Inlibris Bookstore

Chris Ware: Building Stories

Chris Ware

Published by Pantheon (October, 2012). The New York Times writes: "Ware's innovative graphic novel deepens and enriches the form by breaking it apart. Packaged in a large box like a board game, the project contains 14 'easily misplaced elements' -- pamphlets, books, foldout pages -- that together follow the residents of a Chicago triplex (and one anthropomorphized bee) through their ordinary lives. In doing so, it tackles universal themes including art, sex, family and existential loneliness in a way that's simultaneously playful and profound."

John Banville: Ancient Light

John Banville

Published by Knopf (October, 2012). The Financial Times writes: "Luminescent . . . Illuminating and often funny but ultimately devastating . . . Breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death, the final page of which brought tears. The Stockholm jury should pick up the phone now."

Joan Wickersham: The News from Spain

Joan Wickersham

Published by Knopf (October, 2012). Mia Lipman writes: "Joan Wickersham's graceful new story collection explores the failings and desires of seven different sets of people, all of whom share a sense of longing and a single title: The News from Spain. Each tableau fills a concentrated space with rich detail: the sickening smell of popcorn, crumpled tissues and crusted paintbrushes, a white breast in green water. Wickersham crafts intelligent and vivid narratives -- the only two girls in an all-boys school build a delicate friendship; a bedridden wife takes comfort in brandy and her caretaker -- but she is at her best in the realm of nuance, where a cardboard box gone unopened tells you everything you need to know. Human beings in a constant quest for kinship are nothing new. But in Wickersham's hands, their journey feels entirely worth joining, even briefly, and the outcome is anything but certain."

Michael Chabon: Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon

Published by Harper (September, 2012). Michiko Kakutani writes: "He draws an extraordinarily tactile, Kodachrome-crisp picture of the Bay Area world that his characters inhabit -- a world perched somewhere between the hipster concerns of old-school Berkeley and the more down-to-earth worries of middle- and lower class Oakland -- while conjuring the music from the '50s, '60s and '70s that Archy and Nat love so much and that has given them their vocation. The result is a novel with the grooviest soundtrack since High Fidelity: the jazz, funk, soul, R and B and rock 'n' roll that thumps through this volume is a Proustian madeleine for the characters in this book, linking their present lives to their adolescent passions, and the Berkeley of 2004 to the Oakland of the '70s, when Huey Newton and the Black Panthers held sway."

Zadie Smith: NW

Zadie Smith

Published by Penguin (September, 2012). The New York Times writes: "Smith's piercing new novel, her first in seven years, traces the friendship of two women who grew up in a housing project in northwest London, their lives disrupted by fateful choices and the brutal efficiency of chance. The narrative edges forward in fragments, uncovering truths about identity and money and sex with incandescent language that, for all of its formal experimentation, is intimate and searingly direct."

Gillian Flynn: Gone girl

Gillian Flynn

Published by Crown (June, 2012). Janet Maslin writes: "And if you have any doubts about whether Ms. Flynn measures up to Patricia Highsmith's level of discreet malice, go back and look at the small details. Whatever you raced past on a first reading will look completely different the second time around."

Craig Thompson: Habibi

Craig Thompson

Published by Pantheon Books (September, 2011). Publishers Weekly: "A lushly epic love story that's both inspiring and heartbreaking...In addition to richly detailed story panels, the gorgeous Arabic ornamental calligraphy makes each page an individual work of art. A dense, swirling dervish of a tale...this will be the most talked about graphic novel of the fall."

