Friday, November 6, 2009

Great comic gifts for the holidays!

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 DIRECTORY
For the activist

The 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.
  • Order your copy here


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 teen

Everyone 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.
  • Order your copy here


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!).
  • Order your copy here


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.
  • Order your copy here


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.
  • Order your copy here


For the New Yorker
We 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.
  • Order your copy here


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 Weekly

The 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.
  • Order your copy here


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.
  • Order your copy here

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Free Pizza at B&N Greenwich Village - served by the "Cancer Vixen" herself!

Marisa Acocella Marchetto will be reading from Cancer Vixen, now on sale from Pantheon Books, on Friday, October 23 at 7:30 pm at Barnes & Noble Greenwich Village. Featuring a PowerPoint presentation, book signing, and free pizza from Greenwich Village’s Scuderia, this event is not to be missed.

“Marchetto is an inspiration, and her story is one that is definitely worth reading” (Sacramento Book Review).

Order a copy of Cancer Vixen

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Judith Jones Tour


Check out Judith Jones, author of The Pleasures of Cooking for One, on tour in the following locations, and be sure to read her blog, as well:

10/22/2009 POLITICS & PROSE BKSTR, INC.
5015 CONNECTICUT AVENUE NW
WASHINGTON, DC 20008
7:00 p.m.

10/28/2009 BOSTON UNIVERSITY SHOWROOM
808 COMMONWEALTH AVE
BOSTON, MA 02215
6:00 p.m.

11/10/2009 The New School, Woolman Hall
66 W. 12th Street
New York, NY
6:30 p.m.

11/17/2009 NORTHSHIRE BOOKSTORE
4869 MAIN STREET
MANCHESTER center, VT 05255
7:00 p.m.

11/18/2009 NORWICH BOOKSTORE
291 MAIN ST.
NORWICH, VT 05055
7:00 p.m.

11/19/2009 RIVER RUN BOOKSTORE
20 CONGRESS STREET
PORTSMOUTH, NH 03801
7:00 p.m.

Friday, October 2, 2009

A recipe guaranteed not to give you heartburn



Ingredients:
2 cloves garlic
7 large tomatos
1 package linguine
½ cup olive oil
1 cup fresh chopped basil leaves
Salt
Hot red pepper flakes

After seeing Julie & Julia, I had a burning desire to read all books by Nora Ephron and start cooking like a fiend. About a month ago, I finally finished her semi-autobiographical novel Heartburn. Yes, this was the book that was later made into a movie with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep (and no, I can’t imagine either of them looking like the main characters in the book). In the novel, the protagonist, Rachel Samstat, is a cookbook writer and host of her own cooking show, so there are a bunch of simple recipes sprinkled throughout. I decided to try my hand at LINGUINE ALLA CECCA. It’s a hot pasta with a cold tomato-basil sauce. According to Nora, it’s “so light and delicate that it’s almost like eating a salad” and “has to be made in the summer when tomatoes are fresh.” (I actually cooked this at the end of August, so technically it was still summer) I started out by picking seven fresh tomatoes straight off the vine (though I must say, I think it would be even better with a carton of cherry tomatoes). The recipe only calls for five large tomatoes, but it didn’t seem like enough. Then you boil the tomatoes for a minute or two and put them to the side.

Next, pour ½ a cup of olive oil into a bowl, along with two diced up cloves of garlic. The recipe says to take the garlic out at the end, but I chose to leave it in and I think it made it more flavorful. Add 1 cup of fresh chopped basil leaves, a few pinches of salt and a few pinches of hot red pepper flakes (I put a bit more than a few pinches – it depend on how spicy you want it to be). Once the tomatoes have boiled, peel, seed, chop them up and add to the mix. Put the concoction in the refrigerator for a few hours (I let it sit for about two hours exactly).

Boil one pound of linguine, drain and then toss it in with the cold tomato mix and serve in a big bowl.

This is a very straightforward and easy pasta dish for people who aren’t the most advanced cooks (like myself).


To order your copy of Heartburn (and believe me, the book is much more stimulating than the recipe), click here.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

PEN American Center Event coming up - Get your tix now!

Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the “War on Terror”

When: Tuesday, October 13
Where: The Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 East 7th St., NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

With Matthew Alexander, Jonathan Ames, K. Anthony Appiah, Paul Auster, Ishmael Beah, Don DeLillo, Eve Ensler, Jenny Holzer, A.M. Homes, Jameel Jaffer, Susanna Moore, Jack Rice, Amrit Singh, and Art Spiegelman

Tickets: $15/$10 for PEN/ACLU Members and students with valid ID at www.smarttix.com. Tickets may also be purchased at the door.

PEN and the ACLU will join forces to address the acts of torture and abuse carried out on behalf of the United States government since 9/11. At a time when the world’s eyes are on America and the Obama administration has taken some important steps toward addressing the abuses that have occurred over the past eight years, writers and artists will take the stage with lawyers, a former U.S. interrogator, and other special guests.

In an evening of readings and responses, these Members and friends of PEN will read from the recently-released secret documents that have brought these abuses to light—memos, declassified communications, and testimonies by detainees—and reflect on how we can move forward as a nation.

This event is a first step in the long process of national reflection and reconciliation.

David Heatley video

Watch David Heatley's (author of MY BRAIN IS HANGING UPSIDE DOWN) new music video "Suburban White Girls". It features the work of 34 artists from all over the world. The song is from my "My Brain is Hanging Upside Down" EP, released by WonderSound Records in 2008 on iTunes. The original song was written when Heatley was 19 years old and recorded on a 4-track tape recorder in his bedroom in Teaneck, NJ.



Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Video of David Mazzucchelli

Watch a rare video of David Mazzucchelli, author of the “haunting and beautiful” (Los Angeles Times) Asterios Polyp, as he discusses his writing process and inspiration for the graphic novel that has the world buzzing.