Angry robots! Aren't they all? Well, not the line of fine science fiction and fantasy books that comes to readers under the rubric Angry Robot. In fact, their offerings always seem packaged with an appealing extra measure of excitement, zest, and thrills sometimes lacking with more sedate and long-established publishers.

The lives of most authors -- even, or perhaps especially, the great ones -- are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule. In many respects, a cursory overlook of the life of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, fits this milk-mild template, albeit in a slightly divergent and commercial fashion.

The front and back covers and the endpapers and the indicia and title pages of Ben Katchor's sumptuous new collection of strips from Metropolis magazine (appearing originally from 1998 to 2012) constitute a "bonus" story of sorts, seemingly coextant only with this project. The topic of the new piece? How wasteful, environmentally unsound and generally unworthy is the production of books in general and large, glossy art books in particular. The nearly criminal charges are leveled through the intermediary of one of Katchor's great obsessive amateur experts, Josef Fuss, who inveighs against many offenders, including "a deluxe full-color edition of an esoteric literary comic strip."  In other words, against the very book the reader now holds.

Blessed with legions of ardent fans, Lynda Barry is nonetheless critically under- appreciated. Seach on her byline accompanied by the word "review," and you come up practically empty. Many people bump into her only in the context of her long friendship with Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. And yet for nearly thirty-five years she's been producing great, funny, unique comic strips -- not graphic novels per se -- many of them centered on a quirky adolescent girl named Marlys Mullen and her family.

Some acts of worldbuilding in fiction instantiate a milieu that is so culturally odd and exotic, so displaced from the audience's consensus reality in terms of quotidian rituals and observances, clothing and habitations, taboos and emotions, that the subcreation becomes fantastical even if nothing overtly supernatural or paranormal takes place. Such creations usually free up the writer to focus on character, imagining what types of people such a world would produce, since the creator is not overly busy casting spells or buffing up the scales on the dragons. The Ur-example of this kind of book is Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy.

What's a talented writer to do when he's got new stories to set in a thoughtfully imagined world, fans are clamoring for an extension of a beloved series -- and the traditional publishing route to continuing the cycle is closed?  Just a couple of decades or so ago, the answer to that question would have been simple: slink off into the sunset and develop a serious drinking habit. But nowadays the Internet and the spread of ebooks offers many a route to continued storytelling.

Do not imagine that you have understood the concept of "antifragility" right away, merely because the neologism might readily bring to mind the famous quote by Friedrich Nietzsche, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who formerly explored unpredictability in refreshingly unpredictable fashion in The Black Swan, demolishes -- or at least fruitfully unpacks -- that stale rubric in just one of the myriad pithy, ideationally rich, hand grenade-style mini-chapters that constitute his new book, which is a bathyscaphe-deep descent into an unexplored sea of contrarian wisdom.

For the uninitiated, Hard Case Crime, founded in 2004, is a stellar line of pulp fiction masterminded by publisher Charles Ardai. This ongoing celebration of the low-rent, lowbrow genres of crime, suspense, thrillers, and general all-round dangerous down-and-dirty realism has to rank as one of the greatest accomplishments of twenty-first-century publishing. Surely James M. Cain's long-lost, never-before-published, final composition, The Cocktail Waitress, -- the outcome of some arduous archaeological sleuthing and delicate editorial finessing, as described by Ardai in an informative afterword -- represents a new high-water mark for the firm.

Mark Siegel newest graphic novel, Sailor Twain, which he both wrote and illustrated, leapfrogs him into the ranks of "creators to follow." It is exceptionally good, its story being fully the equal of any prose novel of similar scope and ambition, with of course the additional benefit of some gorgeous and sophisticated artwork. That Siegel conceptualized the project and roughed it out over the course of his daily commute alongside the inspirational Hudson River during several years only adds some glamour to his substantial achievement.

