Frederik Peeters translated by Anjali Singh Houghton Mifflin ($18.95) by Donald Lemke True love and terminal illness: in the hands of a novice storyteller, these ingredients often translate into sentimental tales of adoration and heartbreak. For comics artist Frederik Peeters, however, they form the basis of a starkly honest diary of self-revelation that transcends both […]

Harvey Pekar and Heather Roberson Illustrated by Ed Piskor Villard ($17.95) by David Kennedy-Logan Harvey Pekar’s newest book, Macedonia, is a nonfiction account of the travels and observations of Heather Roberson, a UC-Berkeley graduate student, in the Balkan nation of the book’s title. She visits the country to research her peace studies thesis, in which she is […]

edited by Klaus Biesenbach Schirmer/Mosel ($90) by Brian Bergen-Aurand Berlin Alexanderplatz, a 16 hour and 15 minute epic drama about the life of Franz Biberkopf, rests at the center of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s career. It recounts the story of a man who has just been released from prison after having killed his girlfriend years before. […]

MILLER BRITTAIN When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears Tom Smart Goose Lane Editions & Beaverbrook Art Gallery ($55) BRUNO BOBAK The Full Palette edited by Bernard Riordon Goose Lane Editions & Beaverbrook Art Gallery ($55) by Alice Dodge Bruno Bobak and Miller Brittain are two important 20th-century Canadian artists whose work remains relatively unknown […]

Alice Denham Cardoza Publishing ($14.95) by Sharon Olinka Alice Denham’s memoir is a genuinely subversive book that questions how we make flawed celebrities into authorities that determine literary standards. In elegant prose she describes how as an idealistic young writer in the 1950s she moves to New York to be a writer, and the heady […]

Joseph B. Entin University of North Carolina Press ($22.50) by W. C. Bamberger Joseph B. Entin begins his book on Depression-era fiction and photography by quoting from Pietro di Donato’s 1939 novel Christ in Concrete, where a character complains about the “transparent distant eye like policemen” with which the better-off view the poor. From there Entin […]

Edited by Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont Macadam Cage ($15) by Jessica Bennett In the past year, three popular films dealt with stories of unplanned pregnancies. In Waitress, the woman is secretly planning to escape an unhealthy marriage; her pregnancy is an unpleasant surprise resulting from one night of acquiescing to her repugnant husband’s […]

Dean Cycon Chelsea Green Publishing ($19.95) by Dakota Ryan In an age of vanishing frontiers and looming globalization, modern pioneers cannot afford to wield the guns, germs and steel of their infamous antecedents. Instead, Dean Cycon argues, new explorers must be willing to plumb not only the so-called “dark” continents of Africa, South America and […]

SERPENT OF LIGHT The Movement of Earth's Kundalini and the Rise of Female Light, 1949–2013 Drunvalo Melchizedek Weiser Books ($19.95) BEYOND 2012 A Shaman's Call to Personal Change: and the Transformation of Global  Consciousness James Endredy Llewellyn Worldwide (16.95) 2012 The Return of Quetzalcoatl Daniel Pinchbeck Tarcher/Penguin ($14.95) by Kelly Everding Having survived the recent […]

Gary Westfahl McFarland & Company, Inc. ($35) by Ryder W. Miller Gary Westfahl, a Pilgrim Award-winning science fiction scholar, here commemorates Hugo Gernsback, the writer and magazine editor recognized by many as the founder of science fiction. Westfahl does honor some of Gernsback’s literary forebears, especially Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but he credits Gernsback […]