A two-volume self-help course in finding that core of unselfconscious creative urge that school, adolescence and self-consciousness stomped out of you years ago — with pictures, funny anecdotes and a warm-hearted narrator that will, at some point, make you say out loud to the book, "I love you!" Lynda is an American national treasure and these two works are her Old and New Testaments, the efforts towards which I think her last 30 years of cartooning have lead up to. I've never met anyone who wants more desperately to give something of herself to others than Lynda does. |
Lynda Roscoe Hartigan; Walter Hopps;... The finest monograph on any artist I've yet read, it provides a thorough overview of the work and the man who kept poetry and the beauty of the ineffable alive in the visual arts during its blunter and decidedly more "effable" periods. Including a DVD of his experimental films, a facsimile digital collection of his record and book collections, and three-dimensional digital models of his better known boxes, this book is a fittingly great assessment of the man who I think was the greatest and most original artist of the 20th century. |
Everybody's always complaining about how the Great American Novel has yet to be written, but here it is, and it won't likely ever be bettered; four decades of all-American male wrought with the finest, most forgiving brush that words can ferulle together, synaesthetically limning a sense of a person, a generation, and a lifetime so vividly that sometimes I forget that the events herein didn't actually happen to me. It's sort of as if the clarity of Tolstoy and the flat trueness of Chekhov were applied to the 20th century, with surprisingly hilarious results. Thank goodness Updike gave up on cartooning early and moved on to prose. |
I thought that my generation was doing pretty well following Art's example of how to make serious comic books for adults, but this book demonstrates just how pale and paltry our efforts have been; via interviews, documents, photographs and preparatory sketches (and an interactive DVD) it's clear that Art not only created the graphic novel, but that graphic novel may also never be bettered. |
Whenever I think I'm trying hard at what I do, I think of Seth and realized that I'm not. Usually devoting himself to somber works of graphic fiction, this extremely fun book mixes his memories and research into real cartoonists with complete nonsense, all revolving around a fictional fraternal order with a distinctly Canadian (and British) tone of camaraderie, gentlemanly competition and arcane knowledge, all somehow coming out strangely moving and warmhearted, not unlike the artist himself. |
Wilder, Laura Ingalls; Fraser, Caroline Delivery: To home, business or free to our stores. Click for more info. | £24.38 | £20.72 | 15% |  Despatched in 5 business days from USA. |   Add to Basket | Click & Collect:Order now to collect from 4pm today. In stock items only. Click for more info. | £24.38 | £20.72 | 15% |  Currently out of stock in all stores. | Stores - out of stock | New & Used:Our marketplace sellers will deliver to your chosen address. Click for more info. | | | | Currently unavailable | Currently unavailable |
With this adult edition of Wilder's warm yet unremittingly bleak memories of her 19th century frontier life in Midwestern America, the Library of America acknowledges what those of us who read them to our children (or read them ourselves) already knew — that she's one of the greatest, most lucid writers America has produced. The only drawback of this edition is that Garth Williams' homey, woolly drawings are not included, but Wilder's crystal clear prose perhaps shines all the more because of it. |
It's not really about whales or whaling, it's about how the inexperience of youth deifies the doings of the old. In a way, it could be considered the first "fan fiction," if it wasn't already fiction itself. At the same time, it will get you really, really interested in whales and whaling. The Great American Novel, but the 19th century version. |
Paul Duncan; Bengt Wanselius; Erland... Second in line from the better-selling Stanley Kubrick Archives, I actually prefer this volume because the filmmaker's life's work is so much messier, complicated, unstrung and confusing -- while his art is just as precise and masterful. Why Taschen decided to stick with the Kubrickian cover lettering is a little confusing, though easily overlooked for the treasure trove of material within, which |
Raymond Briggs; Raymond Briggs I don't think I've ever read this book without my eyes tearing up. How Briggs manages to impart such feeling and generosity towards his parents in this deeply moving and heartfelt yet never overly sentimental memoir amazes me. It reminds me a little in its after-effects of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," though the two works are otherwise completely different. It will make you care more deeply about life and the people you live it with, which is about the best one can say about anything. |