Stephen Puleo has invested a vast amount of research into the events surrounding and including the moment on May 22, 1856, when Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina thrashed Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a gold-topped wooden cane on the floor of Congress. The Caning casts the facts into a compulsively readable narrative which does honorable, evenhanded justice to all the players and issues of the era, while teasing out not only similarities with our present antagonistic politics but also some educational differences.

Michael D. Lemonick's engrossing new account of the relatively young field of exoplanetary science reveals how the study of planets outside of our solar system languished as a kind of pencil and paper speculative game until the right technology and the right visionary inspirations coincided. After that, the riches began to rain down from the heavens. Now we stand poised on the threshold of the ultimate coup: finding a "mirror Earth," or twin to our hospitable home.

The consensus history of the detective story credits its natal coalescence to Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," appearing in 1841. So potent was the new fictional idiom, so suited to contemporary times, that in only a couple of decades mystery novels and short stories were a standardized form, although of course many refinements and milestones remained ahead. So in 1864 the appearance of Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective, featuring the first gumshoe of her gender, was a logical but unprecedented landmark. (Some authorities give the groundbreaking credit, however, to Edward Ellis's Ruth the Betrayer; or, The Female Spy, from 1863. In either case, the time seemed ripe for such a figure.)

Somehow, despite haunting three different libraries in search of works of a fantastical nature, I never chanced upon the books of Roald Dahl while still in elementary school. And they began to appear precisely when I would have truly savored them. James and the Giant Peach, the first, was published in 1961, the year I finished first grade. A little too advanced for me then but surely still discoverable on the shelves two or three years later. But no, I chanced to encounter Dahl only in high school, with his "adult" stories. I still recall the thrill of picking up Switch Bitch in a used book store in the small bohemia adjacent to Brown University. Enjoyable, sure, but not a patch on the YA stuff.

Welcome to Mollisan Town, a burg like many another literary venue, full of citizens rich and poor, honest and criminal, loving and mean, where odd and exotic events occur with life-changing regularity. You'd recognize the commingled noir and magic-realist lineaments of the place from books by Jorge Amado and Jeff VanderMeer, from movies like Chinatown and Pan's Labyrinth. Except for one thing. The inhabitants of Mollisan Town are animate stuffed animals. Yes, creatures of cloth and wool batting, fur and buttons, fabricated in factories before being delivered to their designated natal homes, who nonetheless manage paradoxically to eat and breathe, feel, and die.

Nicholson Baker is a scant three years younger than I, and so I expect he feels generationally much the same way about the high quality of E. B. White's essays. Confirmation of my hypothesis arrives in his new book, The Way the World Works, where he achieves superb results on a par and simpatico with White's sturdy, eternal, captivating prose. (Another obvious and acknowledged influence is John Updike.) Such striving and accomplishment surely could not have arisen without the influential vision of the shining essayistic temple built by White on Mount Parnassus. But now White needs to scoot over slightly on his Parnassian throne to accommodate Baker's sacred rump.

I first encountered the work of Jeff Lemire in 2008, when I sat as one of the judges for the Eisner Awards, comicdom's premier prize. Volumes 1 & 2 of what would become his Essex County Trilogy were under consideration and indeed ended up on the final ballot: an easy decision, as I recall, that elicited unanimity from the impressed judges. Since then, he has gone on from strength to strength, becoming one of the best writers at DC Comics for some of their core superhero titles, while also drawing and scripting his own stand-alone project for their Vertigo imprint, Sweet Tooth, a brutally tender tale about chimeric mutants in a postapocalyptic landscape. And the most amazing thing about Lemire's career since 2008 is that he has not compromised his indie vision. He's remained weird and off-kilter and idiosyncratic, failing to succumb to the bombast and swell-headedness that so often infects even the sharpest of the alternative creators when they enter the franchised world of "the Big Two," Marvel and DC.

