Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/30

Every Monday morning, I post an annotated list of the books that came in the mail to me for review (and occasionally books that came through other channels). Since I review comics for ComicMix and spent sixteen years editing The Science Fiction Book Club, those books tend to be comics and SF/Fantasy -- but, if there are any publicists for other genres lurking out there, I've been reviewing lots of other things (mysteries, business books, books of words or odd facts, etc.), so please do consider me for similar works that you're promoting.

What I saw this past week (a slow time, as everyone in publishing spent their last summer vacation days at the Hamptons or elsewhere) was:

Tobias S. Buckell's third novel, Sly Mongoose, which was published by Tor in hardcover earlier this month. The cover is great, Buckell is a nice guy and a good writer, but I'm already a book behind on him, with Ragamuffin still sitting on my shelf a year later. (That was one of the last books that I could have read for the SFBC, but my boss Ellen got to it first -- largely because I'd read Buckell's first novel, Crystal Rain, and told her how good it was. No good deed goes unpunished.)

Probably the most unexpected book I saw last week was Alan's War, a big graphic novel by French cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert based on the life of an American G.I. It's the first of a projected series, with this book covering Alan Cope's service in WW II and a second book (Alan's Youth) expected to fill in his life up to that point. It's being published as a trade paperback (with French flaps and similar bells and whistles) by First Second in November. I've enjoyed what I've seen of Guibert's work so far (such as The Professor's Daughter, with Joann Sfar), and there's been an interesting surge of good non-fiction comics over the past few years, so I hope the combination is doubly good.

American Widow was written by 9/11 widow Alissa Torres and illustrated by Sungyoon Choi; it's Torres's own story and that of her late husband, Eddie. Villard is publishing it in hardcover on September 9th. I expect to review it for ComicMix next week, so I'll avoid prejudging it before I actually read it.

Faust 1 is the first American edition of a Japanese anthology series that mixes fiction, non-fictional prose, and manga. The Japanese edition is edited by Katsushi Ota, who also provides an introduction to this American version, but the American book itself doesn't credit an editor. Del Rey published it in mid-August. It's hard to tell from looking at it if this book exists because there really is a huge, pent-up demand (from all of those manga-reading teenagers) for more prose from Japan in the US, or if Kodansha is using its relationship with Del Rey to push what looks like one of their major current projects in Japan. I suppose the sales will show which is true. But the name is weirdly specific and culturally tied -- not in a good way, either -- for an broad anthology. Why would anyone call a book like this Faust?

Danica Novgorodoff's debut full-length graphic novel Slow Storm will be published tomorrow by First Second; I reviewed it at ComicMix some weeks back.

And last for this week is the new "Wild Cards" book, edited as always by George R.R. Martin with assists from Melinda M. Snodgrass. This one is Busted Flush, and it's the nineteenth in the series. I read the first eight or ten of these -- the original series, when Bantam published them -- but I have to admit that I jumped off when, like so many shared worlds, each volume got gloomier and gloomier, as each writer played "Can you top this?!" with their nasty mind-controlling and head-hopping villains. I missed the Baen run entirely, and I haven't caught up with the current series, either. Has anyone been reading them lately? (This one will be published in hardcover by Tor in December.)