Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities
This book is a riveting menagerie of story, from the overarching tale of the novel, to the stories contained within it, to the Hans Christian Anderson tale referenced in the title. The co-authors both contributed to the story, with Mignola doing all of the illustrations in his characteristic fantastical Expressionist style. The prose is lucid, with a generally dark tone, leaving the highs and lows of the story to move the reader.
The setting of the story is an alternate Europe, during and directly after World War I. Events and places share many similarities with our world, but not all. Lord Baltimore is a former English officer suffering from the shocks of war, as well as an encounter with the titular vampire. The secondary characters all knew Baltimore at various times in life, and they meet in a tavern to tell stories about him and about their own lives. As it turns out, they have all experienced supernatural events that make them more liable to believe the narrative of Lord Baltimore's tragic life, and the ghastly plague that spread from the trenches of World War I to ravage Europe like the Red Death of Poe. In telling their stories, they come to grips with the damaging effects of evil and strengthen their resolve to do what is necessary to aid their own steadfast tin soldier.
A fictionalized account of the murder of 
The comic strip 
This collection of short stories is a representative offering, showcasing Murakami's skills from his beginnings as an author in the late '70s to today. Shadowy jazz clubs, bizarre metaphysical conditions, high and low culture, Japanese work culture, political violence, nameless and subtly attractive women: all of his recurring obsessions appear here. The book has a loose, freewheeling feel, and is a fine place for a Murakami beginner. Read a few paragraphs of a story, and if you don't like it, move on to the next. Diverse as this collection is, you will eventually find something you like.
Not for the faint of heart, The Savage Detectives is a dreamlike and gritty tale of the fictional Visceral Realism poetry movement in 1970s Mexico City. The story follows the elusive ringleaders of this motley group of young writers – Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima – on their quixotic mission to find Cesárea Tinajero, the first true Visceral Realist. By turns ponderous and gripping, The Savage Detectives is an absorbing novel that is not to be missed, if only to experience Bolaño’s style and Wimmer’s superb translation.
In this debut novel, 
Hank Thompson, protagonist of 
Election is elegant, funny, and eminently readable at 200 pages, and it made me want to read more of Tom Perrotta's work. The story is an engrossing stew of angst, backstabbing, politicking, jealousy, ennui, and sex, all set in the midst of a high school election. For various reasons the election turns out to be unusually hotly contested, and readers get to watch the lives of various students, teachers, and parents implode and expand in a variety of colorful ways.
Mortal Love is a fascinating novel that spans the lives of various poets and artists and musicians over a hundred years as they encounter a mysterious woman. For each of them, she ("Larkin Meade" in the present day) is both lover and muse, inspiring in each the most powerful work they will ever produce. Elizabeth Hand's writing is densely sensuous, her words aptly evoking the artistry of her subjects, and almost poetic in its intensity. Many historical figures appear in this work, including some notable 
Yes, The Time Traveler’s Wife is about time travel. And at its center is the love story of Henry, the charismatic time-traveling librarian, and his wife Clare. Yet to categorize this strange, lovely novel as fantasy or romance would be somewhat misleading. It is certainly not a love story of the classic boy-meets-girl variety. Indeed, Henry DeTamble first meets Clare when she is six, and he is nearly middle-aged, swept back in time during one of his involuntary time traveling episodes. Years later (or earlier?), after many travels to Clare’s childhood, they meet again. As Clare’s life progresses in a (normal) linear fashion and Henry flip-flops through time, the narrative leads one to question the ideas of causality, coincidence, destiny, and fate. It all appears to be a Möbius strip, as Clare tells Henry when she finally meets his present-day self; does knowing about the future then cause one to change it?
Three Junes is a quiet character study of the McLeod family, told at three points in time over the span of ten years. Each section stands well on its own; indeed, “Collies,” the first part of the book, won the 1999 Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella. Yet when read together, the stories complement each other and serve to provide multi-faceted portraits of the characters; the reader not only views Paul, the McLeod patriarch, through the lens of his own narrative, but from his son Fenno’s perspective as well.
Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is a fast, gripping science fiction novel that tries to figure out what the costs are when war never ends, and what that might mean in outer space. If you think Star Wars or Star Trek when you think of SF, this book will broaden your mind. The action takes place on various space ships traveling throughout the galaxy at 
City of Glass is a short, strange scrap of a detective novel that will leave you wondering what happened when it's over, and whether or not you've been had. It is the first of three novels Auster published in the mid-'80s that are collectively known as the New York Trilogy, all of which both serve as and are about mysteries. Fans of 
This fall I will be experiencing for the first time class V white water rapids while shooting down a remote and treacherous West Virginia river. The above mentioned and not-so-well-remembered scene from the film, coupled with the excitement of my upcoming adventure, had me scurrying to the fourth floor stacks of JBC in search of James Dickey’s classic survival novel Deliverance, which I devoured eagerly over a recent weekend. Prior to reading the book, which happened to be an antiquated and tattered volume from 1970, all my knowledge of this story had been gathered from multiple viewings of the movie over the years. I knew of no one else who had tackled the original written version either. 
Fun Home is an autobiographical comic written in a nuanced, literary style, intermingling the stories of the author’s coming to grips with her sexual identity and her closeted father’s untimely death. 
Bones of the Moon is a 
This slender, haunting novel follows Sumire, a typically strange 
Lisa Lewis' poems are sweeping things that read like short stories. They remind me of Aimee Bender's short fiction: composed with a carefully crafted simplicity; conversational with lyric tendencies; hinged not on sharp fragments but instead on sort of inverted moments: the language is manipulated to surprise but always remains conversational in tone. There is a simplicity within these poems—sometimes conjured by a series of parallel sentences and the repetition of totemic words—but the poems aren’t simple. They move ever outward in gathering arcs to relate a progression of events or objects or ephemera. Ideas and experiences are linked one after the other to create a vast container of images, yet the poems manage to feel instinctual in these accumulations. These are natural, complicated meanderings that trace a pattern to the core. Lewis’ melancholy is a plainspoken, energetic melancholy, and she offers devastating observations that feel right on—as absolute as waking, where ordinary truths turn monumental but are not contrived-profound. 
Angela Carter's stories are Byzantine, richly layered affairs. She draws on fairy tale themes and writes in a style that could easily be called "purple" or "hothouse," if not for its intense focus. Some, like this 1978 collection's eponymous tale, are actual retellings of well-known classics like "Bluebeard" or "Beauty and the Beast." The violence and sexuality that Carter sees inherent in nature always lurk just around the corner here, if not in plain view. "The Erl-King" is an absolute tour-de-force, revisiting Romantic views of nature and creation even as it tears them down. "Wolf-Alice" is a fine conclusion to the volume, pulling together themes from many folk tales and weaving them together with a postmodern Gothic sensibility. It's no wonder that Carter's stories, continually subverting authority and questioning who is in control, are regarded by critics as highly feminist.
Everyday people in modern, middle-class England and the far reaching impact of decisions people make are common themes in novels by Joanna Trollope. Brother & Sister explores the issues surrounding adoption through David and Nathalie, a brother and sister adopted from different mothers into a family. When Nathalie decides to search for her birthmother, and cajoles David into searching for his also, they and their families change as they work through anger, abandonment, victimization, forgiveness, and intimacy. What does it mean to be a family? What is a mother? Who am I really? Who do I “belong” to? What is “mine”? These are questions Trollope’s characters must answer for themselves. Her characters and their issues seem very realistic. No one is perfect and their flaws are believable. People who might appear weak have inner strength that is not always evident. Likewise, those who appear strong have weaknesses. The plot moves with a nice combination of introspection and action. This story will hold your attention from beginning to end.
Night Picnic: Poems is a fine 2001 collection by 
Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders is an Aladdin's cave of treasures, containing more than thirty short stories, poems, vignettes, and literary forms in between. From a novella about a modern-day demigod's travels in Scotland, to a short story about some far-out exchange students, to a set of poetic instructions for traversing fairy tales, 
The works of the acclaimed 
Perhaps no other novel from the nineteenth century -- and perhaps no other novel in the history of American literature -- is as controversial as Uncle Tom's Cabin, by anti-slavery activist and novelist, 
"What good is science fiction to Black people?" If you have ever wondered this, or if you've ever thought that the future was limited to shiny, cybernetic miracles, you need to read Bloodchild and Other Stories. A collection of five short stories and two wonderfully spare essays on the art of writing, this book serves as a fine introduction to the works of 
When I read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, I feel I am in the presence of great art. The author’s prose flows and evokes imagery like a masterpiece. It is a worthwhile diversion to refresh the spirit. With 200 pages, more or less depending on the edition, it takes just a short time to immerse into and emerge from a tale sure to stay with you forever.