After reading Rudolph Herzog's Dead Funny with mixed laughter and gasps, head-shaking incredulity and sagely nodding confirmation of the best and worst that humanity has to offer, I find myself channeling the Three Stooges in You Nazty Spy!, John Banner (Sgt. Schultz) in Hogan's Heroes, Roberto Benigni in Life Is Beautiful, and John Cleese in that episode of Fawlty Towers known as "The Germans". In short, I'm trying to use all the familiar, non-German instances of humor about the Nazis to understand this book's revelations:  a heretofore rare glimpse into the incredible pressure cooker of mortality and laughter that Herzog reveals Hitlerian Germany to have been.

Dan Zettwoch's debut graphic novel sings with a sweet simplicity enhanced by a concealed formalist complexity. Birdseye Bristoe, a spare, episodic tale concerning a few momentous weeks in the lives of the citizens of a small, eccentric "Midsouth" town, is Norman Rockwell by way of Twin Peaks. Although not as ambitious or dense as David Mazzuchelli's Asterios Polyp, it shares some of that book's sly blending of macrocosmic and microcosmic concerns, where big issues arise emergently out of the quotidian.

Be very careful what you wish for -- you might get it! This familiar bit of cautionary and cynical folk wisdom -- with its unspoken but obvious corollary that when you get your wish it will prove distasteful -- would surely have been known to the master American fantasist James Branch Cabell (1879-1958), especially in its contemporaneous incarnation as "The Monkey's Paw," a 1902 story by W. W. Jacobs. In fact, the monitory maxim could almost serve as a recurring motif and theme across all of Cabell's books, in which unrealistic desires and expectations and dreams are often undermined and betrayed by their very fulfillment, proving that the deluded  human heart is never the best judge of what's really healthy for it.

If you're a fan of pulp fiction, of ashcan gutter naturalism, of absurdist caper novels, of rags-to-riches sagas, then pick up Rich Cohen's The Fish That Ate the Whale. This history-embedded, anecdote-rich biography of Sam Zemurray, the bigger-than-life figure behind United Fruit Company at its height of power, is a balls-to-the-wall, panoramic, rocket ride through an acid bath, featuring unbelievable-but-true tales of power-grabbing, ambition, folly, passion, commerce, politics, artistry, and savagery: daydream and nightmare together.

Readers who encountered the first and second books in this acclaimed series -- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volumes 1 & 2, which originally appeared  in serial pamphlet form over the years 1999 to 2003 -- had little reason to suspect that they were enjoying anything more ramified and extensive than a steampunk-style, alternate-history-influenced, literary pastiche. 

But Moore surprised everyone with the appearance in 2007 of The Black Dossier, which delivered supporting documents and secret history in Pynchonian spades, fencing in vast tracts of additional literary territory, and catapulting the action to the year 1958. Now the series suddenly and unexpectedly possessed a wider remit than simple steampunk shennanigans. And so arrived The League of Extraordinary Gentleman: Century 1910 and Century 1969. Now the most recent installment, Century 2009, catches up with the present and points the series towards a blazing future all unborn.

John Scalzi's droll and even touching new novel, Redshirts, is a space opera which, at first, seems wryly and cynically to posit that a low-level grunt's life aboard a Big Government starship might resemble a Couplandesque cube-farm in space, except with killer ice sharks and carnivorous rock worms when the crew is on-planet. But their throwaway lives are not totally at the mercy of mere bureaucratic incompetence and disdain. No, more sinister cosmic forces are conspiring against Scalzi's crew, in the form of "The Narrative." And these added dimensions open out Scalzi's story into something much more earnest and significant than simple parody.

To say that Stephen Cave's metaphysically provocative new book, Immortality, is an extended gloss on the famous Woody Allen joke -- "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work...I want to achieve it through not dying." -- is both accurate and trivializing. Allen (actually quoted for a different quip in chapter 8) gets full props for succinctly and memorably encapsulating two paths to immortality, those that Cave dubs "Legacy" and "Staying Alive." But the comedian utterly neglects to reference the other two strategies of "Resurrection" and "Soul." Cave, however, considers every possible angle of humanity's eternal anti-death quest in his highly readable treatise. His impeccable, insightful, invigorating chain of reasoning about death and its role as the driving force behind nearly every cultural institution and action in human history leaves no tombstone unturned.

