Alex Toth was no Jack Kirby. He never achieved fame through the creation of world-renowned superheroes. No legion of fanboys ever followed his byline. He was no fount of cosmic ideas. He disdained most publicity, and was more prone to morbidly dwell on what he saw as his failures, rather than boast of any triumphs. And he was not a team player or a happy camper when he felt slighted or misunderstood, which happened more and more often as he aged.

Ah, the faithful and grateful audience of a beloved author of books for young readers! The favorite books of childhood remain part of our souls forever, unlike those respectable tomes we amuse ourselves with as adults. And the deaths of YA creators can hit hard. Notice of the death of YA fantasist Brian Jacques (he died in February 2011 at age 71) evoked remarkably emotional responses, unanimous in their praise and shared sense of anguished loss.

With this stimulating, surprising, meticulously researched book, Alexis Madrigal confers on the green technology movement the valuable gift of historical perspective, a roadmap of past failures and triumphs that can help our society today to form a sensible prospectus for our future survival and escape from eco-apocalypse. Digging deep into the record of alternate energy schemes and projects extending as far back as the 1830s, Madrigal lays down a saga of visionary inventors, enthusiastic or fickle citizens, millionaire robber-baron investors, self-serving charlatans, far-seeing or short-sighted bureaucrats, hardy pioneers, altruistic saviors, and starry-eyed philosophers, all of whom played a part at one time or another in striving to deliver new and improved sources of power to the species and liberate us from drudgery--while hopefully getting rich in the meantime.

The author photo of Ken Babbs on the dust jacket of his first solo novel, Who Shot the Water Buffalo?, depicts a jovial, burly, silver-maned fellow wearing an insignia-laden Armed Forces leather jacket. He looks like anybody's unassuming Foxy Grandpa, ready for a night out with his bowling league or a BBQ at the AmVets. But of course, Babbs is operating undercover. One of the original Merry Pranksters, a true Child of the Sixties, legatee of the Ken Kesey canon, Babbs is more Holy Goof than AARP resident of Florida-as-God's-Waiting-Room. Now he's chosen to return to his fabled past--specifically, his Vietnam War service in the early 1960s--in order to deliver a novel based on his firsthand experiences of that grim and absurd conflict, with an emphasis on the absurdity.

A utopian fantasy: If I were a billionaire, I would purchase one copy of The New Cool for every politician in the United States, from Podunk town council member to POTUS.  Then, employing the arcane superpowers which Glenn Beck imagines George Soros possesses, I would force each politico to put aside any and all tasks, no matter how vital, until they had read and deeply internalized Bascomb's inspiring narrative.

At nearly 400 pages, Duncan the Wonder Dog, the debut graphic novel by self-taught wunderkind Adam Hines is merely the opening salvo in what the artist forecasts will be a 2600-page epic in nine volumes, to be completed over the next twenty-five years,  all about the fate of sentient beasts in an alternate timeline (otherwise resembling our own era) where "animal rights" means arguing with a weeping cow about why it needs to die for the benefit of its human overlords.  Not since Dave Sim launched Cerebus on its three- decades-long road to completion has a creator embarked on such an ambitious and perhaps foolishly grandiose project.  But judging by the obsessive meticulousness, craft and talent on display in Duncan, Hines stands a good chance of fulfilling his vision, barring a chance mortal encounter with a rogue pitbull objecting to any of his sentiments.

Surely you recall the trippy climax to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Astronaut Dave Bowman's psychedelic voyage through the hyperspace tunnel, and his awakening in a Louis XVI bedroom, aged and dying, only to be rejuvenated by the Monolith as a space fetus? Well, Blake Butler's There Is No Year, his first novel outside the small press realm, is pretty much that whole sequence replayed one hundred times in succession, occasionally slowed down to one frame per minute. But this analogy has to take into account the following highly distinctive changes.

Dave Bowman is now three generically named individuals, "mother," "father," and "son," a family of shamblers suffering from various teratomas, fluctuating body parts, mental lacunae, spastic tics, insatiable appetites, and catastrophic identity disorders.

