New Today: Inklings by Jeffrey Koterba

The debut work of writer, musician and political cartoonist Jeffrey Koterba is published today. Inklings (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) tells the author’s own story with the aid of strong graphic elements, without the maudlin self-pity often associated with works of that genesis.

In his bio, Koterba tells us that “during the summer of 1978 [I] was struck by lightning and lived to tell about it.” He makes it sound like an advantage -- a thing to have survived and gained strength from, rather than a horrid obstacle which had to be overcome.

That pretty much describes all of Inklings. Koterba’s inky stylings are luminous, yes. But so is the spirit that drives them. Inklings is an almost rabidly optimistic look at a difficult childhood and coming-of-age from the hands of a fiendishly talented artist.

If Inklings is just the beginning, I can hardly wait to see what is yet to come.

Art & Culture: Best Music Writing 2009 edited by Greil Marcus

2009 marks the tenth anniversary of the Best Music Writing anthologies edited by music journalist and scholar Daphne Carr and published by Da Capo. As befits an anniversary edition, this anthology is stunning with contributions from some of the very top names in music writing, and letters, as well.

As guest editor Greil Marcus points out, Best Music Writing 2009 is not meant to be an almanac:

It is not a record of the best or worst or most important what-happened-in-music of 2008, the year from which all of the pieces here were drawn …. I distrust the notion that something has to happen in any given year that in the future we will look back upon as a portent of something or as an example of something else.

What we have, instead is, quite simply, the best. The most passionate, the most deeply felt, the most well-crafted and stated and sharply rendered. Over 30 pieces reflect all aspects of the music business and all types of music. You’ll recognize some of their names. Jonathan Lethem. Aidin Vaziri. Carrie Brownstein. David Remnick. Stanley Booth.

If you appreciate reading about music, you’ll enjoy Best Music Writing 2009. It does not get better than this.

New This Month: The Midnight Guardian by Sarah Jane Stratford

On the off-chance that you’re not yet totally sick of vampires, debut novelist Sarah Jane Stratford serves up an interesting new take on the blood-sucking mythos. A sort of alternate history, with vampires, The Midnight Guardian (St. Martin’s Press) opens on Hitler’s Germany, right at the bloody center of the Second World War. By 1940, Hitler has managed to kill all the vampires in Europe and Britain’s vampires are outraged and incensed and determine to disrupt the Nazis from their course of destruction.

Stratford’s fiction clearly owes a debt to the most senior of vampire lore weavers: both Bram Stoker and Anne Rice though, certainly, her creations show little resemblance to the Twighlightish teens of recent efforts by others. This may be in part due her education: Stratford holds a Masters degree in medieval history from the University of York and the depth and clarity with which she approaches these aspects of her material really come through. You get the feeling that, in building her particular lore, Stratford is on very solid ground.

Stratford’s story is tight and she can certainly write but one just wonders if -- really? -- the world is ready for still more vampires after we’ve seen so very many. Still The Midnight Guardian is a worthwhile and in some ways thought-provoking book.

New Last Week: John Dies at the End by David Wong

At a time when many writers are pushing at the edges of the novel, trying to redefine what the word means and what it is, David Wong sort of does. This comes in part from the publication history of his first novel, John Dies at the End (St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne), one of those weird Internet success stories you hear about. In fact, this might be one of the best yet.

John Dies at the End started out as a Web serial in 2004. The story appeared in book form for the first time in 2007, as a paperback from “Horror and Apocalyptic Book Publisher” Permuted Press, an independent publisher whose area of specialization you can pretty well guess at. John Dies at the End would have fit right in with their line.

The action in John Dies at the End all centers around soy sauce, a mysterious and fairly unstable drug that alters not only the mind, it seems to have an effect on time and eventually opens a portal to a pretty hell-like place. After you take it, Wong tells us, “You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that’s exactly right every time. And you can see the shadowy things that share this world, the ones who are always present and always hidden.”

The story is a first person narrative from the viewpoint of the author who actually isn’t David Wong, but says he is throughout the novel. In real life (and it’s not even a secret) he is National Lampoon contributor and Cracked.com editor-in chief Jason Pargin. That CV might make you think that John Dies at the End is hilariously funny. And sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s deeply disturbing and even horrifying. And then it’s funny again. In between there are some starkly -- and even surprisingly -- human moments. And all of that sounds like too much for one little debut novel to hold up under, but wait: this is a book that reportedly had over 70,000 downloads when it was free on the Internet. Since it was free, you might think “big deal,” but think again: try to give away 70,000 of anything on the Internet. I promise: it won’t be as easy as it sounds.

And so, is John Dies at the End high art? Not exactly. Or maybe, not even. But it’s interesting, compelling, engaging, arresting and -- yes -- sometimes even horrifying. And when it’s not being any of those things, it’s funny. Very, very funny. Next stop for David Wong (or maybe he’ll be back to being Jason Pargin by then), who knows? But, whatever it is, I feel very confident that a lot of people are already waiting to see what he dreams up next.

Art & Culture: How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll by Elijah Wald

It’s important to know going in that How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (Oxford University Press), doesn’t really have much to do with the Beatles at all. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that it has everything and nothing to do with them.

What the book really does is take on everything we think we know about popular music because, as author Elijah Wald tells us, “the past keeps looking different as the present changes.”

In many ways, Wald looks at music from a new and surprising place: the various spots where it is seen and felt. From those who make it and those who, individually, groove to it. This passage explains the title -- and in some ways the book itself -- most succinctly:

If you are not aware of the Beatles, you cannot hope to understand any music of the 1960s, because they are ubiquitous and affected all the other music. Even if some musicians remained free of their influence, those musicians were still heard by an audience that was acutely conscious of the Beatles. They were the dominant, inescapable sound of the era.

And though you might disagree with those words -- or, at least, some of them -- the fact that they are worth arguing is... well... inarguable.

Wald is a musician and writer who has authored six previous books on music including Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues and Global Minstrels: Voices of World Music. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll is highly readable. Wald adds something new to a field most of us thought had been over planted. The book is lucid, innovative and richly worthwhile.

Graphic Novels: The Color of Heaven by Kim Dong Hwa

The Color of Heaven (First Second) is the third book in a coming of age trilogy by celebrated Korean manhwa artist, Kim Dong Hwa. In an interview with Newsarama earlier this year, Hwa said that he was deeply influenced to tell the mother-daughter story in his Color of Earth trilogy by the aging of his own mother:

Since I was very young, I’ve been interested expressing the growth and change (mentally and physically) of a girl in manhwa form. I consider the process of a girl becoming a woman one of the biggest mysteries and wonders of life. And one day when my mother was sleeping in her sickbed, I looked down at her wrinkled face and suddenly realized that she must had been young and beautiful once. Then I started imagining her childhood and youth. What would she have looked like in her 60s, 50s, 40s and etc.? These thoughts inspired me to put my hand to the plow. Ehwa is the result of tracing back my mother’s youth.

Delicate, poetic and sometimes deeply -- though obliquely -- sensual, The Color of Heaven concludes the story of young Ehwa and her own mother. Older in this third book -- she’s a young woman now -- Ehwa is anticipating a love of her own and softly rebelling against the boundaries and realities her mother is trying to set.

Reading, one understands the thorough esteem with which this artist is regarded in his own country. It’s a delight to be able to all three books in the 2003-published trilogy -- The Color of Earth, The Color of Water and The Color of Heaven -- in their English translation.

New This Month: A Princess of Landover by Terry Brooks

A Chicago lawyer, brokenhearted after the loss of his family, buys a magical kingdom for a million dollars in an attempt to escape his wretched reality. Then -- wonder of wonders! -- the magic is real and the dreams begin to come true.

All of that is the central premise behind Terry Brooks’ Landover series, less well known than his epic Shannara series and, in many ways, so much more fun! In fact, it almost seems as though fun is one of the points of the whole Landover creation. Don’t get me wrong: this series is every bit as well conceived and written as anything we’ve seen from this bestselling author. But Landover is special. It’s lighter than the world of Shannara and, all-in-all, it’s an incredibly pleasant place to pass time. With that in mind, it’s impossible for me to tell you why Brooks has waited 14 years to give us a new installment in what I understand was a bestselling series when initially released. However, that is the case: the series’ first volume -- Magic Kingdom For Sale -- SOLD! – was published in 1986. Books two through five were published in a fairly regularly pattern between 1988 and 1995. And then nothing. Until now.

The new book is sufficiently sweet, charming and skillful to fit nicely into the Landover world. In A Princess of Landover (DelRey) our businessman’s headstrong half sylph daughter (the princess of the title, of course) must be taught a lesson. Magical highjinks ensue.

