Made-Up Books

Readers accustomed to the charm of Sara Pennypacker's Clementine series might be surprised by the depth and darkness of her new book for older readers. Twelve-year-old Peter and Pax, the pet fox he wa... (Tom)

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was eccentric even by celebrity-author standards, so it's fitting that her imagined life story defies the conventions of typical historical fiction. Instead o... (Liz)

They sure boiled their books hard back in the '50s. This one, published in 1953, has been almost as difficult to find since as an armored car at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft (to borrow a memo... (Tom)

There was an odd book about a sleepy bunny that was all the rage for hypnotizing toddlers last year. I don't know if this one's clinical effectiveness has been tested against The Rabbit Who Wants to F... (Tom)

Since we've had such a snowy winter on the nearby slopes, let's celebrate Slush Mountain, Bjørn Lie's oddball new appreciation of ski culture. Slush Mountain is a busy place—almost Richard Scarry-busy... (Tom)

I'm not sure which choice The Vegetarian makes more horrifying: eating meat, or not. When a young Korean woman makes a simple decision—she won't eat meat, and she can't bear to have it in her apartmen... (Tom)

Anders's debut novel has been filed, officially, on the adult side of fiction (and it does have an R-rated scene or two), but I think it might find its most passionate readers among older teen readers... (Tom)

When I opened the store, I was surprised and disappointed to find that only the first three of the original seven Great Brain books are still in print. There may be no kids' books I remember more inte... (Tom)

What a strange and perfect little thriller. Published on the eve of war in 1939 and opening with the near-assassination of an unnamed European dictator, it remains as riveting as ever, with an airtigh... (Tom)

Phinney Mother Bruce Full credit to our storyteller Steph for spotting right away how hilarious Mother Bruce is, which we have since confirmed with extensive field-testing among kids and adults (the a... (Tom)

Among novelists there are, as Thomas Wolfe once said to F. Scott Fitzgerald, "putter-inners" and "taker-outers." Elizabeth Strout is definitely a "taker-outer," and much of the wonder and beauty of he... (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)

Giving a lesser-known historical event—the development of the Citroën C2V, the brilliantly simple French "people's car"—a fictional, kid-friendly spin by putting 13-year-old Angelo Fabrizzi at its cen... (Tom)

One of the books What Belongs to You reminded me of, and this is high praise indeed, was André Aciman's first novel, Call Me by Your Name, also a slim, elegant, explicit novel about a short-lived affa... (Tom)

We only learned of Imai's exquisite 2014 picture book when her fellow author Sanae Ishida made it one of her holiday gift recommendations for us, but it ended up being one of our surprise hits of the... (Tom)

When I returned to the third book of Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels after six months away, what struck me most, aside from how vividly the story's two main characters, Elena and Lila, remained in my min... (Tom)

There's been a renaissance in giant illustrated kids' fact books (we love Maps and Animalium), and The 50 States is our new favorite. Each state gets a two-page spread crammed with Sol Linero's high-s... (Tom)

It's so rare to find fiction about everyday work, aside from office satires and the usual glamorously improbable professions, that opening up a novella that concerns the Arkansas Highway and Transport... (Tom)

Finally, after twelve months of Phinney by Post, an NYRB Classic (the series that helped inspire our program in the first place)! Schwarz-Bart's 1972 novel, the first she published solely under her na... (Tom)

Zeina Abirached was born into war, Lebanon's civil war that divided its capital, Beirut, in the '80s, and her graphic memoir, drawn in gorgeously blocky blacks and whites that will remind readers of M... (Tom)

I'm not really sure that this is a kids' book at all. Will little readers or big ones most appreciate its simple fable of courage and friendship and its intricate, exquisite illustrations? "Illustrati... (Tom)

This is not your typical YA dystopian sci-fi romance novel. (I should know, I read enough of them.) This is the first book of any type to grab me and not let go in way too long a time. Told in hacked... (Steph)

Part sendup of the world of art collecting, part love story, and part art-theft mystery, The Improbability of Love is great fun. Opening with the daring theft of a painting from what was supposed to b... (Laura)

At some point in my late youth my obsessions turned from the made-up baseball games I played with my friends to the made-up stories that get called "fiction." This book, as much as anything, was the h... (Tom)

Jumping Jingleheimer Schmidt! It's one thing to play robots, but it's another to become a robot, which is just a little (actually a large) dose of Robo-Sauce away. (The recipe's included, though the i... (Tom)

"Who didn't get enough sleep?" "Who ate all the jam?" "Who is in love?" Each page spread in this charmingly horizontal book asks young readers to spot one culprit in a lineup of goofy kid and animal s... (Tom)

