reading notes

by James Kochalka and Craig Thompson
available from Top Shelf Comics
James Kochalka has published mini format comics before, but none as slick as this collaboration with Craig Thompson. Five inches square, forty-eighty pages long with a full-color cover, Conversation is packed with self-deprecating humor and back and forth on the meaning of art.
The design is one [...]

by Mark Slouka
ISBN: 0375702091
This story of two brothers ranges from the monsoon-wracked Meklong in Siam to high society Paris to flophouses in London to the Civil War-torn American South. The brothers struggle with poverty, love, faith, grief, and being literally connected to each other.
The brothers are Siamese twins — the original pair — Chang and [...]

by Louis Menand
ISBN: 0374529000
In this collection of essays, Menand considers the importance (I want to say the real importance) of fifteen cultural figures in the United States. His time frame more than spans the twentieth century, encompassing the end of the nineteenth (William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes) and the beginning of the twenty-first (Al Gore, [...]

by Ann Patchett
ISBN: 0060572140
Patchett’s best friend was Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face. Yes, the one with the disfigured face, the one who died of a heroin overdose at age 39. This book is the story of their friendship.
In telling it, Patchett also tells their stories about becoming writers. They went to the [...]

by Lucy Grealy
ISBN: 0060569662
This is the kind of book that causes people to toss around the word heartbreaking. As a child, Grealy was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Two and a half years were devoted to chemotherapy and radiation treatments; she survived but a sizable portion of her jaw did not.
The horror one [...]

by Jonathan Tel
ISBN: 1582431833
Soldiers, old folks, an ethical dentist, writers, and terrorists all make appearances in Jonathan Tel’s book. Of the seventeen stories, some read like parables, others more like sketches. Tel captures ideas in few words.
His stories all take place in or in the vicinity of Jerusalem, and the pacing, idioms — the general [...]