A Princess of Landover is an enjoyable journey; a helluva ride.

Biography: The Supremes by Mark Ribowsky

As a culture, we just don’t seem to get sick of epic Motown girl group, The Supremes. We’ve had movies and television shows and, of course, books and books and books. None of this diminishes the pleasure of author Mark Ribowsky’s The Supremes (Da Capo). Nor, in some ways, does it diminish Ribowsky’s hubris: for himself and his chosen subjects. “[The Supremes] are the most important modern American music act after Elvis Presley, and this may well be the first real biography of them,” Ribowsky writes in his Introduction. Fair enough. Especially as he points out that this might have something to do with “the geology of female acts and gender-based assumptions of what is a ‘serious’ subject matter.”

As hinted at in these words, Ribowsky’s biography is no lightweight fan fluff. Rather, this is an intelligent biographic retrospective, worthy of any university press, but arguably more gripping. This is, after all, good stuff. From the girls’ 1960 audition for would-be starmaker Barry Gordy, to playing the Apollo and “living their dream” to the famous -- infamous -- riffs between the Supremes themselves that eventually led to their break-up.

As Ribowsky points out, “the Supremes’ saga has produced a good many fables, a convenient fallen dream girl in Diana Ross, and a heavy in Barry Gordy.” Good stuff, well handled. The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal is a terrific book.

New this Month: Hitler’s War by Harry Turtledove

There is something vaguely comforting about a Harry Turtledove alternative history. Turtledove has written many, many books and a lot of those books have been set in familiar times, but where some -- or even several -- of the elements have changed. To Turtledove, it seems, the world is a constant Sliding Doors of possibility.

Change one thing.

Turtledove’s books are deeply inventive and well thought out but, on a certain level, they are not deeply different from each other. Therein lies the comfort. One can rely on Turtledove. He writes well and with confidence. He develops strong plots. Delivers well considered storylines.

Take the most recent entry, Hitler’s War (DelRey). The novel is predicated on a single question: what would have happened if Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had refused to allow Hitler to annex the Sudetenland? Again, change one thing and, like a kaleidoscope, everything looks different. One piece falls another way and all things are altered.

I enjoyed Hitler’s War. It is solid writing and classic Turtledove. The book didn’t move me greatly, but I didn’t expect it to. I’ve seldom been moved by this writer’s work. But Hitler’s War did make me think and I enjoyed all of the time I invested into this large book.

Turtledove hits it once more.

Biography: Black Tooth Grin: The High Life, Good Times, and Tragic End of “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott by Zac Crain

Unsurprisingly, Black Tooth Grin (Da Capo) begins at the end. December 8, 2004, 24 years to the day that John Lennon died. “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott killed onstage, mid-song. The founder of the metal cover band Pantera, Abbott was not well known outside of his own metal community. However according to author Zac Crain, no one who knew the musician ever wondered why so many people called the act “the 9/11 of heavy metal.”

Of course, Black Tooth Grin doesn’t just tell the story of Abbott’s death. Much more time and detail is spent on the doomed musician’s life. Does D Magazine senior editor and music scribe heavyweight Crain sometimes move Black Tooth Grin towards the maudlin? Maybe only slightly. For the most part, though, Crain seems to hit all the right notes, skillfully blending fact with educated fancy, filling in the blanks and also imagining the what-might have beens and the nearly-weres.

Metal fans will, of course, find Black Tooth Grin to be a must-read but even those who had only barely heard of Abbott will find Crain’s book compelling. It’s a portrait of the music industry exactly as you always suspected it was… and yet entirely different. Fascinating.

New in Paperback: The Islamist by Ed Husain

More than two years after its initial publication, Ed Husain’s The Islamist comes to us in a sleek new paperback from Penguin.

The Islamist is riveting. This is partly due the extraordinary subject matter and partly to Husain’s calm and stately voice.

Though this is a topic that can invite strident voices to either side, Husain is all the more compelling for never really going there. Instead, he tells his tale simply: born in a Muslim but largely non-political London suburb, recruited to fundamentalism at 16 and swimming with extremists for five years. When he was in his early 20s, Husain rejected what was on offer, did his own research and found his way back to a more traditional form of the faith in which he had been raised. Much of The Islamist consists of this spiritual and physical journey and the view from inside is both frightening and enlightening, as is Husain’s personal journey back.

Since The Islamist was first published in 2007, it was nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the PEN/Ackerly Prize for Literary Autobiography as well as several other prizes.

If you’ve ever wondered about Islam and how it fits into the modern world, you’ll find The Islamist to be a worthwhile starting point as well as a deeply interesting read. Highly recommended.

New This Week: Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

If you love SF/F and have not yet encountered Brandon Sanderson, you can forgive yourself: the whole thing has happened pretty quickly. That said, don’t stick your head in the sand on this one. He may be relatively new, but expect him to be around for a while.

Sanderson is a writer with talent, vision and chutzpah, a combination that put him into awards line-ups and bestseller lists almost from before the first moment. This because Sanderson was hand-picked to write the conclusion to Robert Jordan’s epic Wheel of Time series after Jordan’s death in 2007. Being heir apparent to one of the genre’s most legendary writers did nothing to detract from Sanderson’s reputation, but when you read his work, it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t have gotten there on his own. He is a writer that not only can write, but does. He’s so good, he makes it look effortless, to the point where Warbreaker (Tor) was more or less written online. Sanderson explains on his Web site:

And so, I did something crazy. I went to Tor and asked if they'd be okay with me posting the entire version of Warbreaker AS I WROTE IT. Meaning, rough drafts. The early, early stuff which is filled with problems and errors. They thought I was crazy too (my agent STILL thinks this project is a bad move) but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do something that would involve and reward my readers. For those who are aspiring novelists, I wanted to show an early version of my work so they could follow its editing and progress. For those who are looking to try out my novels, I wanted to offer a free download.

And that’s just what he did. The book published this month is much more than an intact testament to Sanderson’s great online experiment, it is a book that grows out of this author’s involvement with his community. Not a bad starting point at all.

The book itself is... well, it’s wonderful. Sanderson is one of those world-building authors who replies heavily on strong characterization to convince readers of the viability of the environments he creates. This is not a technique that can work for writers who are short on either skill or imagination and Sanderson has lots of both.

New this Week: The City & the City by China Miéville

Having waited quite a while for the latest effort by China Miéville, the author of Perdido Street Station and Un Lun Dun, I’m disappointed in myself to have been disappointed by The City & the City (Del Rey), a book that I know is better than I think it is.

Let me explain.

Since he arrived on the scene under the splendid weight of King Rat in 1998, Miéville has been the one to watch. Just 25 at the time, King Rat announced this arrival with a force and passion that was undeniable.

After a book like that debut, there’s always the fear: will he be able to follow it up? And Miéville did, in wonderful style, with a book that is -- arguably -- already a classic: 2000’s majestic steampunk Perdido Street Station.

Other books followed, with Miéville seemingly pushing the boundaries of whatever form he opted to follow. Mark my words: he is a very real talent. And the joy of it: seven splendid books in, Miéville is still only 36 years old. He has time to push at every edge of form that he wishes.

He’s done that again in The City & the City, pushing at the boundaries of both speculative fiction and classic 20th-century noir. Set in a somewhat recognizable world with a starkly Eastern European feel, the two cities referred to are Beszel and Ul Qoma, two cities that happen to be in the same place at one time. Citizens of both places are forbidden to see each other or acknowledge each other’s presence, even though there are circumstances where denizens of both places can be seen. At those times, it is both law and etiquette to unsee the other party and never to say you’ve seen anything at all.

Now clearly, a murder investigation under such circumstances is going to be a challenge. For one thing, there’s a whole city of potential suspects right over there and you may not ask them where they were or what they’ve seen.

While the premise is deeply fascinating, it never quite works for me. The writing, once again, is fantastic. Miéville writes beautifully. Few can come close to his way with both meter and metaphor. He seems to hit the dark and gritty noir tone effortlessly and -- aside from the weird circumstances of the city -- his characters are believable and even pleasantly flawed. I felt distanced from the story in a way that I could not bridge but, as I suggested when I began, the writing is so good, the premise so well thought out, I can’t see how the fault could be Miéville’s and, certainly, other reviewers have liked it much better than I did.

I plan to read The City & the City again in a few years. I’m hoping it will all gel for me then because, as I said, I suspect this book is better than I thought it was. I can’t, after all, see any reason for the book to be less than the sum of its parts.

New Today: A Day in the Life by Robert Greenfield

Through much of A Day in the Life (Da Capo) I kept getting the same uncomfortable feeling I got while watching Requiem for A Dream (2000), but not in a good way. There was a similar feeling of inevitable sinking and incoming tragedy. A similar feeling of wanting to shake someone and make them see.

