Web Exclusive Reviews: Week of 6/30/2008

This week on the Web: death and what you can do about it, death and what a war zone reporter does about it, more speculative history from China enthusiast Gavin Menzies, an author's memoir of the tour supporting her last memoir, scientists examine the human-centric importance of all Earth's critters, and a classic of American photography turns fifty.

Hit Parade: PW Talks with Lawrence BlockA Web-Exclusive Q&A

Prolific mystery writer Lawrence Blocks talks to PW about his latest series starring Keller, the laconic, stamp-collecting hitman on the brink of retirement. William Morrow will publish Hit and Run on Block’s 70th birthday.

Viz Media Owners Revamp Licensing Unit

Shueisha and Shogakukan—the two Japanese publishers that own the American-based manga publisher Viz Media—have entered into a new partnership to expand the company’s licensing and mechandising arm.

A New Love & Rockets In a New Format

Fantagraphics will relaunch the Hernandez brother’s acclaimed series, Love and Rockets, calling the series Love and Rockets: New Stories, and publishing it as a 112-page trade paperback collection starting in September.

Koontz’s Odd Thomas Goes Graphic

Dean Koontz’s character Odd Thomas makes the leap from paragraphs to panels in the new graphic novel In Odd We Trust, published on June 24 by Del Rey.

ADV Manga Is Still in the Picture

Despite a lack of new releases and continuing rumors about its future, ADV Manga is still alive and keeping its books in print, according to Chris Oarr, the ADV sales account manager who oversees the manga line.

‘Turning Them into Movies Is Just an Added Benefit’: Kingdom Comics at Disney

Ahmet Zappa and Christian Beranek are launching a new line of graphic novels at Disney to be distributed via Disney Worldwide Publishing

Comics Briefly

2008 Harvey Awards; PW The Beat: Didio, Heroes Con; EW’s 100 Best Books; Brian K. Vaughan at Midtown Comics; Guests at NYAF; Vanguard at SDCC; Transfuzion at Wizard World Chicago; and Don Parent at Wizard World Chicago

Bad Moon Setting

After nearly four decades of marriage, Anne Roiphe's husband collapsed from a fatal heart attack in the lobby of their apartment building. In her new memoir, Epilogue, she puts to the test the old saying, “Time is the widow's friend,” as she begins rebuilding her life. Tell me about the significance of the moon in the book.

Miami Book Fair Adds Graphic Novel Focus

The Miami Book Fair International, which attracts more than 250,000 visitors over eight days, is partnering with Diamond Comics Distributors to expand the comics and graphic novel presence at the 25th annual fair set for November 9—16 on the campus of Miami-Dade College. Pulitzer Prize—winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman will be a featured guest and will create this year's poster.

Nonfiction Reviews

Wounded Warriors: Those for Whom the War Never Ends Mike Sager . Da Capo , $16.95 paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-306-81735-9 Veteran journalist Sager (Revenge of the Donut Boys) presents an amalgam of celebrity portraits and cautionary tales in a collection as addictive as the drugs and violence that fuel much of the author’s reporting.

Children's Book Reviews

Picture Books Ten Tiny Babies Karen Katz . S&S/McElderry , $14.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-4169-3546-9 Kicking off with “1 tiny baby starts to run” and ending with 10 sleeping babies tucked into their cribs, Katz (Princess Baby) once again puts her kewpie doll crew through their paces, this time enumerating all the fun things that babies do, from toe wriggling and noisemaking to eati...

Tolstoy in Queens

Irina Reyn's debut novel, What Happened to Anna K., transports Anna Karenina to Queens, N.Y., where she struggles with familiar issues of identity, social rules, gender and loyalty a century later and a continent away.

Washed Up by 15

The second thriller from former Cosmopolitan (U.K.) editor-in-chief Sam Baker starring fashion journalist Annie Anderson, Deadly Beautiful, takes a hard look at the too often brief careers of teen models, one of whom, Scarlett Ulrich, may be the victim of a serial killer in Japan.

Prophets and Plural Wives

The 19th Wife David Ebershoff . Random , $26 (528p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6397-0 This exquisite tour de force explores the dark roots of polygamy and its modern-day fruit in a renegade cult not recognized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka the Mormon church). Ebershoff (The Danish Girl) brilliantly blends a haunting fictional narrative by Ann Eliza Young, the real-life 19th &...

Fiction Reviews

The Development John Barth . Houghton Mifflin , $23 (176p) ISBN 978-0-547-07248-7 From the iconic Barth come nine darkly comic stories set in a gated community on Maryland's Eastern Shore. In his trademark style—multiple endings, metaphysical musings, breaking the fourth wall—Barth presents a searing indictment of a certain sociological class in the later stages of life, when the...

Web Exclusive Reviews: Week of 6/23/2008

This week: attack of the Chinese megacity, the stripping life in D.C., the Empiric States of America, a scottish football hooligan in suburbia's peewee soccer league, Alice Munro the mother, a fine new birding guide, and the pleasures of Richard Kern's sexy-creepy-contrived voyeurism. Plus: the latest of L.A. Banks's Vampire Huntress novels, E.E. Knight's new Vampire Earth book, and a standalone novel from Left Behind scribe Jerry B. Jenkins.

Spring Flying Starts

Nee Reported Out at DC Comics

According to a report on the comics news website Comic Book Resources, John Nee, DC Comics senior v-p of business development, is leaving the company.

The Amazing Remarkable Eddie Campbell

Eddie Campbell's latest opus takes on cowboys and circuses and takes him and his creative muse in even more daring directions.