Readers are off to a fast start in 2014 with some truly excellent titles from every aisle of the bookstore: history, young adult fiction, literary fiction, graphic novels, espionage, gastronomy — you name it. The famous names usually wait until fall to publish, but already this year has seen great comic memoirs from Gary Shteyngart and New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, and a racy piece of Wall Street reporting from the incomparable, indefatigable Michael Lewis.
There’s also some great work from less well-known writers, especially some marvelous literary fiction: Stacy D’Erasmo’s Wonderland, about an aging rock star, and Phil Klay’s Redeployment, a searing look at soldiers returning from Iraq. BJ Novak’s smart, funny story collection One More Thing was an extremely welcome surprise; equally welcome is a long-overdue reissue: Miracleman, a masterpiece-level comic book from pre-Watchmen Alan Moore not seen since the 1980’s. Enjoy!
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E. Lockhart, We Were Liars
Four fast friends—three cousins plus one outsider—spend summers together on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts with their extended family, most of whom are thoroughly pickled in money and alcohol. One night Cadence, our heroine and narrator, has an accident that changes everything—but she can’t remember what happened, and nobody will tell her.
Alan Moore, Miracle Man Vol 1
Alan Moore’s work on Miracle Man produced some of the smartest, strangest and all-time greatest superhero comics ever written (and drawn)—every bit as good as Watchmen—but they’ve been out of circulation since the 1980s for legal reasons. Now Marvel is finally reprinting them, and they haven’t aged a day.
Olivia Laing, The Trip To Echo Spring
Laing’s question is, what is the mysterious connection between writing and drinking? To answer it she weaves together the lives of great alcoholic writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever, and Tennessee Williams, looking at why they needed to drink, what drinking gave them, and what it took away.
Stacy D'Erasmo, Wonderland
The heroine of WONDERLAND is an indie rock star, a cult icon, who’s attempting a comeback at 44 after seven years out of the public eye. D’Erasmo conjures up the seedy, sexy spectacle of life on the road with amazing vividness, and fills in the inner life of a woman who has one last chance to get her voice heard.