Made-Up Books

"Terse and exact about the work they do," as his many admirers know, describes the fiction of James Salter too (although The Dig makes even Salter seem a little gabby!). He's better known for his late... (Tom)

Any fan of S Is for Salmon, one of our favorite picture books last year, will immediately recognize Hannah Viano's distinctive papercut style in her new book. Arrow to Alaska is a story for slightly o... (Tom)

His author bio says Cynan Jones has published, along with his novels, a "retelling of a medieval Welsh myth," which isn't surprising after reading The Dig. It has the fatalistic momentum of myth or fa... (Tom)

Our Phinney by Post picks have gotten an excellent response so far, and I sure hope that extends to #4, but we'll see. It's a book so self-serious that it skirts the edge of parody, told in sternly fo... (Tom)

Noggin is the most absurd realistic-fiction book ever written. A 16-year-old boy wakes up after a full head transplant only to realize all his friends have grown up and moved on. As he gets accustomed... (Henry)

Sometimes a book sits on your shelf for years before you find the key to open it. I've grown more interested in Bishop as I've learned more about her over the years, but it was only Toíbín's friendly... (Tom)

Whether you're a last-minute Easter shopper, or just a lover of the bright and delightful, this new picture book by Seattle writer and illustrator Julie Paschkis is nearly impossible not to pick up an... (Tom)

I've generally been immune to Richard Powers's novels: for a time I tried almost every one, intrigued by their premises, but found myself left cold by their earnest brilliance. But my searching stoppe... (Tom)

I like the book Wildwood by Colin Meloy because it is a book of never-ending adventure, starting when Prue McKeel's brother is abducted by a murder of crows, and spiraling into a long-lasting baby hun... (Sada)

The title of this 1964 picture book (just brought back into print by—of course—NYRB Classics) may be the greatest in the history of publishing—how could you not want to read about its hero's oddly spe... (Tom)

It's not easy to be funny for 300 pages, but Paul Beatty pulls it off in this topsy-turvy, never-know-which-way-is-up satire, which leaves you no comfortable ground on which to rest, least of all the... (Tom)

You don't need to know that Carson Ellis is the hip Portland illustrator for the Wildwood series and the band the Decembrists to appreciate her delightful solo picture book debut. Beginning with the m... (Tom)

Johnson's debut novel starts like a (really well-written) sitcom, when four freshmen at "Berzerkeley" meet at a party: a white woman (who occasionally claims to be Native American) and three guys (a w... (Laura)

No thumbnail image can do justice to the elegant intricacies of Enchanted Forest (or its "inky quest" predecessor, Secret Garden, which we've belatedly brought into the store as well). A coloring book... (Tom)

I'm not sure of all the artistic and/or contractual reasons why Richard Price wrote his latest novel under (or, rather, as the cover has it, over) a pen name, but any Price fan will be glad to hear th... (Tom)

Kids' Books of the Week Red: A Crayon's Story by Michael Hall I Don't Want to Be a Frog by Dev Petty and Mike Boldt You are what you are. Or are you? I sat down with these two appealing new picture bo... (Tom)

Kids' Books of the Week Red: A Crayon's Story by Michael Hall I Don't Want to Be a Frog by Dev Petty and Mike Boldt You are what you are. Or are you? I sat down with these two appealing new picture bo... (Tom)

What do you call what Kelly Link does? She takes a story that at first seems to follow the usual rules of realism, and turns it slightly—and then not so slightly—toward the strange, the magical, the f... (Tom)

In this heart-wrenching, pulse-pounding story of a brother and sister evacuated from London to the countryside during World War II, Bradley's storytelling is pitch-perfect: she reveals Ada's feelings,... (Liz)

I'll read anything Rachel Cusk writes. I've long admired her intelligence and her sure-footed style, and the way she will break the surface of her stories and demand you ponder something big and abstr... (Liz)

Imagine the future Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, as an 11-year-old Sherlock Holmes, with the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, as her 14-year-old Watson (and the young Charle... (Tom)

If you've seen Miranda July's movies or read her story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, you might have an idea of what to expect from her first novel. But otherwise, how to explain Miran... (Tom)

At first I was just smitten with the title, and imagined what story inside could live up to it. Unsurprisingly, a word-drunk one. After all, September, the thoroughly admirable girl of the title, "lik... (Tom)

Preparation for the Next Life is very much about this life, as lived in the blind tunnel of poverty and illegality traveled by Zou Lei, a young Uighur woman who has made her way from western China, vi... (Tom)

