Simone

This is an epically gorgeous picture book, and an instant classic for me. Chronicling a lone girls wanderings through Seattle's city streets as she follows the threads of music all the way home, you are invited on a full color kinetic journey where the music is surely audible if you listen closely enough.

Familiar tale of a young child sent on on errand and the city's goings on through her eyes. But thanks to the author/illustrator the world through her eyes is beautiful and full of fetching detail - iron work and shadows, rough walls and spectacles. It's a pleasure to go on an errand with Shau-yu.

This is a great collection. Megan works with several distinct styles of cartooning, and the stories shared span autobiographical to fairy tale. They are intimate, emotional, and dear.

Oh this is SUCH a sharp, dark tale. It is great to be with O'Connor for longer than a short story. Religion raw and twisted as wreckage, family ties and lies, and in the end no redemption for anyone.

Shaer uses the dramatic events in a yehiva dormitory, and following fallout and legal battle, as the spring board for this look into the Hasidic community of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The lineage of the Hasidic rabbis and how Crown Heights came to figure into the story of the Hasidic Jews of New York is a curious piece of the fabric of our city.

Read and be delighted. A young orphan arrives to live at her grandmothers house, a brittle matriarch unsparing in her judgements and fixed in her way of life. We proceed from there into one of the most clever, wickedly entertaining reads. Just writing this makes me excited to read it again.

It's always exciting for me when Miranda July comes out with something new. From back in Olympia Washington days when she was performing downtown making music or presenting slide-shows incorporating herself in curious ways, I appreciate her idiosyncratic view of how things work and what's possible. This new collection puts faces and stories to ads in the Pennysaver. What would have been perhaps too far out in fiction is delicious as a slice of life.

A startling look and meditation on the power of photographs and photographers to shape and manipulate our understanding of truth.

This picture book tells the story of a young Japanese woman and her courtship with an American sailor in lively, stylized watercolors.