Becky Ohlsen
Content by Becky Ohlsen
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Some people just really love words. Dai Sijie, author of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, is one of those people.
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How many people could you remember, if you sat down and tried to make a list?
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Tired of being embarrassed every time you take your less-savvy friends or clueless parents out to see the latest action-hero blockbuster adapted from a comic book?
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The Best American Comics 2007, edited by Chris Ware, collects segments of what, in the editor's opinion, are the standout comics of the year.
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For a more theoretical take on comic books, try Our Gods Wear Spandex by Christopher Knowles with illustrations by Joseph Michael Linsner.
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Kelly Link's stories fit into the young adult category in the same way that Salman Rushdie's collection, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, does: sure, youngsters will love these stories, but gr
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It's almost impossible to describe Never Let Me Go without giving too much away.
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It's always satisfying to encounter someone who consistently makes worse decisions than you do even if that person is fictional.
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Stewart O’Nan (Emily, Alone) has packed a huge amount of emotion into this slim novel. In less than 200 pages, he manages to examine the whole history of a marriage—complete with excess baggage, lingering resentments, equal amounts of frustration and fondness.
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The latest novel by Stewart O'Nan (Speed Queen) is an ideal book for a rainy, tea-sipping afternoon.
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Not a book for those with short attention spans, Behindlings is a colossus of digressions, distractions and circumlocutions.
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Does anyone really ever get over adolescence? Maybe some, but even if you're one of the lucky ones, reading Paul Murray's new novel will bring all the roiling, churning madness of being a teenager right back into focus. The book claws into you right away, and its vividness never fades—impressive, considering it's nearly 700 pages long.
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It’s no easy trick to age a character 20 years in 300 pages and never once let the narrative voice falter or sound jarring.
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It wasn't enough for Wesley Stace to be a successful musician and a devastatingly handsome guy; he had to go and write a novel as well. And it's not just any novel.
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The antiqued look of the first few pages of Shaun Tan's The Arrival makes it clear you're in for something extraordinary.
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On a much lighter note is The Professor's Daughter, written and illustrated by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert.
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Also laced with humor, but in a much more serious setting, is Cairo, written by G. Willow Wilson with art by M.K. Perker.
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With the smallest shift in marketing, Mary Roach could singlehandedly triple the rate of pleasure reading among teenage boys.
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Considering its relatively slim profile, there's an awful lot packed into Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon's latest novel, The Final Solution: A Story of Detection.
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Lost opportunities, found art, stories both true and false—these ideas bind the disparate threads of Jess Walter’s new novel, Beautiful Ruins.
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Reading Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel is a bit like settling in with a skilled raconteur as he pages unhurriedly through an old photo album.
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In Property, Valerie Martin, author of Mary Reilly, has set herself a difficult task. How does one elicit sympathy for an unlikable narrator?
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For insight into the early days of superhero comics, check out Tales to Astonish, pop-culture journalist Ronin Ro's streetwise biography of Jack Kirby, the man who created Captain America an
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The first novel by Chandler Burr, New York Times perfume critic and the author of three books of nonfiction, is bound to generate chatter—not only because it features cameos by pract
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Reached at his home in Menden, in the southwest corner of the state, David Small says, “It’s a gray day in Michigan.” Gray seems appropriate for the conversation; somehow, discuss
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Breaking Up, a graphic novel written by Aimee Friedman and illustrated by the much-lauded Christine Norrie, has a storyline that will appeal to teenage girls and beautiful illustrations th
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Tim Rickard's comics may not be for everyone, but the combination of black humor and absurdism in Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! will appeal to a certain mentality.
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If you haven't already met Babymouse, a feisty little mouse with big dreams, this would be a great time to start.
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There's nothing even remotely matter-of-fact about The Book of Ballads, a collection of folk songs and fairy tales illustrated by Charles Vess and written by some of the biggest names in comic
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Another collection of short pieces by a variety of big names in the graphic-novel universe is Bizarro World.
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Who doesn't love to be able to walk out of a holiday blockbuster and say, "Well, not bad but the book was better"?
