Books, Paul Dale

Leah Hayes - Funeral of the Heart

19 Jun 2008

SHORT STORIES (Fantagraphics) Welcome to the weird world of Leah Hayes. Where an elderly couple digs mysterious tunnels at night. Where a young male kitchen hand becomes a duck-slaughtering expert when his girlfriend develops an unusual illness. Or…

Jason Lutes - Jar of Fools

22 May 2008

TRAGEDY/NOIR (Faber) First serialised in Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger back in 1993, and anthologised in the US in 2003, Lutes’ remarkable graphic novel is long overdue a decent European release. Jar of Fools tells the story of…

Richard Cowdry & Various - The Bedsit Journal No 2

8 May 2008

COMPILATION (Bedsit Journal) Marshalled together by the artist and writer Richard Cowdry whose previous comic seed bombs include Kartoon Cuts and Knucklehead, this funny, bitter and vulgar collection of new comic book talent proves what can be done…

Film Books Round-Up

10 Apr 2008

The debate about US cinema from the late 1960s continues with Yale graduate Mark Harris’ Scenes from a Revolution (Canongate ••••). It starts with the fairly flaky premise that the 1967 Academy Award ceremony was the night that the new Hollywood was…

Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis

10 Apr 2008

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Vintage) In advance of the Persepolis feature-length animation to be released at cinemas at the end of this month (25 April if you want to note it in your diary) comes this welcome two-in-one paperback edition of Satrapi’s seminal…

Bill Griffith - Zippy: Walk A Mile in My Muu-Muu

13 Mar 2008

CULT STRIP (Fantagraphics) Having made his first appearance in Real Pulp Comix in 1971 Zippy is getting old. For the uninitiated Zippy is a polymath, free associating pinhead who wanders the consumerist besieged wastelands of the US. Griffith’s…

Richard T Kelly

4 Jan 2008

Richard T Kelly is laughing at the jibe that his debut novel is a cross between Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. It’s a cutesy icebreaker and this editor and writer whose published works to date have…

The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics

21 May 2007

CRIME SATIRE CF Wong is having a bad day. The office he shares with his Australian assistant Joyce is about to be demolished by property developers, and he also seems to be on a collision course with some vegan terrorists who have recently invaded…

Niall Griffiths

Runt

15 Feb 2007

What a courageous writer Niall Griffiths is. In the seven years since his debut Grits - an ambitious and occasionally brilliant study of modern hedonism in West Wales - he has divined, deviated and experimented with a bravery that is only really…

Harvey Pekar

Ego and Hubris (Ballantine Books)

12 Feb 2007

BIOGRAPHY/LIFE STORY Meet Michael Malice - childhood immigrant, dreamer, short-ass and egotist. In some ways he’s just another mildly schizophrenic man, raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, but to Pekar (the graphic novel’s greatest navel gazer) he is…

Winsor McCay

Editorial Works (Checker BPG)

12 Feb 2007

NEWS/REPORTAGE Better known for his groundbreaking 1930s animated film Gertie the Dinosaur (a film so exquisitely animated that it upped the game for Disney at the time), and comic strips Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend…

Niall Griffiths

Runt (Jonathan Cape)

29 Jan 2007

SOCIAL DRAMA What a courageous writer Niall Griffiths is. In the seven years since his debut Grits - an ambitious and occasionally brilliant study of modern hedonism in West Wales - he has divined, deviated and experimented with a bravery that is…

Elfriede Jelinek

Greed (Serpent’s Tail)

23 Nov 2006

SOCIAL DRAMA Like Austrian feminist writer Elfriede Jelinek’s novel The Piano Teacher, Greed has taken almost five years to be translated. This, however, probably has more to do with our penchant for feelgood celebrity literature than the contempt…

Comic - Will Eisner

Will Eisner

22 Nov 2006

COLLECTION The rediscovery of the mighty Will Eisner continues with this lovingly bound collection of more New York stories. Out of the four sections, there are actually only two graphic novels here - The Building and Invisible People. The former, is…

Jo Sacco

But I Like it (Fantagraphics)

26 Oct 2006

AUTOBIOGRAPHY/COLLECTION Containing some of the same material as previous Sacco collection Notes from a Defeatist, this new selection is a more focused attempt to archive and give order to the reams of material he amassed as a music mad young man who…

Joe Sacco

But I Like it (Fantagraphics)

10 Oct 2006

AUTOBIOGRAPHY/COLLECTION Containing some of the same material as previous Sacco collection Notes from a Defeatist, this new selection is a more focused attempt to archive and give order to the reams of material he amassed as a music mad young man who…

Richard Dawkins

The God Delusion (Bantam)

28 Sep 2006

Like a latter day John Thomas Scopes (the Tennessee biology teacher who was the inspiration for the play and film Inherit the Wind) Richard Dawkins has long been vocal about his belief that all children should be taught the Darwinian Theory of Evolution…

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith (1998)

1 Jan 2005

Some years ago Mma 'Precious' Ramotswe decided to use her inheritance from her beloved father to open a detective agency in Botswana. Having been met with scepticism by her bank manager ('Can women be detectives?'), she put together her assets (a tiny…