If you’ve ever struggled to lead a creatively satisfying professional life, there’s a good chance Cass’s story will resonate. Cass’s chosen career path? Theater. After an entire decade of working on “weird downtown plays” as a no-name playwright in NYC, she wins an award along with $50,000 and lands herself an off-Broadway debut. She’s 33 …
Gordon-Reed made her name, and won a Pulitzer, as a historian of Virginia, and specifically of Thomas Jefferson’s estate of Monticello, as she told the history of its black residents alongside its white ones in unprecedented detail. But she was raised in Texas, East Texas specifically, and her little handbook about Juneteenth, the local holiday …
I got to read an early copy of Outlawed last year and have been impatiently waiting until it went on sale and I could share it. This book deftly recasts the Western genre through a queer, feminist lens, with lots of fun and adventure along the way. In an alternate 1890s where any woman who can’t …
One response to the complexity of explaining the Haitian Revolution is to narrow the scope, as Sudhir Hazareesingh does in Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by focusing on Toussaint. Despite his tinier canvas and his younger audience, Hale, in the tenth installment of his wildly popular series of graphic histories of thrilling episodes …
We don’t consider it often, but writing about the past, even in the most straightforward way, makes time elastic. Take The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis, for example. It’s a 1983 novel that’s having a renaissance due to Netflix’s acclaimed screen adaptation. (Side notes: I’ve seen one episode so far and agree with the accolades. I …
I hope it doesn’t trivialize [the previous] week’s … Book of the Week, Erica C. Barnett’s memoir of alcoholic blackouts and self-destruction, to say that the humiliating confessions in this book are nearly as relentless and excruciating. Because the humiliations, in the case of this graphic memoir, are tiny: failed bookstore events, comicon party snubs, parenting meltdowns, …
This delightfully illustrated graphic memoir is an emotional and straightforward account of self-discovery and acceptance. Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, explores coming to terms with eir genderqueer identity and asexuality in a way that is personal, thoughtful, and educational. Kobabe’s self-aware recollections range from uncomfortable and painful to awkward and joyful and liberating. The artwork …
We know puzzles can be hard to come by these days, and many of our suppliers are out of stock, but we recently received another batch, and this time we’ve made it a little easier to buy them from us. We’ve created a page on our site with our current puzzle inventory—you can purchase them there, …
When an advance copy of Home Baked arrived at the store, I took it home hoping merely to escape into the iconic 1970s San Francisco setting. I never anticipated that this memoir would give me an in-depth education on both the history of the era and the politics surrounding marijuana. Home Baked tells the story of the underground, …
It’s a subject ripe for satire: a young literary woman leaves publishing to try out tech in San Francisco and gets drawn into the money and ambition of Silicon Valley. But Wiener’s memoir, sharp-tongued as it sometimes is—of the photos on a first date’s Instagram feed, she writes, “They were, I had to admit, very …