Robert Greenfield (STP, Exile on Main Street) relates the tragic story of Tommy Weber and Susan “Puss” Coriat. Beautiful, aristocratic Londoners when they wed in the early 1960s, they are sucked into the vortex that the 60s became for many people and, by story’s end, both have been basically ruined by sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Puss dies by her own hand in 1971 and Tommy in 2006 after decades of self-abuse.

In between the golden beginning and the ignominious end, the couple have two children -- one of whom would grow to become the actor Jake Weber -- fall in with various nefarious rock n’ rollers and just rip their golden life to shreds.

A Day in the Life reads, at times, like a novel, but like one of those torrid little romances you’d rather no one see you with. And after you finish reading? Well, I just wanted to have a shower.

A Day in the Life is not a bad book, but it’s a sad book. I’m not sorry I read it, but I’d certainly never read it again. Fans of music history and 1960s culture will feel differently, I’m sure. This book is just stuffed full of the kind of juicy tidbits that lot likes best.

New This Month: Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V.S. Redick

Though he’s been compared to George R.R. Martin and Philip Pullman, I don’t really see it. Other than the obvious, of course: fantasy writers who sell a lot of books. But certainly in Red Wolf Conspiracy (Ballantine) I’m most put in mind of Robin Hobb and her excellent Liveship series.

Whether or not this first book in a projected trilogy is destined to become one of the “classics of epic fantasy” as promised by Redick’s publicists I really couldn’t say. Classics have a way of keeping their own council until the deed is done. But, certainly, Red Wolf Conspiracy is a meaty and enjoyable read. An ancient vessel with a precious cargo: a royal bride who will connect two uneasy monarchies. But there is a conspiracy planned for this voyage and all sorts of trouble set to brew before the 600-year-old Imperial Merchant Ship Chathrand successfully completes her journey.

This is a substantial book and, at times, it is somewhat too dense. Redick’s touch is thorough, but it is not light. Even so, those who enjoy classic fantasy will like this ride and will hope that the next book in this series is not too far behind.

New this Week: Shadow Valley by Steven Barnes

Readers familiar with Barnes’ work before 2006’s Great Sky Woman (released in paperback just last month) will have an understandable challenge in knowing what to do with Shadow Valley (DelRey). On the one hand, Barnes is best known as a genre writer. That’s actually an understatement: Barnes is an esteemed and much awarded author in the twinned worlds of science fiction and fantasy. And since he’s also married to yet another esteemed author of speculative fiction -- Tananarive Due -- it’s a sort of familial thing. We have our expectations of Barnes. But does he deliver? Well, yes. But in unexpected ways.

Like Great Sky Woman, Shadow Valley holds not the merest thread of SF/F. No matter how hard you try to find it, it just isn’t there. This is straight up historical fiction, but more Jean Auel than James Michener: this is creation historical fiction. Or maybe most accurately prehistorical fiction. In Shadow Valley we go way back to ancient Africa where Sky Woman and Frog Hopping -- first encountered in Great Sky Woman -- are dealing with life beyond the devastating eruption of Father Mountain that concluded the last book.

This is exciting stuff. Epic, page snappingly thrilling, not to be missed. The literati have a way at holding their nose when they sense the faintest whiff of SF/F nearby. My hope is that Barnes’ literary pedigree won’t overshadow the excellence of this work. It’s a worthwhile book that has the potential to help a lot of people gain an understanding of their distant roots.

New This Month: Gladiatrix by Russell Whitfield

In their review, Publishers Weekly came up with an elevator pitch for Gladiatrix (St. Martin’s Press) that eclipses almost anything else that might be said about the book. “Think: girls gone wild -- with swords.” Really, what more need be said?

Nineteen-year-old Lyssandra is a Spartan priestess with martial training. Oh, and she’s super hot. As Gladiatrix opens, she’s in the arena performing as a female gladiator. Her life as an arena slave is short-lived, however. She is scouted by the successful and beautiful gladiatrix, Eiranwen, who takes the young slave into her school and -- ultimately -- her bed.

Gladiartix is occasionally so overwritten, I had to avert my eyes. Take these two lines from the very first page:

The roar of the crowd was a living thing as it assaulted her and she staggered beneath its violent intensity. Row upon row of the screaming mob surrounded her, the ampitheatre stuffed full, as if it were a massive god gorging upon base humanity.

You don’t have to go far to find lines like that, either. These are from the first page, but I could have just opened the book at random.

But then, this is not high fiction. No one is going to be rushing in with any literary awards for debut novelist Russell Whitfield on this one. But if you like this sort of stuff at all, you’ll probably enjoy Gladiatrix. Intense action, gore, sex, Gladiatrix has it all. Could a movie be far behind?

SFF: The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton

Looking back on it, much of the time I spent reading Peter F. Hamilton’s The Temporal Void (Del Rey), I was in a daze. And the book is 700 pages, so it was a significant amount of time. What dazzles me is the breadth and depth of Hamilton’s imagination. The world he has created for his Commonwealth Saga is... well... dazzling. I found it eye-popping when I first encountered this world in 2008’s The Dreaming Void. If anything, I am even more blown away this time. The Temporal Void is a significant accomplishment that bristles with the author’s shining ideas.

The dreams implied by the titles were created long ago by a human astrophysicist named Inigo. Inigo’s dreams were inspirational and were shared by hundreds of millions of people, resulting in a religion: Living Dream. Now, however, the dream has grown darker and time is running out. The fate of humanity rests in the hands of half a dozen people that we come to know in The Temporal Void. This is a fantastic, alien, complex series. Hamilton can’t write them quickly enough to suit me.

SF/F: The Stranger by Max Frei

Before I say anything else I have to tell you that I’ve never looked forward to the publication of a book more than I did Max Frei’s The Stranger (Overlook). It’s been such a long time coming. I’ve been hearing about it for years but, in retrospect, it felt like whispers of things. Rumors from other lands. Something well imagined that could not possibly be true. Because both The Stranger and its almost iconic author, Max Frei, have taken on mythic proportions. All right, I’ll cop: in some circles, not so mythic. But in those circles, The Stranger -- and the books that come after -- had become almost the Holy Grail of books. If only, we said, Frei’s work could be translated into English, nothing would ever be the same as it had been.

And then, of course, it was. And nothing ever will be the same, but not in the way we anticipated. See: it’s simply not possible to come to a book with the expectations I owned and not be disappointed on some level. And, in certain ways, I was. I am. But I do understand that you simply can’t run out and translate a Russian novel and expect it to play perfectly in English. And I’m talking any novel here. But with something as chewy and nuanced as The Stranger, you can amp all of that up considerably. This isn’t just a book, it’s an event. Clearly, that’s a little tough to live up to.

The Stranger is epic fantasy on a quirky philosophical level. But if those words bring Terry Pratchett to mind, just clear your head: Frei’s work is nothing like that. In The Stranger, even the author is a fictional character. It has come to light that the actual author of Max Frei’s books is a woman named Svetlana Martynchik. Max Frei, the quasi author, is also at the center of his tales, which begin in The Stranger with Book One of the Labyrinths of Echo.

It took my tightly honed North American sensibilities quite a while to pick up the rhythm of Freis’ writing: the alternate universe of dreams, the fact that he is a sort of magical secret agent who must stop a murderer from our world from getting his way in the new one.

North American readers will find themselves slogging through at first: this is not your grandmother’s fantasy. But stick with it: all becomes clear after a while, as well as the density of wit we’re unused to reading English language authors.

The Stranger is a fantastic book and the first of many to be published in English. If I don’t miss my guess, reading it now will put you in the vanguard.

Pow Wow edited by Ishmael Reed with Carla Blank

Pow Wow (DaCapo) is an important book. Edited by the incomparable Ishmael Reed -- novelist, poet, playwright and essayist -- with help from Carla Blank, a writer and artist whose work you will be hearing about soon, Pow Wow’s subtitle offers a broad overview of the book: “Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience -- Short Fiction from Then to Now.” As that subtitle implies, the reader is in for the journey of a lifetime.

The contributors represented alone make Pow Wow a collection of interest. Russell Banks, Cecil Brown, Stanley Crouch, James T. Farrell, Benjamin Franklin, Ellen Geist, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Bharati Mukherjee, Ty Pak, Grace Paley, Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain and more and more and more besides. In all, 63 pieces represent a diverse view of American writing over the past 200 years.

“In assembling this anthology,” Reed tells us in his foreword, “I have read over four hundred short stories written by American writers of all backgrounds. It is a journey I recommend for all readers who want to know where American civilization has been and where it is going.”