Vladimir Nabokov; Dmitri Nabokov Because my friend Chip Kidd designed this book, I had the unsettling experience of getting to read the posthumous, incomplete manuscript in illegal bootleg copy a year before it was published, and I found it one of the strangest literary experiences of my life. I'm still convinced that Nabokov, had he finished this book, would have so powerfully induced a sense of death and obliteration in the reader it might have actually caused injury in some. As it was, I felt icily feverish while reading it, my extremities going cold and translucent along with Nabokov's vanishing paragraphs, sentences, words and "characters." |
James Joyce; Hans Walter Gabler What can I say about what is probably the greatest book ever written in English, other than when I first made my way it I'd frequently stop at the end of the page and have no idea what I'd just read, but would find that my mind had been filled with vivid impressions and sensations that added up, if I thought about it for a second, to a very specific image. Has any other writer ever even come close to this direct transplantation of sense data via language, let along created art with it? It may be the greatest work of art ever created, next to Beethoven's 9th Symphony (which seems to share some of its same transmogrifying, transplant-ifying qualities). |
The first great novel of the 21st century uses the sinister beauty of the American Tax Code as a springboard from which to launch into a genuinely serious discussion of the origins and importance of civic responsibility amidst the hazy, blurred stupidity of a country in quick decline. Contrary to many reviews, I don't think it's about boredom, and it's certainly not boring. Another posthumous editor-to-manuscript resuscitation, the book hangs heavy with the clotted spectre of Wallace's suicide, which makes the writing glow all the more painfully through it. |
Zadie Smith Delivery:To home, business or free to our stores. Click for more info. | £18.99 | £12.34 | 35% | Despatched in 1 business day. | Add to Basket | Click & Collect:Order now to collect from 4pm today. In stock items only. Click for more info. | £18.99 | £16.14 | 15% | Currently out of stock in all stores. | Stores - out of stock | New & Used:Our marketplace sellers will deliver to your chosen address. Click for more info. | | | | Currently unavailable | Currently unavailable |
A tour de force of empathy, understanding and a multi-hued approach to what makes us what we are, Smith's newly hyper-efficient writing approach here delivers ultra-compact sentences, word-images and impressions that bloom in the mind like paper flowers or concentrated dyes. I can think of no one alive who can so deftly and breathlessly sail amid, around and through the minds of her characters and classes than Smith, and after reading this book, I felt more like I'd visited London than the few times I've actually been there myself. |
Dave Eggers Delivery:To home, business or free to our stores. Click for more info. | £16.25 | £13.81 | 15% | Despatched in 5 business days from USA. | Add to Basket | Click & Collect:Order now to collect from 4pm today. In stock items only. Click for more info. | £16.25 | £13.81 | 15% | Currently out of stock in all stores. | Stores - out of stock | New & Used:Our marketplace sellers will deliver to your chosen address. Click for more info. | | | | Currently unavailable | Currently unavailable |
I have to confess that I haven't read this yet (it's next on my list) but my wife did and said it was fantastic, and Dave never goes wrong; every book he takes up is a slightly off-kilter yet completely fresh approach to what the idea of writing and journalism and responsibility to one's fellow humans actually is, and all Right Now. He's also done more to keep publishing interesting than any other person I can think of, and he shouldn't even be doing any of that stuff (but he does, along with maintaining the 826 writing centers, the various McSweeney's periodicals, etc.) Plus the book is designed really, really well. |
The best collection of serious comics ever collected by one of its most serious cartoonists (who also happens to be one of my best friends.) The word "curated" is very overused these days, but Ivan very sensitively did just that here, balancing the funny against the tragic and the literary versus the esthetic, with everything in between. If one wanted to make an argument for comics as a viable medium for self-expression, one couldn't do any better than these two books (minus the selection of my own "Jimmy Corrigan" in the book, which Yale refused to run as anything but sideways, and so looks absolutely terrible.) |
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I've been waiting for this book for almost three decades. Gary Panter is not the same as you and me, a fact most clearly felt in his artwork and drawings, which feel and look like he's reeled in the 20th and 21st century central nervous system and laid it right on the page — with all of the advertising, music, movie and television imagery his line happened to snag on the way up. Designed in emulation of the earliest, awkward oblong strip collections of pioneering strips like 'Mutt and Jeff', this is a pioneering book of cartooning for the 22nd century by cartooning's most singular genius. |