Literature is long. Comics are short.
Does Proust get you down? Do you find The Unbearable Lightness of Being simply unbearable? Is The Inferno your own private hell? Do you long to be conversant about classics like Moby Dick, the Bhagavad Gita, Madame Bovary, and, um, Twilight?
Bestselling illustrator Lisa Brown (The Airport Book; Baby, Mix Me a Drink) did her homework. Long Story Short offers 100 pithy and skewering three-panel literary summaries,
A spiritualist, an insane asylum, a lost little girl . . .
When Clive, anxious to distract a depressed Henrietta, begs Sergeant Frank Davis for a case, he is assigned to investigating a seemingly boring affair: a spiritualist woman operating in an abandoned schoolhouse on the edge of town who is suspected of robbing people of their valuables. What begins as an open and shut case becomes more complicated, however, when Henrietta—much to Clive’s dismay—begins to believe the spiritualist’s strange ramblings.
Meanwhile, Elsie implores Clive and Henrietta to help her and the object of her budding love,
A “mesmerizing” re-imagination of the final months of World War II (Kate Quinn, author of The Alice Network), Hannah’s War is an unforgettable love story about an exceptional woman and the dangerous power of her greatest discovery.
Berlin, 1938. Groundbreaking physicist Dr. Hannah Weiss is on the verge of the greatest discovery of the 20th century: splitting the atom. She understands that the energy released by her discovery can power entire cities or destroy them. Hannah believes the weapon’s creation will secure an end to future wars, but as a Jewish woman living under the harsh rule of the Third Reich,
Tender and compassionate, incisive and heartbreaking, Christina Clancy’s The Second Home is the story of a family you’ll quickly fall in love with, and won’t soon forget.
After a disastrous summer spent at her family summer home on Cape Cod, seventeen-year-old Ann Gordon was left with a secret that changed her life forever, and created a rift between her sister, Poppy, and their adopted brother, Michael.
Now, fifteen years later, her parents have died, leaving Ann and Poppy to decide the fate of the Wellfleet home that’s been in the Gordon family for generations.
‘He was about to commit a forbidden act. A transgression. For no man should rummage through a woman’s handbag.’
Bookseller Laurent Letellier comes across an abandoned handbag on a Parisian street and feels impelled to return it to its owner.
The bag contains no money, phone or contact information. But a small red notebook with handwritten thoughts and jottings reveals a person that Laurent would very much like to meet.
Without even a name to go on, and only a few of her possessions to help him, how is he to find one woman in a city of millions?
Beautiful, dreamlike, and utterly intoxicating, Braised Pork is the beguiling debut of an outstandingly talented young writer who is based in China but writes in English.
One autumn morning, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her lavish Beijing apartment to find her husband dead. One minute she was breakfasting with him and packing for an upcoming trip, the next, she finds him motionless in their half-full bathtub. Like something out of a dream, next to the tub Jia Jia discovers a pencil sketch of a strange watery figure, an image that swims into Jia Jia’s mind and won’t leave.