Pow Wow sets us on that journey in a collection intended to mark our consciousness and our hearts.

New this Month: The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz

Considering how the last year or so has gone, Jacqueline Novogratz left her job in the financial sector just in the nick of time. That wasn’t what it was about. From the front flap of The Blue Sweater (Rodale): “Jacqueline Novogratz left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it.”

The result was a journey that would have far-reaching results. For Novogratz herself, obviously, but also for the people whose lives she touched and who touched her and now, with The Blue Sweater, she touches ours, as well because, as empowered as she is and as powerful she has, in a way, become, Novogratz can also write. In The Blue Sweater she brings us along on her personal journey of transformation.

Part of the power in The Blue Sweater comes from Novogratz’s own urgency. “Today, I believe more strongly than I did as a young woman that we can end poverty,” she writes at one point. “Never before in history have we had the skills, resources, technologies, and imagination to solve poverty that we do now.”

Novogratz is the piper. The stories she tells here are her music. And it’s difficult to even want to do anything other than follow along.

New This Month: The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett

One of the things you hear from new writers is how they’d have X number of novels inside them, if only they could find the time. But time is one of those funny things. Sometimes, the more you squeeze it, the more seems to pop out. At least, so it seems, because there are an awful lot of extraordinary time-squeezing stories in the publishing world.

The latest of these belongs to Peter V. Brett, long-time rider of the F train from Brooklyn to Times Square. It was on this daily commute that Brett wrote 90 per cent of The Warded Man (Del Rey), the first novel in a series so vast, so sweeping, it’s difficult to comprehend that it was composed mostly on the subway, a realm as far from that as inhabited by the legendary demon-fighter, the Warded Man, as can be imagined. Oh: and I did not mention, Brett accomplished this amazing feat while thumb-typing. That’s right: The Warded Man was composed on a Blackberry. The mind reels.

These are the things you think about as you begin The Warded Man. You don’t stay there long, though. While the Publishers Weekly review was a little simplistic, it did point at one of the things I really like about The Warded Man. While it’s not strictly true that “Brett’s gritty tale will appeal to those who tire of sympathetic villains and long for old-school orc massacres” it’s true enough to get to the heart of the matter. This is old-school storytelling, plain and simple. Brett’s characters grapple with issues of morality, with black and white, right and wrong. In the process, a lot of evil stuff gets dispatched. Quite often, there is blood involved.

This is hearty, muscular fare. There is no formula here and little to remind you of other writers. Brett has found his own way to his own world, on the F train. We’re glad to be along for the ride.

New in Paperback: Farewell, My Subaru by Doug Fine

One of the things that’s struck me about the green movement: it can be a little dour. And, actually, I get it. Really, I do. There’s a lot of serious stuff going on, after all. Climates changing. Polar icecaps melting. Food supplies dwindling. It’s all enough to put you in a really bad mood. As a result, a lot of Earth save-related stuff is strident. Unsmiling. You get the feeling you better put up or shut up: the planet is not going to save itself. If you’re not going to do something about it, you’d better stand aside or get trampled in the angry green parade.

Farewell, My Subaru (Villard) isn’t like that. The first hint, of course, is that title. A perfect title, when you think about it. A little bit romantic. A little bit evocative (the whole fossil fuel thing). Certainly a little bit fun. The title hints at all the things this book is and means and accomplishes. But it’s not an idle reference either. In fact, you meet the late, lamented Subaru at the very beginning of the book. The car is dying. And it’s not dying well. And author Fine watches it happen while wondering how much he actually cares. The opening lines of Farewell, My Subaru:

As I watched my Subaru Legacy slide backward toward my new ranch’s studio outbuilding, the thought crossed my mind that if it kept going -- and I didn’t see why it wouldn’t -- at least I would be using less gasoline.

NPR contributor Fine’s print work has appeared in The Washington Post, Wired and Salon. His voice is gentle, his humor sharp, his message clear. Farewell, My Subaru is an easy, enjoyable read. And that’s a good thing, because this is a book that everyone needs to read.

SF/F: Dragon in Chains by Daniel Fox

The story goes that Daniel Fox traveled to Taiwan and became obsessed, to the point of learning the language and writing about it every chance he got. He was, in essence, filled with the place.

When he was sufficiently filled, what ultimately flowed back out was Dragon in Chains (DelRey) a compelling and epic tale set in some alternate mediaeval China where the youthful emperor must flee to an island -- a lightly disguised Taiwan -- where, with his richly varied court, he repairs to get ready for his own destiny.

Fox recently described what was in his heart when he wrote Dragon in Chains:

Partly it was that classic image of the tiny island bristling at the vast mainland, bristling with weapons; partly it was the experience of the native Taiwanese, invaded by a vast northern army and living under military dictatorship. Marry those two together, and there’s a novel. But I’m a fantasist, I have small interest in mimetic fiction. I wanted to recast the story into feudal China first - an emperor in flight, the dynasty at hazard -- and then into imagination, put magic in jade and a dragon in the strait.

Dragon in Chains is the first in what is meant to be an epic saga. If another book were never to follow in this series, this one would be enough. As much as I want to discover what comes next in Fox’s carefully created world, Dragon in Chains stands alone. Fox is not only a wonderful storyteller, he has a poet’s heart and ear. Dragon in Chains is a beautiful book.

Biography: Poe: A Life Cut Short by Peter Ackroyd

To talk about Poe: A Life Cut Short (Doubleday/Nan. A. Talese) is to talk about Peter Ackroyd’s “Brief Lives” bite-sized biographies, because this latest entry falls into that series. But even that description -- “bite-sized” -- trivializes something that, though small, is actually quite grand.

Poe: A Life Cut Short is no Coles Notes biography: no abbreviation of a richer story. Rather it is an eloquently told biography in its own right, created by an author who knows his way around this world, having written internationally acclaimed biographies of William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens and others. To demonstrate, I offer up the beginning of Chapter Two, where Ackroyd’s subject is offered up in sketch form:

Edgar Allan Poe has become the image of the poète maudit, the blasted soul, the wanderer. His fate was heavy, his life all but unsupportable. A rain of blows descended on him from the time of his birth. He once said that to “revolutionise, at one effort, the universal world of human thought” it was necessary only “to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple -- a few plain words -- ‘My Heart Laid Bare.’ But -- this little book must be true to its title.” Poe never wrote such a book, but his life deserved one.

Obviously, I pull that quote now because Ackroyd here might be seen to be attempting to live Poe’s advice. Does Ackroyd add to the knowledge of this tragic, talented writer? I’m no Poe specialist, but I do not believe there is actual new material here. However, he slices Poe’s life with expert precision and the insight of one who is accustomed to looking at distant facts and having them line up in a sensical way.

Poe: A Life Cut Short is an enjoyable and surprisingly detailed biography. Published in the United Kingdom in 2008, the book saw light in North America in January of this year, just in time to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth.

New this Month: Rifling Paradise by Jem Poster

It sounds like hyperbole but I don’t care: Jem Poster’s sophomore effort, Rifling Paradise (Overlook) is as near perfect a book as I have encountered in a very long time. It is a work of historical fiction and the history here -- Australia in the Victorian era -- is pitch perfect. Rifling Paradise looks like a book, but it is not: it’s really a time machine.

The story finds minor English landowner, Charles Redbourne, heading to Australia to make an impression as a naturalist, at a time when that was a weirdly competitive field. If Rifling Paradise was just Redbourne’s story, it would be interesting enough: it would be a good book. But when Redbourne’s specimen collecting takes a terrifying turn, we find ourselves with a page turner on our hands.

So what is Rifling Paradise? Is it historical fiction? Literary fiction? Is it a psychological thriller? Or the portrait of an age? Well, actually, it’s all of those things. And more. A wonderful book.

Non-Fiction: Love in 90 Days by Diana Kirschner

This time of year, the pressure to be paired is almost palpable. And whether or not society is supportive of singles seems to be a cyclic thing. Sometimes the pendulum swings one way and everyone is looking for a reason to justify both unpairing or even just celebrating your single state. But that’s not the cycle that we’re currently in. In Love in 90 Days (Center Street) author Diana Kirschner makes this abundantly clear:

Love is life’s golden ticket. It brings in the brightest of colors and the rich high and low notes. There is no mistaking it; you know when you have love. And you definitely know when you don’t. The big question is, What are you doing about not having love in your life? Are you going to risk being alone and lonely, missing out on all that love can give?