The idea of "literary" comic books covers almost as wide a territory as "literature" itself, but there may be no comics artist who hits the traditional qualities of literary fiction—complex characters... (Tom)

You can argue about which of the two great novels Nathanael West wrote in his short career is the greatest, Miss Lonelyhearts, the searingly compressed tale of a newspaper columnist beset by cynicism... (Tom)

Kids' Books of the Week Good Ol' Charlie Brown, Snoopy, etc. by Charles M. Schulz As much as I have loved the reverential treatment Fantagraphics has given to the 25-volume Complete Peanuts series the... (Tom)

The first comparison of any detective story set at the end of the 19th century is Sherlock Holmes, and R.F. Jackaby, the cryptic, socially indifferent sleuth in Ritter's first novel, Jackaby, and this... (Tom)

Michael Kohlhaas The title of this month's Phinney by Post pick doesn't match the title of the book, because the real selection is one of the "other stories" in The Marquise of O— and Other Stories: M... (Tom)

You may have heard of The Wake, and if you have, the thing you likely heard about it is that it's told in a sort of invented version of Old English that you get used to quite quickly. That's true, and... (Tom)

As a former bookish girl who loved to read about other bookish girls, I hereby nominate Joan Skraggs a worthy successor to literary heroines Anne Shirley and Francie Nolan. In her newly acquired diary... (Liz)

Madeline has lived inside an unforgiving and forbidden world all her life. She hasn't left her house in seventeen years. If she did, she could die. But when a mysterious boy named Olly moves in next d... (Dori)

What a sweet and tender book! Seattle artist Bagley makes a breathtaking debut with this tale of two beavers, a mother and son, who live at the shore and miss an absent father. It's a story of hope, l... (Tom)

As hard as it is to believe that This American Life turns 20 this fall, it's equally hard to imagine public radio without the imaginative long-form storytelling it introduced. Using another recently b... (Tom)

I'll confess some skepticism toward those "remarkable" collective nouns for animals you see lists of everywhere. A "gaggle" of geese? Fine, that's in my OED. But a "prickle" of hedgehogs or an "ostent... (Tom)

Followers of our Facebook page might recall this spring a link we posted to the Kickstarter campaign a Greenwood neighbor, Sara Crow, had created for her board book, Even Superheroes Have to Sleep. We... (Tom)

Let's say this from the outset: Eileen is dark, as dark as its pitch-black cover. Eileen, who tells the story, lives a miserable, grimy existence with her alcoholic father, and, she says, likes "books... (Tom)

For as long as I've known of Lispector, the legendary Brazilian writer, I've been drawn to her but always intimidated by her "greatness," her glamour, and her difficulty, and so I had read plenty abou... (Tom)

To call this the greatest soccer novel ever written would imply that I've read any others, but people say it, and I can't believe it's not true. Peace, otherwise a crime novelist, took a bizarre episo... (Tom)

How on earth could I have resisted choosing this as a Book of the Week until now? It's one of the greats. First published in 1973 and brought back into print 30 years later, Stamaty's first book (befo... (Tom)

Edward P. Jones sets the stories in this collection (and in his second, All Aunt Hagar's Children) in the streets and buildings of Washington, D.C., with an almost obsessive geographical exactitude, b... (Tom)

A Hanging at Cinder Bottom opens in the town of Keystone, West Virginia, in 1910, with Abe Baach, the town's most skilled card player, and Goldie Toothman, the graceful madam of the local brothel, hea... (Laura)

The first rule of Bridge, Tab, and Em's club: no fighting. But as they enter seventh grade, Em has developed curvy new curves, Tab has a newfound interest in social justice, and Bridge has a pair of f... (Tom)

Wow, this book just jumps off the shelf! The Day-Glo realism of surf-dad Gorman's illustrations explode his simple, boldface story of paddling, falling, and persevering into something unlike anything... (Tom)

There was a time (the early '90s, specifically) when there were few things more exciting than seeing a new issue of Eightball on the racks at Fallout Records & Comics. There were lots of artists r... (Tom)

Okay, let's actually do an old Old Book this week, from an old favorite of mine, the master of doom himself, Thomas Hardy. Why do we (or at least I) enjoy stories where bad things happen to good peopl... (Tom)

What Pet Should I Get? is, unmistakably, a Dr. Seuss book, from its eyelashed fish and oddly antlered beasts to its headlong monosyllabic rhythm, and for that alone it's comfortable and endearing. But... (Tom)

You know how sometimes the only thing that will hit the spot is an episode or twelve of Law & Order? Well, these stories, by a lawyer and bestselling author in Germany, satisfy in a similar way. L... (Liz)