Elaine Scarry, best known for her meditation on The Body in Pain, here offers a slim yet gravid essay that occupies a curious nexus.  It is partly a work of sociological analysis, on the order of Bowling Alone.  It is partly an appeal to the power of philosophy and rationality, akin to Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy.  It is partly a work of speculative neuroscience examing our thought processes, such as Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine.  It is partly a controlled rant (pardon the oxymoron) that seeks to speak truth and justice to power, along the lines of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.  And it is partly a dry-as-dust work from some federal agency like the Congressional Government Accountability Office, documenting with reams of precise statistics why we should all eat more vegetables.  Luckily for the reader, the other four passionate actors in the troupe sit heavily upon this bluenose lecturer and only let him get in an intermittent squeak or three.

If I might paraphrase Lady Macbeth, who mused sweetly upon one of her victims, "Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him," I would suggest that a delighted reader's first reaction upon finishing Holly Tucker's captivating, enlightening and mildly horrifying Blood Work might be, "Yet who would have thought the history of blood transfusion to have had so much sheer entertainment in it."

It's easy to see why Patrick Rothfuss's sumptuous, soft-spoken, understated debut novel caused a stir upon its appearance in 2007 and went on to become a fantasy bestseller and engender a passel of fans clamoring for the sequel, which arrives now in the form of The Wise Man's Fear.  Not only was it thoughtfully conceived, well-written and cleverly presented, but it also stood out thematically and stylistically from the competition, that crowd of hairy-chested, brawling, gore-splattered, epic-fantasy lager louts more at home on the battlefield and in decadent court chambers than in Rothfuss's chosen fresh-faced University setting.

Why are we the way we are? That simple question has bedevilled humanity since the dawn of recorded history, provoking various answers from philosophers, mystics, theologians, fabulists, humorists, cynics, politicians, and, only in the last 300 years or so, from naturalists and scientists.  The latest discipline that seeks to unriddle the mysteries of human behavior and mentality, abilities and customs, is that of evolutionary biology, or evolutionary anthropology.  Taking a thoroughly up-to-date Darwinism as their core set of tenets, these practitioners seek to tease out the formative influences from our hominid past—and beyond—that endowed us with ingrained behaviors and modes of thought that often translate directly into the institutions and cultural practices of our everyday lives.

Were you aware that William Burroughs wrote a young- adult novel starring Encyclopedia Brown back in 1976?  Or that, in their prime, the Firesign Theater produced a whole album involving an invasion by lizard-men from an invisible island?  Or that Roger Corman filmed, in only six days, a script by Roald Dahl based on a lost story by George MacDonald titled At the Beck of the Norse Whim?  No?  Oh, that's right:  you don't have access to those alternate timelines where such things are solid facts.  But apparently Daniel Pinkwater does.

Eric Siblin's cleverly dovetailed and enticingly readable investigative account of the famous rediscovery of J. S. Bach's masterful scores for solo cello, at the hands of Pablo Casals in the late nineteenth century, and their subsequent elevation to the consensual apex of musical beauty, puts paid to the quip (supposedly first made by comedian Martin Mull) that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture."  The image of misguided critical futility inherent in Mull's comparison has no place with a writer like Siblin, who can charmingly and empathetically convey the sweet sounds of a live performance through the medium of black marks on a white page—which, ironically, is exactly how Bach's music was first conceived, transcribed and precariously transmitted down the centuries.

If you can read the succinct yet jam-packed teaser of an initial chapter in this first book-length biography of the painter Alice Neel, in which author Phoebe Hoban enticingly and zestily catalogues the highlights of Neel's career, and then still resist plunging immediately into the text that follows-well, you must be an unimaginative, unromantic Philistine of the grossest sort.  Neel's life in tantalizing outline -- born with the twentieth century, artistically active in every decade from the 1920s to the 1980s, stylistically adventuresome, uncompromisingly principled, mentally eccentric, bohemian by nature, acquainted with many famous fellow creators and colorful lowlife characters, adopted by feminists as a standard-bearer, finally endowed with elderly fame -- constitutes the archetypical painterly arc, a narrative of mythic proportions.  How could anyone with even a shred of imagination and joie de vivre fail to fall headfirst into this story?