Patricia Engel: Vida

Patricia Engel

Published by Grove Press (September, 2010). Michiko Kakutani writes: "The stories in Patricia Engel's striking debut collection are like snapshots from someone's photo album: glimpses of relatives, friends, lovers and acquaintances, sometimes posing, sometimes caught by the camera unawares. There are portraits of Latinos in suburban 'Gringolandia,' and portraits of young drifters in Miami, 16 of them sharing a single apartment, mattresses crammed together on the floor 'like it was war times.' There's a skinny 16-year-old boy who always wears faded jeans and 'a white button-down shirt that looked like it only got washed in the sink,' a high school mean girl who develops a fatal case of anorexia, a womanizing pot dealer who becomes the narrator's best friend and a Colombian beauty queen who comes to America and is forced into prostitution."

Patti Smith: Just Kids

Patti Smith

Published by Ecco (November, 2010). Janet Maslin writes: "Just Kids captures a moment when Ms. Smith and Mapplethorpe were young, inseparable, perfectly bohemian and completely unknown, to the point in which a touristy couple in Washington Square Park spied them in the early autumn of 1967 and argued about whether they were worth a snapshot. The woman thought they looked like artists. The man disagreed, saying dismissively, 'They're just kids.'"

Jonathan Franzen: Freedom

Jonathan Franzen

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (August, 2010). Michiko Kakutani writes: "Jonathan Franzen's galvanic new novel, 'Freedom,' showcases his impressive literary toolkit -- every essential storytelling skill, plus plenty of bells and whistles -- and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life. With this book, he's not only created an unforgettable family, he's also completed his own transformation from a sharp-elbowed, apocalyptic satirist focused on sending up the socio-economic-political plight of this country into a kind of 19th-century realist concerned with the public and private lives of his characters."

Mary Karr: Lit

Mary Karr

Published by Harper (November, 2009). Michiko Kakutani writes: "She has written a book that lassos you, hogties your emotions and won't let you go. It's a memoir that traces the author's descent into alcoholism and her conflicted, piecemeal return from that numb hell -- a memoir that explores the subjectivity of memory even as it chronicles with searching intelligence, humor and grace the author's slow, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful discovery of her vocation and her voice as a poet and writer."

Lorrie Moore: A Gate at the Stairs

Lorrie Moore

Published by Knopf (September, 2009). Michiko Kakutani writes: "Ms. Moore has written her most powerful book yet, a book that gives us an indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11 and her initiation into the adult world of loss and grief. It is a novel that illustrates just how far Ms. Moore has come in the last two and half decades from her keenly observed but jokey 1985 collection of stories, 'Self-Help,' which showcased her gifts as a writer but also underscored her -- and her characters' -- emotional reticence, their reluctance to open themselves to deeply felt experiences."

David Grann: The Lost City of Z

David Grann

Published by Doubleday (February, 2009). Michiko Kakutani writes: "'The Lost City of Z' is at once a biography, a detective story and a wonderfully vivid piece of travel writing that combines Bruce Chatwinesque powers of observation with a Waugh-like sense of the absurd. Mr. Grann treats us to a harrowing reconstruction of Fawcett's forays into the Amazonian jungle, as well as an evocative rendering of the vanished age of exploration, which witnessed feats like Livingstone's finding of Victoria Falls, the Amundsen and Scott expeditions to the South Pole and Hiram Bingham's discovery of the lost city of Machu Picchu."

Toni Morrison: A Mercy

Toni Morrison

Published by Knopf (November, 2008). Michiko Kakutani writes: "Set some 200 years before 'Beloved,' 'A Mercy' conjures up the beautiful, untamed, lawless world that was America in the 17th century with the same sort of lyrical, verdant prose that distinguished that earlier novel."

Richard Price: Lush Life

Richard Price

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May, 2008). Michiko Kakutani writes: "Mr. Price puts his myriad gifts together to create his most powerful and galvanic work yet, a novel that showcases his sympathy and his street cred and all his skills as a novelist and screenwriter: his gritty-lyrical prose, his cinematic sense of pacing, his uncanny knowledge of the nooks and crannies of his characters' hearts. (...) He depicts his characters' daily lives with such energy, such nuance and such keen psychological radar that he makes it all come alive to the reader - a visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City and some of its residents, complete with soundtrack, immortalized in this dazzling prose movie of a novel."