So, okay: no pressure, right? But wait, it gets worse. It turns out there are health benefits to being in a relationship, too:

Study after study has shown that love relationships have a huge impact on our psychological, economic, and physical well-being. Having a life partner can create a higher sense of self-worth, provide intimacy and emotional support, which fulfills the deepest need for human connection, and lead to greater wealth and economic stability.

So much for accepting your single self as you are. If you thought you were happy alone, think again. Doctor Diana makes it clear: single sucks. But here’s the problem: what’s a guy to do.

In Love in 90 Days, Kirschner offers up all the answers. And that’s not tongue-in-cheek, either. After all, the subtitle is The Essential Guide to Finding Your Own True Love. That’s a tall order, so Kirschner doesn’t spend too much time on making potential readers feel bad about their partnerless state: she snaps us right to work.

Unfortunately, I was well into Love in 90 Days before I realized that the book is completely not aimed at me. What was my first clue? Try this chapter heading: “Field Report of DUDs and STUDs.” And though some of this advice could work for either gender, Love in 90 Days is most obviously (obvious to anyone but me, I guess) a book aimed at helping women find their ideal man. So I can not tell you if the book works. I can tell you this, though: it’s a 13 week program that takes a sensible and pro-active approach to helping women zero in on their “own true love” in less time than the average sitcom season. Works for me.

From everything I can see, the book is doing very, very well and getting Kirschner a lot of attention. And that’s good, because here is what I hope: she’ll do so well with Love in 90 Days that she’ll write a follow-up, and that follow-up will get me going on finding my “own true love.” There are worse things to hope for.

SFF: The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan

Back in 2002 when Richard K. Morgan’s first book, Altered Carbon, hit the shelves, both readers and reviewers went nuts. In January Magazine’s Best of 2002, gabe chouinard made the book one of his picks for best of the year. “If Raymond Chandler had ever spent any amount of time wallowing in the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s,” wrote chouinard, “I’m pretty sure he could have written Altered Carbon, an absolutely stellar first novel from Richard Morgan.”

It was a feeling that was echoed throughout reviewerdom and has been echoed since in subsequent books and which, in fact, is bound to be echoed for The Steel Remains (DelRey), another stellar novel, and one that takes Morgan into a new-for-him world: epic fantasy which, in his hands, is darkly gritty, violent and entirely gripping. And from the book’s opening paragraph, we know we’re back into territory that chouinard described so well: Chandler on hard drugs. Or maybe, Chandler on synth drugs, rather than the hard booze he was known for.

When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased moth has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse, and check his pupils to see if he’s ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him.

If you have thus far missed out on Morgan’s work, do yourself a favor and try whichever one of his six books strikes your fancy. It might be good to know that a couple of Morgan’s books -- Altered Carbon and Market Forces -- have been optioned for film. Also homophobes might want to brace themselves for The Steel Remains, intended to be the first book in a new trilogy. Whatever you’ve heard about him, you’ll be hearing more soon.

New Yesterday: What Obama Means by Jabari Asim

If timing is everything, Jabari Asim, formerly an editor at The Washington Post and currently editor-in-chief of The Crisis -- the magazine of the NAACP -- has it all figured out.

The author of 2007’s The N Word: Who Say It, Who Shouldn’t and Why approaches Barack Obama’s new presidency from a cultural perspective in What Obama Means: For Our Culture, Our Politics, and Our Future (William Morrow). Asim uses his talent, his training and his observations about his own culture to help understand how we came to this point and where we might expect to go from here. It’s a thoughtful and enjoyable ride. You might not agree with everything that Asim posits, but he states his various cases eloquently and he writes so well, it’s enjoyable to follow him on this journey of thought:

With the heyday of Parisian exile long gone and journeys back to Africa exposed as mostly implausible, race men and women have nowhere else to go. There are too many bodies in the earth, and you can’t, as Toni Morrison once wrote, just up and leave a body. Those bones belong to the land, the land belongs to us, and we don’t need to wear lapel pins to prove it.

Asim is a wonderful writer, sure. But he’s also something of a philosopher and, on moving with him through his thoughts on how this moment in history became possible, it’s enjoyable to follow his mental calisthenics.

Did Michael Jordan’s success in the NBA contribute to Obama’s successful run at the White House? How about Sidney Poitier’s Academy Award and Michael Jackson’s Thriller? Now me, I would not have made those connections and, having read What Obama Means, I’m still not sure I’m convinced. But these are engaging mental exercises for this moment in time. Asim has written an entertaining, enlightening and thought-provoking book. Students of contemporary culture will want to put it near the top of their lists.

New This Month: The Judging Eye by R. Scott Bakker

In a very short time, author R. Scott Bakker has proven that he is well on his way to building a universe that is arguably comparable with those created by the likes of Frank Herbert (Dune) and Isaac Asimov (Foundation). What Bakker does that -- again, arguably -- his contemporaries do not and that those SFF luminaries did was completely imagine -- from the ground up -- a universe so satisfyingly detailed you felt as though you could slip inside. The politics, the religion, the very ground beneath your feet. Many have tried but do not have that gift. But Bakker? Bakker has it, is doing it, will do it, or so I predict.

Barely into his forties, Bakker now backs up the first part of his story -- the three books of The Prince of Nothing series -- with a new series, The Aspect Emperor. The first book in this new series, The Judging Eye (Overlook) will be released later this month. It takes place roughly two decades after the events in 2006’s The Thousandfold Thought, where we find the Prince of Nothing himself now made Aspect-Emperor of a huge holding and claiming that he holds the key to a Second Apocalypse which is right around the corner.

The Judging Eye is released just two months before Bakker’s first thriller, Neuropath (Tor Books) will be released in the United States. (It was published by Penguin Canada around the middle of last year, but they seem to have been somewhat secretive about it.) In an admiring review, SFF World called it a “CSI-style thriller with a science fiction edge.” I can hardly wait!

New This Month: The New Annotated Dracula by Leslie S. Klinger

In 2004 he rocked us with The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a look at the classic fictional detective that was closer -- and in some ways more intimate -- than any that had gone before. Author Leslie S. Klinger offered up an almost line-by-line commentary on the great work. In the process, he unearthed bits and pieces that had been left behind over the years -- a bit of literary archeology, if you will. Fans were floored at the offering of riches about the much celebrated Holmes. On the one hand, the book seemed to cover every possible corner of Holmes legend and lore. On the other, it brought it all together in a handsome volume worthy of gift-giving and collection. The only question left, really, was: What comes next? How do you follow up that sort of action? And with what? After all, not every literary icon is worthy of the Klinger treatment. But, certainly, there are a few.

Klinger found one worthy of his attention in Bram Stoker’s original Dracula. And here again, Klinger follows Stoker’s tale line by line, offering up trenchant observations and tidbits of all sorts of information about this classic novel. We begin with an introduction by Neil Gaiman. “Dracula is a book that cries out for annotation,” Gaiman tells us. “The world it describes is no longer our world.”

And Klinger responds, in a way, with his annotations: perhaps making our worlds collide. As he says in his own preface, “My principal aim ... has been to restore a sense of wonder, excitement and sheer fun to this great work.” He succeeds.

There is a fiction is Klinger’s annotations, however: he proceeds as though Stoker’s Dracula were a historical non-fiction. The device works -- adds, somehow to Klinger’s magic -- and while reading The New Annotated Dracula (Norton) you often feel transported, as though to a world that never existed, an in-between world where magic is real... and ever so frightening.

Ironically -- or perhaps not so much -- Eric Nuzum’s very successful 2007 non-fiction work The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula (St. Martin’s Press) is released this month in paperback. January Magazine reviewed that book favorably when it was published last year, but I mention it here because, while Nuzum and Klinger’s books are very, very different what we have here is not an either-or type of proposition. In fact, you may just find that one fuels the need for the other: there is no duplication between the two books, only an ever-broadening knowledge in a fascinating -- and fictional? -- field.

New Today: The Eleventh Man by Ivan Doig

There’s something sweetly sentimental in all the testosterone lurking not far beneath the covers of The Eleventh Man (Harcourt), a football novel that melds into World War II from Ivan Doig (This House of Sky, The Whistling Season). That would seem a contradiction in terms -- sweet sentiment. Masses of testosterone -- but somehow it’s not. Somehow it works in a book that manages to be epic in scope and fact.

The war licked its chops over the battle of Leyte Gulf, as it came to be called, with the inevitability from day one that history would speak of such a gang-fight of fleets in the same breath with the Spanish Armada, Trafalgar, Jutland, and Midway. Ben all but moved into the wire room at East Base to follow reports of the military struggle shaping up around the Philippine Islands. It proved to be like reading War and Peace standing up.