Urgent health bulletins are issued, warning parents to beware of their children swallowing tiny magnets, which can lead to perforated bowels.  The internet becomes fascinated by tales of a pea sprouting and growing in a man's lung, or an aspirated piece of a plastic cup from Wendy's causing two years' worth of breathing trouble in an inattentive individual.  The x-ray of a dog with an enormous kitchen knife occupying almost the whole length of its innards mesmerizes the random web-surfer's eye.  A video of Michel Lotito, known as "Monsieur Mangetout," racks up a quarter-million views on YouTube.

In my later teenage years, my aspirations toward becoming a writer were crystallized in large part by viewing a feature in the surrepetitiously obtained, newly minted issue of Playboy for November 1971.  The article that struck me so forcefully was a profile of Henry Miller and his joyfully unrepentant and hedonistic lifestyle, earned after decades of hard knocks and bold prose, of which I then knew little and cared less.  The most striking, even surreal photograph of the whole piece showed a fully clothed Miller, aged eighty, playing ping pong with a naked woman, identified as one Candice Thayer.  Any hormone-stoked would-be male author could only dream of attaining such a vocational heaven, made all the more desirable by its supreme frivolity and the apparent absence of any actual writing chores.   

Upon its independent debut in the 1980s, the Black Lizard imprint earned distinction by reprinting older classics of the crime fiction genre:  Thompson, Goodis, Willeford.  Since its acquisition by Random House as part of the Vintage line, Black Lizard has spotlighted more recent books by living authors of no lesser stature, such as Jonathan Lethem and Nicola Griffith.  In bringing us Joe Lansdale's quietly brutal, harshly elegaic novel The Bottoms, originally issued in the far-off year of 2000, the current editors have once again established that the noir lineage continues to flourish in the twenty-first century.

National Geographic is simply the admirable gold standard for a certain type of coffee-table volume about the natural and manmade worlds and their many intriguing points of intersection.  Solid, substantial, humanistic and civilized, albeit seldom pioneering.  Vividly if sometimes a bit conservatively illustrated, with gorgeous photos and savvy graphics.  Informative text in a transparent style, lending itself to easy ingestion by bright youths or curious adults seeking to enlarge their horizons.  Reading a NatGeo book always makes one feel virtuous, humble and, in most cases, proud to be a human.

The strikingly elegant yet somehow alluringly naïve artwork of French graphic novelist David B. will be most familiar to English-speaking readers through his masterful autobiographical tome, Epileptic, concerning his malfunctioning brother and their lifelong sibling tug-of-war full of mingled compassion and disdain.  With The Littlest Pirate King, David B. applies the same skills and angle of attack that served him so well in a naturalistic, personal mode to a highly fantastical tale, one in fact penned by another writer.

To poet Idra Novey falls the task of producing the first English translation of Viscount Lascano Tegui's 1925 cult classic novel from Argentina, and her modern yet timeless version of  On Elegance While Sleeping  fulfills the assignment splendidly,  bringing the bracingly mordant and sardonic voice of this nigh-forgotten contemporary of Picasso and Apollinaire to a new audience.

It is a bold and confident theorist indeed who can characterize his chosen field of research in the frank and humble manner in which Martin Bojowald speaks of "loop quantum gravity," the core subject of Once Before Time, his rigorously enthralling and speculatively mindblowing survey of this ultra-new physics "framework."

Paul Simon's observation that "Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts" seems somehow applicable to the whole concept of canonical SF anthologies, of which the latest is The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, assembled jointly by six savants who represent the editorial board of the prestigious journal Science Fiction Studies.  Every decade or two the field senses a need to redefine its history, both to itself and to outsiders, the latter of whom might wish to employ the resultant volume as a map of strange territories useful in a classroom environment.  But generalist readers also benefit from a fresh look at the classic tales, along with unearthed, obscure yet representative gems.

