The holidays are just around the corner and if you're like me, you can't even begin to think about what to buy each person on your list. When you're stumped about what to purchase this holiday season, consider this--
BOOKS MAKE GREAT GIFTS!Just think about it:
- You can buy 10 hardcovers for the price of an iPhone
- A book costs less than a movie and popcorn
- A book has the potential to change someone's life
- Reading a book lasts longer than wearing a new sweater (and you never grow out of it)
- A book is the easiest gift to wrap
- A book is the easiest item to re-gift!
These are some of the books I plan to give as gifts this holiday season. And don't forget to get something for yourself while you're browsing!
Until next time, happy holidays and happy reading!
HOLIDAY GIFT DIRECTORYFor the activistThe perfect gifts for your politically and socially conscious friends!
I Live Here (Mia Kirshner) is a visually stunning narrative - told through journals, stories, images, and graphic novellas - in which the lives of refugees and displaced people become at once personal and global. Bearing witness to stories that are too often overlooked, it is a raw and intimate journey through crises in four corners of the world: war in Chechnya, ethnic cleansing in Burma, globalization in Mexico, and AIDS in Malawi.
Cancer Vixen (Marisa Acocella Marchetto), now available in paperback, is the groundbreaking graphic memoir that has inspired breast cancer patients to fight back - and do it with style. One of Time.com's top ten graphic novels of the year, with a taboo-breaking sense of humor, Cancer Vixen tells the story of Marchetto's eleven-month, ultimately triumphant battle against breast cancer - from diagnosis to cure, and every challenging step in between.
After spending three weeks as an American Red Cross volunteer in Biloxi, Mississippi, cartoonist
Josh Neufeld created
A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, a masterful portrait of a city under siege. Depicting seven extraordinary true stories of survival in the days leading up to and following Hurricane Katrina,
A.D. presents a city in chaos and shines a bright, profoundly human light on the tragedies and triumphs that took place within it.
For the teenEveryone is familiar with the name
Marjane Satrapi these days, and now you can have both volumes of her best-selling, internationally acclaimed comic memoir in one package -
The Complete Persepolis. Edgy, searingly observant, and candid, often heartbreaking but threaded throughout with humor and wisdom -
Persepolis is a stunning work from one of the most highly regarded graphic artists at work today.
A memoir that should be read in every school, here is the definitive edition of the book acclaimed as "the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust" (
Wall Street Journal) and "the first masterpiece in comic book history" (
The New Yorker). It now appears as it was originally envisioned by the author:
The Complete Maus.
Hailed by
Time as "another of his hilariously slightly off-center worlds that have a vague sense of dread about them. Kind of like where you live,"
Ice Haven is a brilliant graphic novel by
Daniel Clowes, author of
Ghost World (for which he received an Oscar nomination for the screen adaptation!).
For the superhero fan:Attention collectors!! The two hottest genres in comics gleefully collide head-on, as the most beloved American superhero gets the coolest Japanese manga makeover ever in Geoff Spear &
Chip Kidd's Bat-Manga! This is The Dynamic Duo as you've never seen them: with a distinctly Japanese twist as they battle aliens, mutated dinosaurs, and villains who won't stay dead. And as a bonus: Jiro Kuwata, the manga master who originally wrote and drew this material, is interviewed by Chip exclusively in this book. More than just a dazzling novelty,
Bat-Manga! is an invaluable, long-lost chapter in the history of one of the most timeless figures in comics.
The deluxe, expanded, and limited hardcover edition has a distinctive cover, full-color printed endpapers, and an amazing extra adventure written by Jiro Kuwata (not included in the paperback), about a band of rogue alien robot art thieves at large in Gotham City.
For the sci-fi geek:Meet Cole: hapless space rogue, part-time smuggler, on a path to being full-time dead. Follow his adventures through a delightfully absurd science-fiction universe, where the artificial intelligence is stupid, dust motes carry branding messages, and middle-management zombies have overrun a corporate training satellite. In the spirit of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett,
The Sheriff of Yrnameer is sci-fi comedy at its best--mordant, raucously funny, and a thrilling page-turner.
The setting: suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways - from the hideously grotesque to the subtle - but once you've got it, that's it. There's no turning back. Winner of the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz Awards,
Black Hole (Charles Burns) is as hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying.
For the New YorkerWe still can't get you a seat at The Waverly Inn, but we can bring you the wonderful, witty mural by Edward Sorel that graces its walls. Sorel - whose caricatures and drawings regularly appear in
The New Yorker and on its cover - chose forty Greenwich Village greats from the past 150 years to cavort in bacchanalian splendor. Each of the 40 makes a solo appearance in these pages alongside a charming, telling vignette of his or her life by Dorothy Gallagher. Then, the entire mural appears in a foldout at the back of the book. Here you will find Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jackson Pollack, James Baldwin, Thelonius Monk, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, Margaret Sanger, Marlon Brando, and many others.
The Mural at the Waverly Inn is an enduring delight to treasure, and the perfect gift for this holiday season.
Perfect for your coffee table - big gift books that are guaranteed to be enjoyed: "It's as if John Updike had discovered a bag of art supplies and LSD. Elegant, deceptively simple line work and nearly subliminal color symbolism make everything go down like candy." --
Entertainment WeeklyThe triumphant return of one of comics' greatest talents,
Asterios Polyp is an engrossing story of one man's search for love, meaning, sanity, and perfect architectural proportions. An epic story long awaited, and well worth the wait. This is David Mazzucchelli's masterpiece: a great American graphic novel.
One of the most promising young talents in cartooning makes his debut with a dazzling collection--part freakish dreamlife, part quirk-o-rama autobiography, all genius.
My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down is David Heatley's life story told in six different but connected narrative threads. Every inch of this book is filled with visceral art and emotionally resonant storytelling, that is at once stunning, truthful, and uncomfortably hilarious.
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