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Issue:
I would read Geoff Dyer on any subject—partly because his writing is always unfailingly beautiful, and partly because to read him on any subject is to read him on pretty much every subject.
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About halfway through Audrey Niffenegger's debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, you realize you're going to be devastated.
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A post-apocalyptic fable with unexpected overtones of optimism and patriotism, the latest novel from innovative English writer Jim Crace comes across a bit like Road Warrior meets Grapes
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Note to self: Avoid Florida.
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Most of us would probably agree that making Superman angry is not the best career move.
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Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid: A Novel in Cartoons is told from the point of view of Greg, a boy whose mom makes him keep a journal about his life.
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At age 14, Nadia Shivack developed an eating disorder. She named it Ed, which tells you something about her whimsical and humorous approach to a serious problem.
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Imagine Bertie Wooster getting a real job in, perhaps, the assembly line at a bread factory and you'll have some idea of the incongruousness of Charles Hythloday, redoubtable hero of Irish author Paul Murray's excellent debut novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes.
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Original and moving, David B.'s Epileptic is a graphic memoir about the author's childhood near OrlŽans, France.
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The buzz about Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk's new collection of linked short stories, Haunted, is the type that will either scare you off immediately or have you
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I probably could've finished this book in a couple of hours, except that every few pages I was seized by a compulsive need to leap off the couch, run down to the corner bar and slam a stack of quarte
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Existing in a darkly hilarious universe all its own, The Rabbi's Cat (Pantheon, $21.95, 142 pages, ISBN 0375422811), by acclaimed French artist Joann Sfar, combines whimsical drawings, forbidd
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Award-winning author and artist Naoki Urasawa, a manga star in Japan, has a new series out called Monster.
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This adult-themed manga, Wild Rock, puts sort of a Brokeback Mountain spin on the genre.
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One of the cooler manga books to come out in a while is Smuggler, by Shohei Manabe (creator of the much-praised Dead End).
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If you're looking to bone up on your knowledge of all things manga, you can't do better than Helen McCarthy's new book, 500 Manga Heroes &andamp Villains.
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It may sound pretty outrageous--kidnapping, pedophilia, skeletons in outhouses, fornication with ghosts, narration by hound dogs and bobcats--but Donald Harington's 12th novel, With, will s
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In The Making of a Graphic Novel, author-illustrator Prentis Rollins' science-fiction graphic novel The Resonator doubles as a how-to book about writing and illustrating comics.
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Daniel Clowes, best known for the graphic novel-turned-movie Ghost World, may be the comic-book king of gallows humor.
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A comic-book author with movie connections is Harvey Pekar, whose American Splendor became a hit film in 2003.
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Comics get a bad rap. They're generally seen as kid stuff and admittedly, some are.
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Harvey Pekar, best known for his autobiographical American Splendor, teamed up with artist Gary Dumm, editor Paul Buhle and a handful of others to create Students for a Democratic Society
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Some might wince at the idea of a comic book treatment of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.
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The key line in Carl Hiaasen's latest exercise in wackiness, Star Island, is uttered by a state trooper investigating a hijacked busload of development investors.
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Reading a Willy Vlautin novel feels a lot like sitting in the bar talking with Willy Vlautin. And it feels a lot like listening to the songs he writes with his band, Richmond Fontaine.
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The Salon by Nick Bertozzi also uses a visual medium to comment on visual arts, and it does so in a similarly bizarre fashion.
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The latest book by Tony Millionaire is strange. The title character of Billy Hazelnuts is a Frankensteinian boy assembled by rats out of garbage, houseflies and mint.
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It makes perfect sense that 31-year-old British author Steven Hall's debut novel is all over the online publicity machine that is MySpace.
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In her debut novel, Janet Skeslien Charles pulls off a couple of feats. First, the Montana native manages to write convincingly like a Ukrainian who’s tackling the English language.
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<b>It's all about style</b> One of the most exciting books to be published recently is <b>The Originals</b>.
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<b>It's all about style</b> The social commentary continues in renowned artist Peter Kuper's dramatically vivid re-creation of Upton Sinclair's classic novel <b>The Jungle<
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Mary Roach has a penchant for tracking down the answers to the questions you never knew you had about the human body.