Ben Reinking is the 11th man, left behind to chronicle the exploits of his former football teammates as they make their way through various theaters of war. An exciting book with all the right stuff. The Eleventh Man might well be the very best thing Doig -- an acclaimed and respected author -- has done to date. I loved every word.

Biography: The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: A Memoir

For those not keeping score, Grandmaster Flash has been to urban music what Todd Rundgren has been to MOR pop. Clearly, both would exist without these important early purveyors, but -- and arguably -- the resulting genres would have been quite different.

In The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats (Broadway), Flash -- with the help of bestselling author David Ritz (Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, Rhythm and the Blues) riffs through his early life and career with the aplomb one would expect from the man many consider to be the father of contemporary hip hop.

There are times he tells his story calmly: one word neatly marching behind the other in accepted fashion. Other times he shares his remembrances in rhyme and still others when he tells his story in a sweet blend of both. Here, for example, he shares the disappointing result after an early performance:

Maybe my speakers weren’t loud enough. Maybe the people didn’t recognize the jams. Maybe they weren’t in the mood. Maybe they just didn’t understand.

Whatever it was, you could have heard a pin drop in that park, and my stomach was starting to twist. I looked over and saw Miss Rose, Penny, Lilly, and Mom. They could tell I was crushed. I could see them hurting for me, but there was nothing they could do.

Career-wise, of course, things got better from there. Flash’s tale does not end with his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, but it’s close. And though the book concludes on a hopeful note, one gets the feeling a lot has been left unsaid. In some ways, though, that’s OK. On the journey he gives us a taste: the misunderstood talent, the larger-than-life success, the almost inevitable addiction followed by recovery followed by the reevaluation of a life that needs to be richly lived. If the latter years of The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash seem sketchy -- and they do -- it may just be that the book itself is a bit premature. This is a story still in progress with many chapters still to write.

Art & Culture: 100 Road Movies by Jason Wood

If I were to compile a list of road movies -- or any other kind, for that matter -- it would be tempting to try and make it a sort of best of. Filmmaker and writer Jason Wood resists that temptation in 100 Road Movies (BFI), something he explains in his introduction:

I would argue that one of the objectives of any kind of “list” or guide style of book is to stimulate debate, conjecture and hopefully, if only very occasionally, agreement.

And so you have the films you would expect -- Wim Wenders Kings of the Road from 1976, for example; The Grapes of Wrath from 1940 and Thelma and Louise from 1991 -- alongside movies you might not have expected or, in fact, would not have thought of or even known about at all. Rob Reiner’s The Sure Thing from 1984 numbered among these for me. If I’d ever heard of this film, I’d forgotten about it, and I’d surely never seen it. “A witty, 1980s teen variation of It Happened One Night,” writes Wood, “the affectionately regarded The Sure Thing was an early success for Capra-loving director Rob Reiner.”

The Sure Thing is notable, also, for the introduction of an 18-year-old John Cusack in the first of what would became a familiar role for him. He plays, as Wood puts it, a sour-faced cynic who still manages to charm and engage his audience.

Though Oliver Stone’s 1994 Natural Born Killers does not immediately jump to mind when you think “road movies,” in so many ways, it really is, and it’s here.

Obviously, I don’t have the space here to comment on any but a very few of Wood’s choices, but though the book is fairly tiny, it’s also quite excellent. And, just as the author desired, at least some of the 100 films he’s chosen to include are sure to spark some debate and conversations with fellow film buffs.

New this Week: The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan Lopez

In one of those odd coincidences of collective unconscious, 2008 saw the publication of two important books on mid-20th century art forger Han van Meergeren. Back in June we got The Forger’s Spell (Harper) by Edward Dolnick, a beautifully researched and illustrated look at the man most often thought to be one of the most successful art forgers of all time. Nor is Dolnick a neophyte to the shores of art crime. A previous work, 2006’s brilliant The Rescue Artist, won the Edgar award for Best Non-Fiction while ArtNews said there had never been “a better book on art crime.”

One would think that, in a year that an author this good had produced a book this terrific, another on the topic would be overkill. But Jonathan Lopez’s newly published The Man Who Made Vermeers (Harcourt) stacks up very well to Dolnick’s book, in fact the New York Sun says Lopez bests Dolnick. Personally, I think it would take an expert on the topic to pick a winner -- both books are terrific and engaging. Perhaps Dolnick’s prose is a little warmer, while Lopez’s seems a bit more in-depth, but I could be clutching at differences here. The color plates in The Forger’s Spell are fantastic and add their own depth to the story, while the many historic black and white photos in The Man Who Made Vermeers enrich the already terrific text.

If you must pick one over the other, do it at your favorite booksellers. Hold the books side by side, read a snippet from here and perhaps from there and then choose the one that seems to speak directly to you. If you choose one and enjoy it, one won’t ever be enough. Fate has made a set of these books, that’s what I think. And what’s to stop you going back and getting the other once your appetite has been properly whet?

Children’s Books: Grk and the Hot Dog Trail by Joshua Doder

In a FAQ at his Web site, author Joshua Doder (who also writes as Josh Lacey) lists the three books he would most like to have written. The three selected speak volumes about this particular writer’s work:

I suppose the books that I would most like to have written are the ones that I’ve read again and again throughout my life, so they’ve become part of me. If I was going to pick three -- because I can’t just pick one -- they would Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray and Tintin in Tibet by Hergé.

If you’re in a position to read books for children and you’ve not yet come across Doder’s Grk books, wait for it because they’re coming fast. The order in which they come will depend on where you live. For instance, in the United States, Grk and the Hot Dog Trail was published by Delacorte just last month, while those that watch book lists out of the UK would have seen Andersen publish the book back in 2006.

The order in which they come to you does not matter: you don’t need to read the Grk books in publication order to follow along. Here is what is important: each book is set in a different county: A Dog Called Grk (Stanislavia); Grk and the Pelotti Gang (Brazil); Grk and the Hot Dog Trail (USA); Grk: Operation Tortoise (the Seychelles); and Grk Smells a Rat (India).

This time out, while playing tourist during a visit to New York, Tim sees that someone has stolen the Golden Dachshund, a statue worth a billion dollars. Only Tim and his dog Grk can save the day. Doder’s Grk books are lightening fast adventures stuffed with sharp-humored charm.

New Today: Life With My Sister Madonna by Christopher Ciccone

You might love her or hate her or be completely indifferent, but you know her face, her voice and some of her woes. You know who she is. Which is why, though you might not run out and buy the whinefest penned by her brother, Christopher Ciccone, you will probably be at least a little interested in knowing what’s inside.

Life With My Sister Madonna (Simon Spotlight Entertainment) is an absolutely unexceptional sibling memoir. In certain ways, we learn more about sibling jealousy and the nature of that green-eyed beast than we ever do about the author’s famous sister.

There is a breathlessness to Ciccone’s voice here -- as helped along by celebrity biographer Wendy Leigh (True Grace, One Lifetime is Not Enough) -- and even the most mundane bits of fact-sharing can sound like shocking revelations. Here, for example, Ciccone spills the beans on Madonna’s trouble sleeping:

Madonna’s insomnia only became apparent to me when we were living together in downtown Manhattan at the start of her career. Whenever I woke up during the night, she would be in the living room, perched on white futon, which -- no matter how many times we washed the floor -- was always dirty. She was usually dressed in a white oversize men’s T-shirt, baggy, white cowboy-print sweats, sucking Hot Tamales, her favorite cinnamon-flavored candies, and reading poetry -- often Anne Sexton whose lines sometimes inspired her lyrics. Or the diaries of Anais Nin, who along with Joan of Arc, is one of her heroines.

In Life With My Sister Madonna we’re told a great deal -- the book is 352 pages long, after all -- but we don’t really learn very much, which shouldn’t really be a surprise: Ciccone admits he and his sister have not been close since her (currently headline grabbing) marriage to Guy Ritchie in 2000. And, honestly, discovering at this late date that Madonna lost her virginity to some guy named Russell is not a revelation. We did know she’d lost her virginity as some point, did we not? Giving him a name adds nothing to the tale.

Life With My Sister Madonna is already selling well and fans will not want to miss it and likely won’t be disappointed. Clearly, Ciccone can provide childhood details that few could duplicate. Others won’t need to stand in line, though: there’s little here beyond the expected.

Fiction: The Resurrectionist by Jack O’Connell

Jack O’Connell’s most recent book was just one of those that was never going to get the attention it deserved, no matter what. In the first place, O’Connell’s The Resurrectionist (Algonquin) had the misfortune of being given a distinctive moniker that got used by another popular book in roughly the same time period. James Bradley’s book by the same title -- published in 2007 by Faber & Faber in the UK -- has been getting a lot of attention, including being a Richard & Judy Pick for Summer 2008.

