a dozen and more characters as they shape-shift across leaps in time... (Tom)

No one would use the world "realism" to describe Matthew Simmons's stories—God, for one thing, makes a number of appearances, starting a band in one story and making a deal with a guy who calls him "D... (Tom)

I have never seen such a collective swoon behind our counter as when an advance copy of this darling book arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. Why do we love it so? Emily Jenkins's words appear simple... (Tom)

Smith became famous, fast, for the precocious pyrotechnics of her debut novel, White Teeth, but this novel, her fifth, is her quietest and most patient, perhaps because it is all filtered through a si... (Tom)

If Plotto is the over-the-top, maximalist solution to building a story, McGuire's Sequential Drawings is the minimalist alternative. Working in the vestigal, forgotten space of spot illustrations (tho... (Tom)