Made-Up Books

Many books are bad (I can admit that), some books are good, and a few books are great. Even fewer are great at being more than one kind of book at the same time. Oregon's Emily Winfield Martin has lon... (James)

I’ve noticed more and more people coming into the bookstore asking for a type of fiction the Guardian has recently dubbed "Uplit." Not escapist fluff to help forget reality, but books to reassure them... (Liz)

My favorite book I've read so far this year came out in 1985 and takes place in the late '50s. You may know Segal (I did, at least) from her fantastic kid's book, Tell Me a Mitzi, but boy, she is quit... (Tom)

With its primary colors and interactive premise, The Button Book is not the first picture book to be inspired by (or, alternatively, rip off) Hervé Tullet's modern classic Press Here. But regardless,... (Tom)

This short story collection does what Yuknavitch does best—asks you to trade your life for a book that is just strange and beautiful enough for you to make the deal. I floated through these stories th... (Erica)

I loved Greenwell's first book, What Belongs to You, the elegant and intense story of an American's desire for a Bulgarian man, and I love this one too. It's also the story of a young American in Bulg... (Tom)

Twenty-one years and five books after the release of his exceptional first historical mystery, River of Darkness, Airth continues to devise new investigations for his original Scotland Yard-trained sl... (Jeff)

Yoshitake's Still Stuck, the story of a boy who can't get his shirt off, is one of our very favorite picture books, and in his latest, a child is confronted by an even more common, and more challengin... (Tom)

Famously, Gibson predicted our future in books like Neuromancer, and then our present caught up to him. Fittingly, his current loose trilogy, of which Agency is the second book, is set both in the fut... (Tom)

We loved the art and story of Mora's first picture book, Thank You, Omu, but might like her new one even more. It's a simple tale of a shared routine between mother and daughter in a busy life, of mod... (Tom)

This book never goes where you expect it to. Is it a satire of '80s SoCal self-empowerment? Is it a post-nuclear-war story of human apocalypse and survival? Both? Neither? The real story, for me, is i... (Tom)

There are counting books, and then there are counting books! With elegance and imagination and, finally, an extremely long foldout page, Völker demonstrates, in concrete terms, the difference between... (Tom)

You could be forgiven for wondering, for the first half of this novel, why we have it shelved in the Crime & Mystery section, as you get to know two families, the Parks and the Matthewses, in cont... (Tom)

A Big Mooncake for Little Star was my favorite picture book last year, and Lin has followed it with a companion book that is a perfect match for its feeling that you have stepped into a timeless fable... (Tom)

The buzz surrounding this award-winning French author’s first English translation—the saga of a family of pig farmers—always includes a warning along the lines of “You’ll never eat bacon again!” Well,... (Liz)

While we wait for her weird and wonderful collaboration with Maurice Sendak, A Hole Is to Dig, to return from the out-of-print limbo to which it's been inexplicably banished, we have this never-before... (Tom)

To say that Mary Gaitskill is the ideal author to translate the #MeToo movement into fiction doesn't really do justice to the subtlety of her work, or the complexity of the movement. But nevertheless,... (Tom)

You might, on first glance, find Evaristo's prize winner daunting: the stories of twelve characters, told over 450 pages in a style that, with its idiosyncratic layout and mid-sentence line breaks, lo... (Tom)

If you've read Lerner's cultishly celebrated first two novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, you'll find both familiar and unfamiliar things in his third one. Familiar is the character Adam Go... (Tom)

This must surely be a first: a Phinney by Post selection has been adapted into a children's picture book. In this case, it was one of the New Yorker Talk of the Town vignettes in Jamaica Kincaid's Tal... (Tom)

Stay and Fight follows a rotating cast of narrators making do on a plot of land in Appalachia. Although set in the present, the homesteading project they tackle, which includes a lot of acorns and sna... (Erica)

I took the opportunity of this little volume in the Faber Stories series to introduce myself to a new writer, Robert Aickman, the British horror specialist in whose stories, to quote my favorite podca... (Tom)

Is "pre-apocalyptic" a word? There are books all over our shelves that imagine futures after various disasters, but Davis's graphic novel taps into a feeling that's more intensely present: how to move... (Tom)

The work of a scarecrow is lonely: your job is to keep things away from your fields. But when a baby crow, lost and lonely itself, lands nearby, this scarecrow ignores his job description and leans do... (Tom)

When I'm asked for a favorite Seattle book, I usually choose one of two titles: Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (and its sequel, How I Grew), set in her teen years in the 1920s, and th... (Tom)

I should perhaps be focusing on Coats's newest book, the middle-grade fantasy The Green Children of Woolpit, but it's just come out and well, I haven't read it yet. But I really want to, based on how... (James)