In the second place, there is no single space where O’Connell’s The Resurrectionist has a tight fit. There are elegant slashes of noir here but it is not a work of crime fiction. There are strong reaches into other worlds, but it is not quite SF/F. One could argue for straight up literary fiction, but the writing engages too sharply for that. And there is a fully developed plot, characters that can be understood and identified with and even dances with a bizarre comic book world where anything can happen.

As the book opens, a pharmacist named Sweeny has just had his young son, Danny, transferred to the Peck Clinic, a place where they specialize in comatose patients. It does not take us long to realize that, though the Peck Clinic has a good record for awakening patients in comas, there is a lot swirling just below the surface: just slightly out of our grasp. There is more to Sweeny, too, than meets the eye.

The Resurrectionist begins on a sharp and steady noir/crime fiction beat, and becomes ever more surreal until, by journey’s end, it’s difficult to keep track of what’s real and what is not.

O’Connell’s work has been compared to that of Kafka, William Gibson and Wambaugh. While he does not suffer under such comparison, it isn’t entirely fair. While, for me, there were moments when The Resurrectionist bent under its own weight, this was a journey I enjoyed from end to end. More: while I read, there was no voice to whom I felt O’Connell’s must be compared. This is great stuff: and unlike anything you’ve probably ever read before. Highly, highly recommended.

21 Distinctions of Wealth by Peggy McColl

Don’t ask me how it happened, because I do not know but somewhere between the mortgage crisis and breaking the hundred dollar a barrel mark for oil, Issue # 1 emerged. And things changed.

While the environment is still important -- as are eating healthily and raising smart kids and making sure the correct tyrant gets that office this fall -- the reality of a future without marble countertops has entered a lot of people’s minds in the last few months. Never mind taking marble for granted: we’re suddenly not even sure that, in five years time, we’ll be able to afford countertops at all.

Enter Peggy McColl and 21 Distinctions of Wealth: Attract the Abundance You Deserve (Hay House). McColl’s advice is pretty easy to digest. Stop sweating the small stuff, the author of Your Destiny Switch seems to be telling us. Stop looking at minutiae and instead, live the way you were born to be:

Wealth is your birthright. It’s everyone’s birthright! The silver spoon was in your mouth on the day you were born. You may not realize it because you think that to have riches you need lots of cash or financial holdings – or a genuine silver spoon – but this is a very limited and distorted way of thinking about wealth …. What most people don’t realize is that wealth is an energy force.

There’s more to it than that, of course. It’s a whole book, after all. I’m still working my way through it, trying to put into practice some of the things McColl is trying to teach. What the hell, is what I’m thinking. There’s a pile of gold coins on the cover and I wouldn’t mind gettin’ me some of that. All I have to do, McColl says, “is let go of the negative thoughts and feelings that have been blocking you and open yourself up to the gifts you were born with.”

With oil now over $143. a barrel, I need to open myself up and attract me some abundant wealth pronto. I’ll let you know how it all turns out.

New This Month: Cosmos Incorporated by Maurice G. Dantec

Sometimes while reading Cosmos Incorporated (Del Rey) I would stop and emotionally sit back on my haunches and think: this is where the future of SF/F is going. This in my hands, right here, right now. If it never got any better than this, it would be all right.

Based in Montreal, Canada, former punk rock songwriter and ad man Dantec is an extremely popular writer in France. Like his Babylon Babies, Cosmos Incorporated is an English translation of a French novel. One part cyperpunk, one park Orwelian ironic dystopia, one part Houellebecqian sharp lyricism and wide-stanced theology. In scope and content and style, Cosmos Incorporated is breathtaking.

The population of the world has been devastated by disease, misuse and war. What little has been left of earthly society is monitored by the Uniworld, a huge computer network -- think Internet on futuristic crack -- that has information on every individual left on earth. We see much of what’s left close to Sergei Diego Plotkin, a man with a deadly mission who will soon find himself with more -- and somehow less -- than he anticipated.

Expect a lot of interest in Cosmos Incorporated. Babylon Babies -- which was the first Dantec novel to be translated into English -- will be released as Babylon A.D. in feature film form at the end of August and starring Vin Diesel. About a month before that, Del Rey will release a mass market version of Babylon Babies. All of that should conspire to make readers take note of Dantec’s most recent work. And that’s a good thing, because this is a writer worthy of the attention and many fans who have already read the book in French claim this is the writer’s best work to date.

To be clear, Cosmos Incorporated will not be for everyone. Not by a longshot. But if you like your SF/F with a heavy dose of discordance and the roving threat of electricity, this one may well be for you.

New Today: Tigerheart by Peter David

The thing that touches you first is the tone. You expect one thing and get quite another. But with Tigerheart (Ballentine/DelRey), Peter David has decided to give us a delicious treat: the voice here is one of wonder and discovery, as though written for a child, but it doesn’t take long to realize that it was not.

Though elements of Tigerheart put one instantly in mind of Peter Pan, this is not a retelling of J.M. Barrie’s classic story. Or, if anything, it is more.

Author Peter David (Sir Apropos of Nothing, Wode to Wuin) says that, when Peter Pan fell into the public domain, he began working on the story.

“But as it developed, I started to realize that it was really Paul Dear’s story, not Peter Pan’s. And since Peter Pan’s monumental ego would certainly not allow a story to feature him as a supporting character, he slowly began to back away from it with a mild sneer and a mocking sweep of his nonexistent hat.” This allowed, David reports, “a sort of respectful distance” from Barrie’s creations.

And so, in a way, Peter Pan is reimagined as Paul Dear and Neverland becomes Anyplace. And everything is familiar, but cast with Peter David’s own strong magic.

The Indiana Jones Handbook by Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese

Those for whom the late May release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull reignited the thirst for all things Indie will be pleased to set their eyes on this book. The Indiana Jones Handbook (Quirk) bills itself at “The Complete Adventurer’s Guide” and, in some ways, it is. How else would you discover what to do if bitten by a tarantula? How to run on top of a moving train? If you have to cross a rope bridge? Or if you have to deal with rats? (“Damp, dark caverns are a paradise for rodentia,” the book warns at one point.)

Though tongues may well be in cheeks, they were neatly tucked away during the writing of The Indiana Jones Handbook. Like all those Worst Case Scenario handbooks so popular at the beginning of the decade, this Indiana Jones-themed book takes all of its questions quite seriously. Is the resulting guide funny? Well, a little bit. But it really helps if you’re already a fan, if for no other reason than to help you get the references to monkey brains and other purely Indie material. Looks of color illustrations -- many from the films -- as well as a solid little format contribute to the fun. And though it seems unlikely that most of us will actually benefit from learning how to survive for several days while clinging to a submarine’s periscope, the possibilities opened just by thinking about it are all a lot of fun.

New This Month: We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek

It seems possible that We Are Now Beginning Our Descent would have been a much better book if its übbertalented author, James Meek, had just hung on for a decade or so before telling this story. As things are, sometimes it all just seems a little to close, a little too raw.

Like Meek himself, Adam Kellas, the protagonist of We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is a British reporter in Afghanistan. According to the author’s bio, after 9/11, The Guardian sent Meek to Afghanistan to report on the war. In 2004, Meek’s reportage from Iraq and about Guantanamo Bay saw him named Foreign Correspondent and Amnesty Journalist of the Year.

Now, clearly, Meek knows about what the world looks like to a British reporter in the Middle East. And, just as clearly, based on his Man Booker-longlisted novel, the internationally bestselling The People’s Act of Love, Meek knows how to tell a story. But somehow, despite a violently shifting canvas that leaps over three continents and through the minds and hearts of a well-drawn and compelling cast of characters, elements of We Are Now Beginning Our Descent never quite gel.

The writing here is beautiful. “The stew smelled rich and fertile, like somebody’s happy ending.” And, “The two, shame and pride, nestled together, mirroring in adjacent chambers of his heart.” Yet somehow the compelling characters, the beautiful writing never lift off the page to become a living, breathing story; to create a memorable book. And, somehow again, that’s OK. It seems possible that what we are witnessing in We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, at least occasionally, is the exorcism of some personal demons. That can, in itself, be a pleasurable process to be part of.

Meek is a young enough writer that we can anticipate more stories from him. Meanwhile, we have this one and while it never transcends, neither is it a waste of time. Somehow, that’s enough.

New in Paperback: NASA: The Complete Illustrated History by Michael Gorn

Every time there’s a presidential race, it brings NASA to my mind. Maybe it’s because of the “space race,” but it’s also at least partly due to wondering why we haven’t gotten farther, achieved more. Shouldn’t we be able to buy timeshares on Mars by now? Shouldn’t we have colonies on the Moon? I don’t think I’m alone in these connections. Every time an election draws near, it seems as though we get treated to a new spate of books about space stuff. And here we are.