What kid doesn't have a 13-floor treehouse in his or her head, featuring a man-eating shark tank, a lemonade fountain, a giant catapult, and plenty more? Griffiths (the writer) and Denton (the drawer)... (Tom)

The stories in this book were written a half-century ago, and in a preface he wrote for them halfway between then and now their author was surprised even then that they were still being read, survivin... (Tom)

[The story of an 11-year-old foodie who becomes a secret restaurant reviewer] This book is a great book if you love food ... or if you don't. It's realistic fiction. It's light and funny but you won't... (Henry)

To say almost anything about the new William Gibson novel would be a spoiler, since a big part of the fun of reading him is orienting yourself in the world he's dropped you into and mapping out its ex... (Tom)

You can't tell from the photo, but Animalium is huge, as big as previous newsletter favorite Maps (it's from the same publisher, the well-named Big Picture). But while Maps brings a doodly whimsy to i... (Tom)

Dash Shaw is willing to bewilder you. His comics layer images and stories in a dream logic that I find helpful to approach with a wide-eyed openness. And when they've worked for me—as his new one, Doc... (Tom)

Yup, that's pretty much what Sam and Dave do: dig and dig (with breaks for chocolate milk and animal cookies), hoping to find something spectacular. They do indeed, but the real fun of the book comes... (Tom)

Let's just get going with some of the sentences: (Tom)

After their Costa Award-winning Dotter of Her Father's EyesM/em>, Mary and Bryan Talbot have collaborated with Kate Charlesworth for an exhilarating look at the fight for women's suffrage in Britain a... (Liz)

No Nobel Prize again for Philip Roth? No matter. You can still read him, and if you haven't before, you might start here. I've loved, variously, Goodbye, Columbus, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock,... (Tom)

You may have read Alec Wilkinson's New Yorker profile this summer of his friend Edward Hirsch and the long poem he'd written about the death of his son, Gabriel. The poem came out last month, and it's... (Tom)

Is A Moose Boosh a kids' book? A food book? An art book? A poetry book? I'm not sure where in the store to put it, so for a while I'll keep it on our front counter, because it's just the sort of exube... (Tom)

Robinson's second novel, Gilead, took the form of a letter written by an elderly preacher to his young son, the fruit of a late and utterly unexpected marriage to a much younger woman named Lila, and... (Tom)

Was it a blessing or a curse that Walter Tevis's first two novels, The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth, were turned into memorable movies? He didn't publish again for nearly two decades, but lat... (Tom)

I recommend this delightful book with a warning: it may threaten the most blissful hours any new parent has—nap time. What (Tom)

As anyone who walks into Phinney Books can see, I am very fond of the NYRB Classics series. There are a dozen or two NYRBs I could (and likely will at some point) choose as an Old Book of Week, but Ro... (Tom)

YA Book of the Week More Than This by Patrick Ness More Than This opens in the last, few precious moments of a life. How can there be more than this? Oh, but there is! A boy wakes up after he was cert... (Leighanne)

In the fine American tradition of Tom Sawyer and the Great Brain, meet Harris, nine years old and full of spit, foul language, and half-baked ideas for making life on the farm a little less dull. Paul... (Tom)

"There's only two times in a restaurant," Marie learns before her first shift at the Olive Garden, "before and after." In between, you just white-knuckle it until your last table is cleared. You might... (Tom)

Whether your house has a dog or a cat—or better yet, both—you and your young readers will appreciate Gall's new picture book, which finds the sitcom-worthy setup—an odd couple forced to become roommat... (Tom)

If you let go of your expectations of a thriller plot from Caught's thriller premise—a young man, caught smuggling pot by boat into Newfoundland four years ago, escapes from prison and makes his way w... (Tom)

Through the Woods is a kids' book in the same way that Grimm's original fairy tales are: murderously bloody and almost gleefully unsettling. Carroll (another Canadian!) makes her book-length debut wit... (Tom)

Leaving the Atocha Station, poet Ben Lerner's first novel, became an unlikely hit (by literary standards) in 2011, an event that's now part of the story of his second novel, 10:04, which (like his fir... (Tom)

An archeologist discovers the ancient body of a small woman buried deep in the earth of a remote British island. A young reporter, seeking answers, meets the love of his life on that same island, year... (Leighanne)

Fi-Fi, Foo-Foo, Ooh-La-La, and Gaston: Mrs. Poodle's new puppies, one of whom--guess who?--doesn't look quite like the others. In fact, he looks rather bulldogish, which becomes particularly interesti... (Tom)

Your Face in Mine begins with the narrator's encounter with an old friend transformed: a white man who has become, through surgery and chemistry, a black man. It's the old Black Like Me premise, but R...