When discussing the eerie, enigmatic, and creepy work of master cartoonist Charles Burns, the obvious comparison is to the cinema of David Lynch.  In fact, if you Google the names of the two creators together, you'll get nearly ten thousand shared hits.  And it's true that both artists employ transgressive characters and events, odd juxtapositions, surreal segues, meticulous contemporary naturalism, arcane symbolisms, dream logic, and primal tropes of violence and sex.   But in Burns's newest, X'ed Out—which is the first 56-page installment in a longer tale of indeterminate length—I found myself thinking of earlier models for the type of story Burns seems bent on telling.  Namely, two great fantasists at either end of the Victorian period:  George MacDonald and David Lindsay.

Despite frequent analogies between writers and other crafters—let's choose fine woodworkers as the second half of the equation—we immediately encounter one major difference that renders such comparisons ultimately inutile. 

 Aurorarama is a toothsomely sweet serving of Baked Alaska that conceals an anarchist's time bomb inside.  Melding the droll, rococo politesse of Jack Vance with the phantasmagorical realpolitik of China Miéville, Jean-Christophe Valtat conjures up an exotic, polychromatic world too real not to exist somewhere, if only in a luckier, more delirious and glorious universe adjacent to ours.  Exemplifying Italo Calvino's mandate for "lightness" in fiction—Valtat's bold and capricious direct-to-English prose, not translated from his native French, dances across the page like Saki's or Firbank's—while also embodying Mark Helprin's nostalgic moral seriousness—think Winter's Tale on ecstasy—this opening salvo in a snowball cannonade of fantasy promises to attract discerning and sophisticated readers galore, those fans of the fantastical who are tired of second-hand visions and stale conceits.

When every other day brings a headline detailing some unprecedented and unfathomable event of earth-shaking import, it's easy enough to miss notice of the lesser revolutions.  Thus, ultramodern citizens who focus exclusively on electronic means of communication might have failed to note the recent epoch-shattering news that the British government intends to sell off its Royal Mail Service.  A government institution since 1516, when Henry VIII established the office of "Master of the Posts," the vaunted and legendary service will now become a branch of Wal-Mart perhaps, or an arm of the Murdoch Empire.  And of course the US Postal System is plainly headed for an identical severance from Federal sponsorship.

Today I picked up The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy in their new translation by Cathy Porter, and nearly dislocated my wrist. The book weighs in at slightly over 600 pages. How those Czarist gentry could write! Just think how many tweets it would take to amass that number of pages!

No one can accuse famed physicist Stephen Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow of pussyfooting around their controversial beliefs: "Philosophy is dead," they bluntly proclaim in the opening pages of The Grand Design, and only science can possibly offer any solace or solutions to a perplexed humanity scratching their heads over the great intellectual and spiritual conundrums that have eternally plagued us.

I must sternly advise readers not to approach Douglas Perry's The Girls of Murder City without being aware of the risks they run. Like the hero of Jack Finney's Time and Again, who steeped himself so intensely in vintage surroundings that he became unmoored in time and slipped back to Victorian-era New York, so too might the unwary readers of Perry's book find themselves sucked willy-nilly back down the decades to 1920s Chicago, as a result of Perry's incredibly visceral, sensual and hypnotic recreation of that era. Such a pleasant yet disorienting fate happened to me, I swear it. The man is simply a wizard of words, and must be approached with caution.

An evergreen recipe for engrossing domestic drama: take one white mother and child; add a trusted and beloved servant of lower class and variant ethnicity (accompanying and contrasting servant's child optional); fold in romance, money, careers, remorse, prejudice, empathy and cultural conflicts. Season with both tears and laughter. Bond at high emotional temperatures for a lengthy period of years. Voila! Bourgeois-proletariat heartache soufflé!