NASA: The Complete Illustrated History (Merrell Books) is the first paperback edition of a striking hardcover first published in 2005. As the subtitle tells us, it is a complete history on NASA which -- perhaps not so coincidentally -- turns 50 in 2008.

You don’t need an anniversary to enjoy the book, though. Author Gorn is an award winning historian with several other related books to his credit and the foreword was written by former astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

NASA: The Complete Illustrated History is clearly a must for space geeks, but many will enjoy this book that would reach for the stars.

Cult Watches by Michael Balfour

If you think you know about watches, think again. Internationally respected watch geek Michael Balfour here brings us the watch book to end all watch books. And though the spirit is all things watch-related, the focus is quite different: Balfour takes intimate, elegant, stylish looks at 30 “cult” watches and though he never quite gets around to explaining how the 30 he chose managed to make this particular cut, we can extrapolate -- by what he says about them and by which ones he chose -- that, for his purposes, “cult” is somewhere outside of the mass market. Something special, in many cases handmade and in all cases, highly collectible. And thus we get up close and personal with the Cartier Tank; the Bulova Acutron; the Hamilton Electric; the Rolex Cosmograph Daytona; the Vacheron Constantin Toledo; the Swatch and 24 others.

The chosen 30 get their tea leaves read, in a sense. Balfour profiles each of them in great detail, bringing us history where appropriate, engineering background where called for and throughout provides visual information above and beyond the call.

Cult Watches (Merrell) is beautiful, memorable and deeply interesting. Students of design and those with an interest in modern history will be fascinated. Those who share Balfour’s passion for watches and who love and collect them might just be moved to tears.

Review: Dark Wraith of Shannara by Terry Brooks

Today in January Magazine’s SF/F section, contributing editor Lincoln Cho reviews Dark Wraith of Shannara by Terry Brooks. Says Cho:

Terry Brooks, the “godfather of American fantasy” has referred to Dark Wraith of Shannara as “the grand experiment.” It’s not difficult to see why. It’s a brand new story set in the distant future world of Shannara that tells the multi-generational story of the Ohmsford family. Though Brooks has set work outside of Shannara, it is these for which he is best known, as well as being what famed publisher Lester del Rey scooped out of the slush pile in the form of The Sword of Shannara, published in 1977. That was about 21 million copies of American-published Terry Brooks novels ago.

Thirty years later, it’s exciting to see this grand master of the genre trying his hand at something that is, for him, entirely new with a graphic novel.

The full review is here.

Happy Anniversary: The Big Lebowski

It blows my mind -- that is to say, it is mind-blowing -- that The Big Lebowski turns 10 this year. I mean, what did we even say when we didn’t call each other “dude”? The Coen Brothers’ modern classic, released in 1998, plunked this term into its current context into the modern lexicon. And so much -- so much! -- more. This from the introduction to BFI Film Classics The Big Lebowski by J.M. Tyree and Ben Walters:

Since every last scrap of dialogue from the film is now somebody’s inside joke -- oat sodas! what-have-you! -- The Big Lebowski is now basically a slacker’s bible, to be quoted more or less religiously.

Like the film itself, the book is slender and appears light, yet it is surprisingly powerful, offering up assessments of the movie and its place in modern film -- and cult film -- history, as well as the impact The Big Lebowski has had on the wider world (more than you probably think). It even offers brief comment on other Coen Brothers movies and finds the place where Lebowski fits in the context of the work of these talented and off-beat siblings.

Is it an important book? The depends. Do you think The Big Lebowski is an important film? If the answer is an unhesitating “yes,” run, don’t walk.

New Today: Tales Before Narnia edited by Douglas A. Anderson

In many respects, this seems like the collection that real SF/F aficionados -- and those who love the history of the twinned genres -- have been waiting for. Editor Douglas A. Anderson -- a recognized expert on all things Hobbity -- here takes on the very history and roots of the form. Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction (Del Rey) explores the stories that fired C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and others. In total, 14 novels and several short stories.

“Many of Lewis’s inspirations can be traced to his wide reading,” writes editor Douglas A. Anderson. In Surprised by Joy (1956) an autobiography of his early life, Lewis noted that one of the experiences forming his pleasure in literature occurred when as a youth he read the poem ‘Tegnér’s Drapa’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.”

It’s great to read about that in Anderson’s introduction, but it’s also great to then be able to look not far ahead and find “Tegnér’s Drapa” and sample the poem for yourself. (“I saw the pallid corpse of the dead sun borne through the Northern sky.”) In all, 21 works Anderson considers important to Lewis’ development as an author, including writing by Hans Christian Andersen, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, J.R.R. Tolkien and others.

The publication of the book is meant to tie in with the second Chronicles of Narnia film, Prince Caspian, starring Tilda Swinton, Liam Neeson, Eddie Izzard and others and due to be released by Disney Pictures May 16th.

A Warming Frost

To my way of thinking Gregory Frost’s Shadowbridge (Del Rey) is the kind of book that can start genre arguments, and on so many levels!

In the first place, the writing here is beautiful. Beyond beautiful. It’s sublime. And when critics think of fantasy novels, the first thing that jumps into mind is not prose that uplifts. And yet:

The first time Ledora spoke to a god, she had climbed to the top of the bridge tower and she was masked….

The towers – there were three supporting Vijnagar – were like great flat-topped and frieze-covered behemoths looming above the buildings and creatures on the surface that threaded the distance between them.

Frost writes, as I’ve said, beautifully. Lyrically, even. He writes as though he’s going to a place there is no coming back from. It seems to me to be the only place from which fantasy should be approached.

On his Web site, Frost describes the fictional place we encounter in Shadowbridge as “a world of linked spiraling spans of bridges on which all impossibilities can happen. Ghosts parade, inscrutable gods cast riddles, and dangerous magic is unleashed.” And… “Monstrous creatures drain the lives of children and for a price, you can sample their fleeting quintessence -- provided the creatures don’t sample you instead.” And, truly, aside from the whole fleeting quintessence thing, that works for me, as well.

Frost, who is also the author of the virtuous and awarded collection Attack of the Jazz Giants, has been a finalist for pretty much every award offered in his field of interest. In Shadowbridge, he proves himself to be a powerful writer here at the top of his game. If you love the sort of vibrant fantasy that relies as much on the skill of its creator as the complexity of his imagination, you will love Shadowbridge.

If you read and like Frost’s latest, there’s good news: while Shadowbridge: Book One was published just last month, you don’t have long to wait for the second book in the “duology.” It will be in stores this coming June.

Legacy Series Lacks Magic

I’ve been reading the Pern series since childhood. My introduction to the series came when I found two battered paperbacks in a used bookstore and, entranced by the covers, bought them. These two were the first in the Dragonriders of Pern series: Dragonflight and Dragonquest, first published in 1968 and 1970 respectively. Not only did I love both books, it’s probably safe to say that this early encounter with the work of Anne McCaffrey quite possibly altered the course of my reading forever. And since I was introduced to them many years after they were first published, I had great pools of this wonderful author’s work in which to swim before I had gotten all the way through her backlist.

Almost anyone who has given McCaffrey a serious read understands her magic. The connections she weaves between her human and dragon -- as well as other animal -- characters moves far beyond charm into some primal place where we all understand what might be possible if all the circumstances were correct.

The Pern series has, quite understandably, fostered more than its share of fanfic. So when it was announced that Anne McCaffrey’s son, Todd, would co-write a Pern book with his mother, there was much anticipation, but not a whole lot of surprise. That first book, 2003’s Dragon’s Kin was successful enough that the younger McCaffrey tried again -- on his own this time -- with 2005’s Dragonsblood. Another collaboration with Anne in 2006, Dragon’s Fire, leads us right here to Dragon Harper (Del Rey, 300 pages). Well, not exactly leads us: Dragonsblood actually takes place chronologically after Dragon Harper and the other collaborative McCaffrey books. But that’s another -- ahem -- thread.

The thing is, the younger McCaffrey is a competent enough writer. Heck: he might even be a very good one. Trouble is, I loved Anne McCaffrey’s books so well and believed in her magic so thoroughly, it’s tough to look at the collaborative efforts and judge them on their own merits, without having those judgments colored by the earlier, solo, books.

Do you understand what I’m saying? Dragon Harper is fine. It might even be good. It is not, however, magic. It does not transport and it will probably not alter your life. It did not alter mine. Will I read future efforts from the younger McCaffrey? You bet.