Margaret B. Jones (Margaret Seltzer): Love and Consequences

Margaret B. Jones (Margaret Seltzer)

Published by Riverhead (February, 2008). Michiko Kakutani writes: "One of her friends in prison writes her that 'so few of us will ever get the chance to see what it's like outside L.A.,' that she should 'be our eyes.' That Ms. Jones has done, and with this remarkable book she has also borne witness to the life in the 'hood that she escaped, conveying not just the terrible violence and hatred of that world, but also the love and friendship that sustained her on those mean streets."

Philip Roth: Exit Ghost

Philip Roth

Published by Houghton Mifflin (October, 2007). Nathan Zuckerman is back in New York City. "And so I set out to minimize the loss by struggling to pretend that desire had naturally abated, until I came in contact for barely an hour with a beautiful, privileged, intelligent, self-possessed, languid-looking 30-year-old made enticingly vulnerable by her fears and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again."

Lauren Fox: Still Life with Husband

Lauren Fox

Published by Knopf (February, 2007). Michiko Kakutani writes: "Though the jerry-built plot of 'Still Life with Husband' devolves into a soap-opera-ish melodrama about adultery and angst, this novel is no passing piece of chick lit. Rather, it marks the debut of a delightful new voice in American fiction, a voice that instantly recalls the wry, knowing prose of Lorrie Moore crossed with the screwball talents of the cartoonist Roz Chast."

Richard Ford: The Lay of the Land

Richard Ford

Published by Knopf (October, 2006). Daphne Durham writes: "a novel that finds Bascombe contending with health, marital, and familial issues wake of the 2000 presidential election."

Jennifer Egan: The Keep

Jennifer Egan

Published by Knopf (August, 2006). Joel Glenn writes: "The Keep's honest yet intimate approach to the sometimes bitter inner dialogues we often hold with ourselves, concerning ourselves, is at once engaging and disarming but manages to leave one with the feeling of receiving an unexpected gift of a pair of warm mittens on a dishearteningly cold day. In short - none of us are truly alone; the message seems to say, though we may feel that way."

Anne Tyler: Digging to America

Anne Tyler

Published by Knopf (May, 2006). Ron Charles writes: "With her 17th novel, Tyler has delivered something startlingly fresh while retaining everything we love about her work. Digging to America delivers the blithely insular, suburban Baltimore characters we expect, but it's a bait-and-switch move. In a daring expansion of Tyler's range, the people who are really at the heart of this novel come from Korea, China and Iran."

Deborah Eisenberg: Twilight of the Superheroes

Deborah Eisenberg

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January, 2006). Michiko Kakutani writes: "The title story of Deborah Eisenberg's masterly new collection takes place in a millennial New York City, cutting backward and forward in time to give the reader glimpses of that metropolis before and after 9/11..."

Dana Spiotta: Eat the Document

Dana Spiotta

Published by Scribner (January, 2006). Michiko Kakutani writes: "In her stunning new novel, Dana Spiotta tackles this perennial theme [reinventing oneself] with ingenuity, inventiveness and élan..."

Mary Gaitskill: Veronica

Mary Gaitskill

Published by Pantheon (October, 2005). Janet Maslin writes: "Mary Gaitskill's fierce, night-blooming new novel is about a close friendship between two women. But it should not be confused with anything cozy. Imagine a buddy story from the mind of William S. Burroughs, illustrated with images by Robert Mapplethorpe or David Cronenberg, and you get some idea of the tenderness to be found here..."

Zadie Smith: On Beauty

Zadie Smith

Published by Penguin Press (September, 2005). Michiko Kakutani writes: "Although the plot of On Beauty hews remarkably closely to Howards End, Ms. Smith has managed the difficult feat of taking a famous and beloved classic and thoroughly reinventing it to make the story her own..."