Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/23

This is a weekly post: it goes up early every Monday morning and lists the books that I received the week before for review or notice (and, sometimes, books that I got in other ways, if I want to call attention to them). I haven't reviewed any of these yet, and I won't be able to get to all of them, but everything is worthy of notice and every book will be someone's favorite.

So, book I saw last week included:

Rafael Grampa is a Brazilian comics creator who won the Eisner for Anthology, but has never before published a graphic novel of his own work. AdHouse Books is changing that in November, with Grampa's Mesmo Delivery, a slim volume about a truck driver who takes a job delivering one of those packages that are never to be opened, under any circumstances.

DC's manga arm CMX is responsible for the fourth volume of Nari Kusakawa's The Palette of 12 Secret Colors, coming on September 10th. It seems to be a comedy-adventure series about "color magicians" and the birds that are their familiars, or raw materials, or friends. A story about color seems an odd choice for the black-and-white medium of manga, but this is a strange world we live in.

Best American Fantasy 2008, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, from Prime Books. It's the most literary (or the least "genre," depending on how you want to look at it) of the major "Year's Best" books, and it's back for a second year as a trade paperback this November. Prime hasn't gotten organized enough yet to have it on the major online retailers (or on their web site, or to have a cover shot of it anywhere), but here's an Amazon link to the first volume as a placeholder.

And then there's Afro Samurai, by Takashi Okazaki, published by Tor and Seven Seas. As far as I can tell, this is a spin-off of the animated TV show of the same name, though it's written and illustrated by the TV show's creator, which is not usual for a spin-off. The first volume hits stores in September.

I should also note that John Scalzi's new novel, Zoe's Tale, has just been published in hardcover and should be in stores already. I read in it the popular "advance reading copy" form a few weeks back, and hope to get my review up sometime this week, so it won't be too late.

And I got a short stack of fantasy novels from Ace last week as well, starting off with Chris Marie Green's Break of Dawn, the third book of a trilogy called "Vampire Babylon." Contemporary fantasy has been running more to open-ended series than to defined trilogies, so it's good to see writers doing something different in that area. (Though I see from an afterword in this book that another "Vampire Babylon" trilogy is already scheduled, which means they'll probably go on as long as they sell.) Break of Dawn -- a somewhat ominous title given that the main character's name is Dawn -- is a trade paperback and will be on sale September 2nd.

Another Ace novel is Jeanne C. Stein's Legacy, the fourth book in the "Anna Strong, Vampire" contemporary fantasy series. In this book, she's battling the werewolf widow of the nasty vampire she knocked off in a previous book -- isn't that always the way? Legacy is officially published tomorrow, August 26th, so you could grab it right now.

Also publishing tomorrow from Ace is Wanderlust by Anne Aguirre, which is actually a science fiction novel (and probably the sequel to Grimspace, her first novel, if I know anything about publishing). It's about a young spunky woman who is one of the few who can navigate FTL starships through the particular bafflegab hyperspace used in this series -- every author has his or her own; collect them all! -- but who found herself out of a job after what I suspect were the events of the first novel.

Last this week is Ace's new hardcover, a Patricia A. McKillip novel called The Bell at Sealey Head. Since McKillip has just been named one of the Life Achievement winners of this year's World Fantasy Awards, and since I really liked the book of hers that was published the year I was a World Fantasy judge, and since I've missed so many of her books, I'm moving this novel up high in the pile -- I hope to read it within a few weeks. It sounds like a low-key story of people and atmosphere in a small seaside town, which could be lovely. It's also going to be published on September 2nd.