Books

Two new works of science fiction demonstrate the limitless potential of the Big Idea.

Contemporary readers of Bill Griffith's comic strip, Zippy the Pinhead, know with certainty that the illustrator is one of the most accomplished draftsmen working in comics today, his talents on a par with those of Robert Crumb. His art -- nuanced shad...

Contemporary readers of Bill Griffith's comic strip, Zippy the Pinhead, know with certainty that the illustrator is one of the most accomplished draftsmen working in comics today, his talents on a par with those of Robert Crumb. His art -- nuanced shad...

Contemporary readers of Bill Griffith's comic strip, Zippy the Pinhead, know with certainty that the illustrator is one of the most accomplished draftsmen working in comics today, his talents on a par with those of Robert Crumb. His art -- nuanced shad...

Once held close to the chest and protected by well-understood laws, the valuable information about our lives that we blithely disclose with our every keystroke has the potential to turn around and bite us on the butt. Modern jurisprudence has failed to...

Watching The Hellstrom Chronicle upon its fortieth anniversary reissue (in a beautiful, immaculate, eye-candy print -- but with no extra features) propels me back instantaneously to my teenaged years when I saw this unique hybrid documentary for the fi...

The Plots Against the President, Sally Denton's fascinating new study of the early presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is a move toward a kind of historiological equivalence. While sketching with a novelist's compassion and precision the unique ac...

The fifty-one tiny stories (vignettes? prose poems? blipverts? flash fictions?) contained in Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty resolutely refuse total decryption. But they burrow into the reader's subconscious and sprout odd blossoms. At first glance, Diane Wil...

An absurdist vision of America's future is a new monument of "slipstream" fiction.

William Gibson is a superlative storyteller, able to mint fresh, intriguing characters and propel them through compelling plots. He limns postmodern and futuristic venues with a keen eye. He taps the zeitgeist and spins out its skein of probable trajec...

The average citizen, playing with his or her iPhone, spares not a moment's thought for the scientists who made it possible. Happily, a worthy remedy to this shameful gap in our communal knowledge comes in Frank Close's The Infinity Puzzle. Written...

No amount of prior study or imaginative mental time-travel can prepare the reader for the outré and unsettling sights to be found in Julia Suits's wild and wacky...The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions. Burly, topless businessmen clad...