Wenzel returns to the same premise as in his Caldecott Honor winner, They All Saw a Cat—everyone brings their own perspective to the same thing—but for me there's something even more evocative about m... (Tom)

In this wonderfully funny and charming YA debut, we accompany a young queer Puerto Rican woman—Juliet—as she travels to Portland to intern for the hippy-dippy white woman who wrote her favorite book.... (Juliet)

No getting around it, this sounds like a tough sell: 1000 pages of unbroken thought, not a stream of consciousness but a torrential river scouring a mental landscape. But that's how you produce someth... (James)

Who knew that NunLit was a genre with a passionately devoted following? Not me, until I read this unique story about a medieval convent, considered one of its classics. Townsend writes brilliantly abo... (Liz)

Pie in the Sky is a wonderful hybrid of a regular middle-grade novel and a graphic novel, with illustrations vividly fleshing out all the silly, heartbreaking, and imaginative moments in this story. E... (Haley)

This is a novel about gambling, heavy metal music, late-night debauchery, and washing dishes in a restaurant. Guess which is the most interesting, by far? The dishwashing! If you've read other behind-... (Tom)

This is the kind of book I used to read more of: a debut novel by a young writer about, well, young writers. They drink too much, sleep with the wrong (or the right?) people, get poorly paid for iffy... (Tom)

Why is laughing-out-loud at the written word so rare that it feels like an unexpected gift when it happens? Well, whatever the reason, this seriously funny coming-of-age story had me LOL-ing so often... (Liz)

Calling Drive Your Plow a murder mystery is a bit like calling Beloved a ghost story. There is a series of unsolved murders (which—spoiler!—are solved), but the real story is in the storyteller: Janin... (Tom)

Nearly every discussion of Chesnutt's 1901 novel, only recently acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of its time, focuses, understandably, on the real event it was inspired by: the white riot in Wi... (Tom)

One more time hearing Steph's masterful storytime rendition of this tale of a small Western town beset by bandits and saved by a young paleontologist (who arrives, slowly, on a tortoise) convinced me... (Tom)

Having missed out on Marlantes's fiercely admired Vietnam epic, Matterhorn, and in the mood for a big Northwest tale, I decided Deep River, only his second novel in four decades of writing, would be m... (Tom)

Reading last week about the late Michael Seidenberg, I got to thinking about this book by his great friend Jonathan Lethem, who started selling books for him as a young Brooklyn teenager. Perkus Tooth... (Tom)

While perusing a list of women mystery writers’ favorite mysteries by women, one plot synopsis caught my eye: two girls swap identities while evacuating Edinburgh in 1940. When I looked on Goodreads i... (Liz)

Do friends have to stay exactly the same to stay friends? Smouha and Marton take the old lost-sock gag for a new spin (sorry) and wring (sorry!) a surprisingly subtle tale out of a sock who gets separ... (Tom)

I'm not sure if Ocean Vuong's first novel is more intense on the page or in your ear. I took it in the latter way, read in Vuong's own soft, quavering, and forceful voice, which he keeps at such a pit... (Tom)

I first read Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay shortly after it was published, and now that it’s been released in paperback, I feel compelled to write about it. It’s a quiet, character-driven book about famil... (Anika)

What begins as a story about attempted assassination—Queen Victoria is shot at during an 1860 coach ride through London—quickly becomes a knotty but witty mystery involving Charles Darwin’s recently p... (Jeff)

Published in 1993—decades before YA dystopias became so popular and ubiquitous—Parable of the Sower tells the story of 18-year-old Lauren Olamina, who is surviving in the year 2024. Octavia Butler’s i... (Anika)

Everyone always says that the lanterns they set off during the annual Autumn Equinox Festival eventually turn into stars. This year Ben and a group of friends, accompanied by unwanted tag-along Nathan... (Gabi)

I almost gave up on Outside the Gates. Having liked Gloss's Wild Life quite a bit, I decided to read her first novel (also recently republished by Saga Press) but at first thought its allegorical styl... (Tom)

Sometimes I suspect the gradual reprinting of Mark Alan Stamaty's books from the '70s and '80s has been undertaken with me in mind. Certainly Phinney Books must be among the nation's top sellers of hi... (Tom)

A family of three (mom, dad, and small son) resides in an English hamlet, a site with historic roots that's now a commuter suburb of London. All the mod cons, but with room for a creative kid to roam... (James)

Those of you familiar with the quirks of Cretaceous-era evolution might be aware of the problem our hero, Tiny, faces: "It is very difficult to hug with tiny arms." So what do you do when your friend... (Tom)