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You don't have to be an artist in the 1920s to find inspiration in Paris.
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Putting the fun back in funeral and spicing it with tenderness, grit and regret, Alison Bechdel's memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic grabs you from the first page and never l
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Quirky science writer Mary Roach opens up about Packing f
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Like a blend of Persepolis and A Christmas Carol, Parsua Bashi's graphic memoir of growing up in Iran, Nylon Road, takes a playful tone but covers some seriously dark mater
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Late in her new novel, describing the pronouncements of a woman with early dementia, Lydia Millet writes, “With Angela what was familiar frequently became strange, the near withdrew into the
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The absent father is hardly a new theme in fiction. But in his debut novel, Gentlemen of Space, Ira Sher approaches the idea from a vantage point that is, literally, out of this world.
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In his stunning debut novel Well, 26-year-old author Matthew McIntosh writes with a calm, almost anthropological solemnity about a loose collection of lost souls living in a suburb of Seattle
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What do you get when you cross a junkie with a lunatic? No, that's not the lead-in to a bad joke; in fact, it's the premise of a really good novel. The junkie is Oscar.
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Birds of a feather, it seems, will flock together eventually.
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Garage Band, by the acclaimed author/illustrator Gipi, addresses the constant teenage tug-of-war between having fun, following your dreams and learning to behave like an adult.
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Lucy Fisher is having the worst week of her life.
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One of the fastest-growing divisions of Japanese manga, that vast universe of Japanese comics that's forever reinventing itself, is shojo, comic books aimed at a young female audience, which t
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Manga has produced yet another innovation and a sensation with Tokyo Tribes by Santa Inoue.
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Author Tsugumi Ohba and artist Takeshi Obata join forces in Death Note, in which a klutzy Shinigami demon drops his "death notebook" in the human world and has to go fetch it, causing unim
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The goth-influenced manga I Luv Halloween, by Benjamin Roman and Keith Giffen, follows a batch of adorably creepy little moppets as they set out trick-or-treating on Halloween night.
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A new manga-style book that displays influences by various goth-friendly artists, from Jhonen Vasquez to the Brothers Grimm, is The Tarot Cafe (TOKYOPOP, $9.99, 192 pages, ISBN 1595325557)
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In my office there's a woman who uses the word "wrap" as a universal replacement for the word "lunch." "Want to get a wrap?" she'll ask, daily, as if no other
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In the far-future world of Glacial Period, by Nicolas de Crecy, the European continent has iced over and everyone's moved south.
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Israeli author Etgar Keret is known and loved, especially among younger readers, for his short, potent stories.
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A mold-breaking new graphic novel you'll want to consider is La Perdida, by Jessica Abel, who publishes the zine Artbabe.
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Weird in an entirely harmless and wholly entertaining way (if you're into that sort of thing) is Inubaka: Crazy for Dogs.
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In the wake of 9/11, Brian Remy's consciousness is as thoroughly shattered as his country's confidence.
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Joe Hill says it took him quite a while to find the spark that would make his riveting new horror novel roar to life. Though he ended up writing the bulk of NOS4A2 in about seven months, getting the book started wasn’t easy.
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For the past century or so, Bulgaria has served as a sort of unwitting laboratory for political change in the western world; communism, socialism and capitalism have all swept through and had their
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Reading The Mount is a challenging, but ultimately rewarding, experience.
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Issue:
Stewart O'Nan writes the kind of characters that stay with you.
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Blending irony-tinged cool and hipster ennui with, like, actual feelings, Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings is a frank, funny and sometimes cringe-inducing look at a Japanese-American guy in hi
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<B>Sandlin's comic genius</B> OK, so the madcap plot is silly enough for a Hollywood comedy, something like a cross between <I>Weekend at Bernie's</I> and <I>Wa
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A new graphic novel from the ambitious and wide-ranging First Second, the Roaring Brook imprint that published Gene Luen Yang's National Book Award-winning graphic novel American Born Chinese,
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Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about her mother is not, immediately, a memoir about her mother. Or at any rate, it’s not only that.
