Books, Issue 616

Michel Faber

Baptism of fire

Michel Faber is a tough act to follow, especially when you're Michel Faber. The chameleonic author has built an impressive back catalogue that flips between postmodern memoirs of a Victorian prostitute, ghostly love stories or a sci-fi thriller about a…

John Updike - The Widows of Eastwick

For almost half a century, novelist, poet and New Yorker writer John Updike has chronicled the concerns, thoughts and sexual foibles of the American middle class. Not always successfully though, as can be forgiven amidst a career which embraces almost…

Alexander McCall Smith - La's Orchestra Saves the World

When a master of storytelling such as Alexander McCall Smith puts pen to paper, we have come to expect great things. And he doesn't disappoint with this latest stand-alone title, a warm and captivating tale of strength, passion and friendship set in…

Jim Holt - Stop Me If You've Heard This

If there is one art form often deemed to be beyond analysis, it's comedy. You hear, see or read something funny and then you laugh. End of. Right? Anyone who seeks to go beneath the skin of stand-up and explain the mechanics only succeeds in killing the…

Will Eisner - Textbooks

Undoubtedly what editor Denis Kitchen calls the 'primary treatise on the theory and mechanics of modern comics', Eisner's influential textbook Comics and Sequential Art and its two companion guides get a makeover for the digital age. Honed from lectures…

Dag Solstad - Novel 11, Book 18

The only three-time winner of the Norwegian Literary Critics Award, Dag Solstad follows up 2006's much praised Shyness and Dignity with this sophisticated, sometimes claustrophobic, representation of a mid-life crisis coming to an extreme end. The plot…

Laura Dockrill - Mistakes in the Background

The emergence of a sassy-tongued poet who can relate to the yoof should be a good thing. And Laura Dockrill, aka MC Dockers, truly does seem to be articulating, in her unaffected, unchecked, stream of consciousness way, the existence of the Facebook…

Jesse Reklaw - The Night of Your Life

Since 1995 American cartoonist Jesse Reklaw has invited readers of his website to submit synopses of their dreams, then adapts the best into four-panel comic strips. Reklaw's second compilation (after 2000's Dreamtoons) features a surreal discount…

Dave Gibbons - Watching the Watchmen

If pushed to name the greatest comic ever, most would say The Watchmen. Aimed at an adults, when writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons created a hugely detailed world where heroes did exist, they made it so realistic it was almost another genre of…

Avengers: The Sentinels Strike

Roy Thomas, Steve Engleheart & various

More reprints from the Marvel archives as the Avengers go up against the Sentinels, the Beast Brood, Magneto and more in these adventures from 1972-73. The Avengers are Marvel's premiere super team, as famed for their relationships as their daring and…