It's Monday once more, and I have a few books to tell you folks about. As usual, these arrived, semi-unexpectedly, over the past few days, and they're all newly published or just about to come out from their various houses. I haven't read these books, but I have perfected a mixture of the quick glance and the unsupported assumption over my nine years of blogging, and I will use those awesome powers to describe these books to you now.First up is Melanie Rawn's new fantasy novel Window Wall
, the fourth in her Glass Thorns series that started with Touchstone. This time out, we've still got a pseudo-Elizabethan world with many fantasy races and ubiquitous magic, but our young hero, Cade, is finally accepting his magical visions and trying to figure out what potential future events they're showing him. And, since prophetic visions of breakfast are very rare in fiction -- sadly so, keeping mundanity and everydayness carefully corralled in the real world -- those visions are of course about devastating, horrible explosions. (And I suppose he should be happy they're not of The End of All Things, the traditional wellspring of fantasy visions.) Window Wall is a Tor hardcover, arriving April 14.
I've seen several editions of James Dashner's very popular YA novel The Maze Runner over the past couple of years, both before and after the recent movie. And I now have a new one at hand: The Maze Runner/The Scorch Trials: Collector's Edition
, which collects the first two books in the series along with some new "bonus content." [1] Coincidentally, The Scorch Trials is turning into a movie as well, and will reach theaters in mid-September. If you don't know the series, it's yet another near-future dystopia, where teens are cruelly sorted and tormented by the nasty oppressive adults who don't understand anything and can't see The Truth -- which is not at all a metaphor for actual teenage life, no sirree -- until the main kid rises up to lead the revolution and start down the path to Logan's Run. This particular series has a whole bunch of boys stuck in a death-trap maze, because that's what you do with the next generation of workers in your society: try to murder them all off early. This edition gives readers two whole novels for one price, and is available on April 14th.
Now, this is interesting. Tor is bringing out Peter Orullian's 2012 novel The Unremembered in a new, somewhat rewritten edition as The Unremembered: Author's Definitive Edition
on April 7th as a trade paperback. If I'm reading the description right, this isn't a case where the first edition had some errors, or extensive cuts, but instead that Orullian was working on the sequel and realized 
Honesty is the best policy, but sometimes it's tough.
Anyway, here's Harley Quinn Vol. 2: Power Outage
, written by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, with art by Chad Hardin and John Timms, collecting the second clump of issues from what I think is a popular, funny series. (I am way outside of the superhero-comics loop these days, mostly by choice.) In this volume, Harley finds an amnesiac Power Girl in Coney Island and claims they are a long-time crime-fighting duo, and then takes a trip to the San Diego Comic-Con, because comics aren't nearly self-referential enough.
And I also have Wonder Woman Vol. 6: Bones
, written by Brian Azzarello with art by Cliff Chiang and Goran Sudzuka, which ends their run on this book. (I don't remember if there was a recent relaunch before the big linewide crossover event, or if this was the run-up to the event. And, honestly, I don't really care: contemporary superhero comics are just a blur of relaunches, linewide crossover events, and shocking changes these days, and I'm much happier not bothering to pay attention.)[1] As a marketer myself, I'm very prone to using the word "content" to describe written stuff, though I hope I'd think twice before putting it on a book cover. It's a very marketing-sounding word, and not customer-friendly.
is a new contemporary fantasy novel by Daryl Gregory, author of Pandaemonium and Afterparty. It's the story of young Harrison Harrison, deathly afraid of water after a supernatural sea creature capsized their boat and disappeared his father, who now lives with his marine biologist mother in the small, eerie Massachusetts town of Dunnsmouth, perched on the edge of a dark and mysterious sea. It's a first person Lovecraftian book, and appears to have been hand-crafted to appeal directly to me -- so I hope I can find time to read it. Harrison Squared is a Tor hardcover, officially arriving in stores tomorrow.
, the fourth and last book in her "Rebel Angels" fantasy series about alternate worlds and the various Scottish hunks in all of them. (I may be misrepresenting the series horribly.)