The phrase "ocean of the stream of stories," traditionally applied to a vast cycle of Indian legends, now has a new rightful claimant in the form of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's enormous new world-spanning, time-delving, mind-warping anthology of fantastika, The Weird, replenished as it is with flows from many lands and many eras. Assembled with passion, scholarship, and a clear vision, this Neptune-deep, Poseidon-rich volume establishes a non-exclusionary canon for "strange and dark stories," a crepuscular territory dear to the heart of any lover of tales that are deranged, odd, surreal, deracinating, spooky, creepy and -- well, just plain weird.

Do you recall the tagline from the very first Superman movie? "You'll believe a man can fly!" Well, I'm tempted to craft such a hyperbolic assertion for China Miéville's off-the-wall yet utterly convincing new "all-ages" novel, Railsea. Something along these lines: "You'll believe a mole can terrify!" Or perhaps "You'll believe in the majesty of mole hunts!" But of course such silly quips impute a kind of Monty Python-style vibe to the book, and nothing could be further from the truth. This coming-of-age questing tale is completely engrossing, not parodic, and, in its own genius-skewed way, totally naturalistic.

The science-fictional motif of lethal, infectious information -- bad memes -- is a fascinating one, with an extended history. One of the earliest instances is Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow from 1895. Chambers's conceit is a malevolent play: read beyond Act II, and you go mad. And of course, Chambers certainly influenced Lovecraft and his sanity-destroying Necronomicon. Now, thanks to the good offices of Minnesota Press, aided by the excellent translating prowess of Thomas Lamarre and Kazuko Y. Behrens, English-language readers get to fill in a missing link in this fascinating lineage, with Kawamata Chiaki's Death Sentences, a fine novel from 1984 that extends the riff to the realm of surrealist poetry.

The inimitably demented and lapidarily hilarious Mark Leyner returns in fine fettle with a rollicking new meta-fictional novel, his first paraliterary excursion in fourteen years. The affect of the book? Drunken sagaciousness, manic sobriety, crazy wisdom, hieratic gossip. Perhaps if you smooshed together Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, Will Self's Walking to Hollywood, Thorne Smith's The Night Life of the Gods, and Michael Moorcock's An Alien Heat, you might decant something similar -- but only after creating a hell of a mess for an inferior brew. So why not just go straight to Leyner?

It's a shame, in a way, that Graham Greene brilliantly and decisively utilized the title A Burnt-Out Case for his 1960 novel about a hapless, wounded antihero whom passion and art have abandoned. The title would have been so perfect for an installment of Elizabeth Hand's ongoing saga of Cassandra "Cass" Neary, burnt-out, middle-aged ex-punk photographer, who, in this second installment, after her debut in Generation Loss, finds herself again far from her comfortably sleazy New York digs and involved in shady doings in Helsinki and Reykjavik. After her previous scary outing in cold, provincial, and brutal Maine, you'd think she'd know enough to steer clear of northern climes. But that's Cass: all guts and no instinct for self-preservation at all.

There must be a rule of thumb in pop-culture archaeology that states that the allure of any topic is inversely related to its assigned importance in the affairs of humanity. The more trivial the subject, the dearer it is to most of its partisans, and the more worthy of scholarship. The smallest things in life often mean the most to people.

This volume of selected letters written by the novelist and counterculture icon William Burroughs during the period from 1959 to 1974, is a remarkable testament, since it manages to confirm Burroughs's legendary public persona while simultaneously shattering it. In other words, we get the whole picture of the man, not just the usual cropped and etiolated snapshot.