Made-Up Books

Nostalgia time! As I was growing up, there were few books more holy on the shelves of my naturalist mother (or her naturalist mother) than Holling's illustrated tale of a hermit crab making his way in... (Tom)

To say, as Zadie Smith has, that Sabrina is "the best book I have read about our current moment" makes our current moment seem quite grim. (Understandably.) A story of random murder, conspiracy theory... (Tom)

The Gallery turned out to be a masterpiece of WWII literature I wasn’t expecting and didn’t know I needed. Burns alternates brief recollections of his travels in the military bureaucracy trailing the... (Liz)

Summer might feel like it's slipping away already (it does to me!), but we still have a month and a half left till Labor Day, which is plenty of time if you're doing Summer Book Bingo with the Seattle... (Tom)

Liz has already written so well about Outline (and its follow-up, Transit), that I'm not sure what I have to add, but I just want to say that I fully expected to love Outline, and I did love it, fully... (Tom)

Ryan Higgins has a particular empathy for the dilemmas of carnivores. First there was Mother Bruce, a bear who just wanted a nice meal of hard-boiled eggs and ended up with a brood of adoring goslings... (Tom)

Where? Oakland, mostly: the center of a dozen or so lives, all of them Native American by some calculation, though each is working to define that for themselves. They are, in Orange's words, "Urban In... (Tom)

One small pleasure of bookselling is discovering that an old favorite of yours, which you had for some reason assumed was unavailable, is in fact still in print. That was the case recently with this 1... (Tom)

You may remember Shopsin as the author of one of my favorite books of last year, the funny, odd, and wise memoir of her family's Greenwich Village diner, Arbitrary Stupid Goal. Her day job, aside from... (Tom)

In the mathematical fable Flatland, the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world can only see three-dimensional visitors as a flat slice of their true being. That's sometimes how I think of Helen DeWitt... (Tom)

The headline to a review I wrote of this book when it came out in 2004 read, "Caribou Hair Everywhere," and I can't think of three words that better describe it. Raised by a father who moved from the... (Tom)

Plenty of kids' books introduce young readers to colors, but few do what Tamaki's beautiful book does so subtly: show that color depends on perspective (why does blue water turn clear when it runs thr... (Tom)

Why not? Because it's covered in germs, but then again, as it charmingly (or disturbingly, depending on your outlook) explains, so is everything else! Ingeniously combining the content of Elise Gravel... (Tom)

Romy Hall has a son, a past, and the impossible sentence of two life terms plus six years to serve in a remote central California prison, which she's just beginning when this novel opens. If this is a... (Tom)

A bad (well, mostly bad) month in Vera Brosgol's own childhood turns out to be the perfect source for a smart, subtle, and entertaining graphic novel that anyone thrown into a new situation will appre... (Tom)

Settle in quickly when you begin this little book, because it's going to charge out of the gate, whether you're buckled in or not. It begins with a stumble for its main character, Mara, which soon bec... (Tom)

A polar bear on a gelatocycle. A fish on a hydrocycle. An armadillo on a penny farthing (that's a bike too). Mayor Snail on a snazzy little BMX. A giraffe on a very tall unicycle. Everyone in Cycle Ci... (Tom)

In our post-Gone Girl times, when it seems we are in an arms race of narrative unreliability, Araminta Hall gives things a twist of her own, putting her tale in the hands of Mike Hayes, a self-made Lo... (Tom)

An insurance scam (or two or three), lovers working at an out-of-the-way diner: the elements of James M. Cain's greatest crime novels are in plain sight, and Lippman clearly had some fun putting them... (Tom)

"It's my birthday. So boo! I hate all of you." "Go away! No! Stay!" This is not your average birthday picture book, but I'll bet it reflects the true roiling, ambivalent emotions of many omf the toddl... (Tom)

It's rare that words feel as embodied as they do in Nguyen's poems: he imagines himself in the bodies of others (his mother's, a blond boy's), he takes other bodies into his own. It brings an intimate... (Tom)

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)

White's third novel for children may not be as thoroughly enshrined as his first two (Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web), but in our house it's the most beloved, thanks to the audiobook, read by White... (Tom)

It sometimes seems like the American reading public only makes room for one new translated superstar at a time, and already it's hard to recall just what a revelation it was when the Chilean-Mexican-S... (Tom)

On one hand, this droll, wordless picture book, about a city crocodile getting ready for a day at work, is a slow-rolling set-up for one big joke. I think it's a pretty funny joke, but the real pleasu... (Tom)

Country Dark is the first fiction Offutt, who in his youth was compared to Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver, has published in twenty years, and it shows. Not because it's an encyclopedic novel packed w... (Tom)

From the moment it was published 25 years ago, Understanding Comics set the standard for something that had hardly existed before it came along: the theory of comics. (And that it was done as a comic... (Tom)

Maggie and Abby have always been locked-at-the-hip pals, at least until Abby spent half the summer at camp on Orcas Island while Maggie was stuck in Seattle, but now they've discovered they are connec... (Tom)

Into the fine and hilarious tradition of men making every possible wrong decision stumbles Ray Morris, a 33-year-old tech journalist living on the still-too-expensive outskirts of London with a wife n... (Tom)

If, like me, you first heard about Roadside Picnic, sometimes called the "greatest Soviet science-fiction novel," because it inspired Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, you should know that going from R... (Tom)

Marco the fox has questions—"Why don’t trees ever talk? How deep does the sun go when it sinks into the sea?"—and none of the other foxes seem to care about the answers, so he joins the crew on a pass... (Tom)

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)

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)