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Matt Prior is not the sharpest tool in the shed. A business reporter, he left his job at a daily paper just as newspaper jobs were becoming scarce enough to seem worth keeping.
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It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what is so compelling about Gabrielle Zevin’s new novel.
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David Mitchell's third novel, Cloud Atlas, is such an astounding feat that it's tempting to think there must be several David Mitchells, each of whom wrote one part of the book.
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In the land of guilty pleasures, food is a go-to theme, for good reason: it’s hard to make a decadent meal sound anything but tempting.
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Dark Horse is a reliably weird publisher, so it's no surprise to find a couple of odd offerings coming from them.
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Another Dark Horse offering, The World Below by Paul Chadwick the writer/artist behind Concrete explores a mysterious sinkhole in rural Washington that leads to a secret underground rea
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Stuck in the Middle: 17 Comics from an Unpleasant Age, edited by Ariel Schrag, is a collection of short pieces by noted cartoonists about the horror that is junior high.
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The framework of Amitav Ghosh's lush new novel, The Hungry Tide, set in the richly storied Sundarbans off the easternmost coast of India, is not so much a love triangle as a love parallelo
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An even grimmer look at adolescence is found in the recently concluded magnum opus by legendary artist Charles Burns.
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Matt Wagner's Grendel: Red, White ∧ Black, the second collected volume of stories about the mysterious, demonic crime boss Grendel.
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Despite its intimidating 600-plus pages, Tekkon Kinkreet: Black &andamp; White by Taiyo Matsumoto rockets along at breakneck speed; before you know it, the story has ended, and you find yo
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A more luscious and painterly surrealism can be found in God Save the Queen, written by Mike Carey and painted by John Bolton.
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Who among us hasn’t wished for more hours in a day? In Karen Thompson Walker’s exciting debut novel, The Age of Miracles, we get exactly that—with dire consequences.
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Amy Bloom has what I might have thought were magical powers if I hadn’t learned that she’s spent time as a psychotherapist.
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The Re-Gifters by Mike Carey, Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel is part of a cool new line of graphic novels from Minx, the much-buzzed-about DC Comics imprint aimed at teenage girls.
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It's hard not to read Matchstick Men as a script, given its background.
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Mary Gooch’s biggest problem is not the size of her body, but the scope of her world.
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Will Eisner, the man who created what's widely considered the first modern graphic novel (1978's A Contract with God) and coined the term "sequential art" to describe the medium, died Jan.
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Will Eisner, the man who created what's widely considered the first modern graphic novel (1978's A Contract with God) and coined the term "sequential art" to describe the medium, died Jan.
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Equally exciting, and actually true, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is an illustrated memoir by Ann Marie Fleming about her great-grandfather, who in his day was a famous Chinese magici
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There are good books and great books. And then there are books like Daniel Handler's Adverbs.
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Other than a penchant for capes and black masks and a talent for getting on Batman's nerves Batgirl and Catwoman might not seem to have much in common.
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Other than a penchant for capes and black masks and a talent for getting on Batman's nerves Batgirl and Catwoman might not seem to have much in common.
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Within the realm of graphic novels, manga is its own vast universe. The term generally refers to Japanese animation in book form, as opposed to anime, the style's video incarnation.
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Within the realm of graphic novels, manga is its own vast universe. The term generally refers to Japanese animation in book form, as opposed to anime, the style's video incarnation.
Read more »
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Within the realm of graphic novels, manga is its own vast universe. The term generally refers to Japanese animation in book form, as opposed to anime, the style's video incarnation.
Read more »
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Within the realm of graphic novels, manga is its own vast universe. The term generally refers to Japanese animation in book form, as opposed to anime, the style's video incarnation.
Read more »
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From the first page of Lydia Millet's new novel, How the Dead Dream, you can tell that her protagonist, Thomas (known as T), tends toward obsession.
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When you kill off your narrator in the first 10 pages of a novel and tell readers who the killer is you'd better have one compelling story up your sleeve. Alice Sebold does.
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Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened, edited by Jason Rodriguez, gathers stories by 16 comic book artists and writers inspired by old postcards Rodriguez dug out of bins in antique
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