, it's credited to the law firm of Greg Pak, Charles Soule, Scott Lobdell, Tony S. Daniel, Aaron Kuder, and Ken Lashley, and it's available as a big fat hardcover right now.
, which is written by Christina Vitagliano (founder of the Monster Mini Golf chain, a fact so random I can't help but mention it) and illustrated by the twin dynamos of Monster Mini Golf's art department, Corey and Craig Marier. It's a Simmons-centric version of all of those jokey webpages about how some person is totally awesome and bends reality to his will: I believe Chuck Norris is the canonical original, but there have been plenty of them by now. Vitagliano's particular take is that Simmons is the modern god of sex, more or less, so this is full of one-liners about the powers of his tongue and other body parts, as well as the usual "the sun needs Simmons's permission to come up" silliness. It has a foreword from the man himself, written in the third person, and it will be a Plume trade paperback in April. If you are sexually obsessed with Simmons, this will be the only book you need this year.
, one of a series of one-shots tying into a current storyline in which Joker unleashes mass chaos and death in Gotham City. (What, again?) It's written by Brian Buccellato, drawn by Roge Antonio and Roman Cliquet, and appears to be entirely a sidebar.
, yet another story about Joker yadda yadda Gotham City in flames and ruins blah blah blah mass deaths and horror et cetera. It's set in between two of the video games -- nothing against them, personally, since I still hope to play several of them -- and was originally published in three smaller parts digitally. It was written by Peter J. Tomasi and drawn by Viktor Bogdanovic and Art Thibert. I'm not clear about whether this is also a one-shot or not -- it has a "Next!" box at the end, but that could easily be leading into the game. Either way, it a piece of Batman story that fits in between two of the most popular pieces of Batman story of the past few years.
, and it collects all of Terry Pratchett's short stories -- in or out of Discworld, from 1963 through 2010, including a deleted segment of his only novella as an appendix -- between two covers. Pratchett was never much of a short-fiction writer, though he is entirely responsible for around fifty novels and partially responsible for a handful more, so this book is not all that large; it's less than three hundred pages long. It has a loving, appreciative foreword by A.S. Byatt (of all people), and no new Pratchett prose of any kind, unless you count the single-sentence dedication to his longtime agent Colin Smythe (whom I also used to have the pleasure of occasionally talking to, back in my book-club days).
was obviously going to be catnip to me and people like me. First, the whole library thing. Second, it's short: a quick read. (Shorter even than I expected: I didn't count words, but it took substantially less than an hour to read. It might well not even reach novella length.) And add in that this library is "strange," too -- well, how could I pass it up?
, by Jessie Hartland. Hartland is a cartoonist and illustrator who created one similar previous book, Bon Appetit, a biography of Julia Child. She's got a whimsical, loose drawing style, with lettering that switches from cursive to printed in between letters and a zingy energy in her drawings. And w all know who Steve Jobs is, and his basic story, right? From the title, I'm expecting this to be entirely positive, and not focus on the many negative sides of Jobs's life -- his neglect of family, his bull-headed refusal to actually get useful medical treatment for the disease that killed him, and his general lifelong I'm-right-and-you-all-are-wrong attitude -- but that's to be expected from a short bio. Insanely Great is coming from the new Random House imprint of Schwartz & Wade, as a hardcover July 21. But I do hope to review it more fully before then.
is one of those books that explains itself fully in the title: it collects twelve stories (and four essays) by the popular fantasy novelist, one of them original and the others published in various places over the past twenty years. It's got a flashy Julie Dillon cover -- which an afterword explains illustrates a very specific passage in one of Elliott's recent books -- and is available right now as a trade paperback from Tachyon.
, written and drawn by Lee Bermejo, and it came out last week from DC's Vertigo imprint. The story is yet another post-collapse future, set a generation after everything went to hell, in New Angeles, where of course gladiatorial combat -- to the death, I assume, with fancy technological killing devices -- has come back into fashion, because it always does after the apocalypse. If you're looking for a dystopia with fewer spunky teen girls and more beefy boxing men, Suiciders should be right up your alley. (Note that the actual comic has a title and other text on it to explain what it is; for some bizarre reason, that version is not available online.)
