Haruki is one of my fav living writers.  Think Raymond Carver meets Gabriel García Márquez.  Could even say HM is the godfather of the new urban fantasy movement (ala Kelly Link).

In this book (published as three novellas in Japan) protagonist Toru Okada is a middle aged slacker without ambition or direction... that is until his wife fails to return from work one day. He receives a bizarre phone call. Then his cat goes missing. Ever stranger events trigger an existential crisis and while exploring his neighborhood he finds and climbs down into an abandoned well.  Experiencing a bit of solace he returns to the well day after day, closing the lid and sitting in utter darkness. 

He meets a cheeky teenage girl and they develop a friendship. She moves away and the relationship continues via mailed letters. Throw in a harrowing first person account of a character's imprisonment and torture during WWII, oh and also a dimensional portal at the bottom of the well and... well it's a slow-burn but otherwise haunting tale.  If you prefer a more grounded (and shorter) book check out Norwegian Wood, Haruki's break-out love story that sold 4 million copies in Japan alone. 

Magic surrealism... absurdist scifi... afrocentric fantasy... 

All good descriptions of Sorry to Bother You, yet none will prepare for the madness once those lights dim. 

Cassius "Cash" Green lives in his uncle's garage in Oakland, California. Struggling to pay bills, he accepts a job at a telemarketer. Calling white folks results in click after click... until fellow cubicle-dweller Danny Glover instructs Cash to use his 'white voice.'  That's when the fun starts. When Cash finds success and gets promoted to the upper floor, where the best of the best sell weapons of mass destruction, indentured servants and **********.

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Brian K. Vaughan is a creative genius. Nothing new there. Along with writing on the tv show Lost, and creating the graphic novel series Y: The Last Man and also Saga--anything he's involved in, I'm game.

So when Paper Girls, dropped, I rushed Hi De Ho comics for my copy. 

Whoa doesn't begin to describe it. 

In the wee hours of the morning after Halloween, circa mid-80s, we join a gang of 12 year old girls delivering newspapers in their suburb when  

ZAP

an invasion from the future engulfs the town. Chaos reigns. The girls, of course, travel here and there, fighting enemies at every turn and encountering strange gizmos from the future, all while trying to make sense of the warring factions and a God-like old man tasked with keeping the fabric of space time from ripping apart. 

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What to say? One of my favorite novels of all time, and I'm not alone: the book won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for literature, in addition to plenty others. As far as awards go, I generally enjoy Pulitzer winners. Yet the accolades didn't prepare me for Wao. 

The gist: the story follows Dominican boy Oscar de León through a humorous albeit pained childhood and adolescence, in which our morbidly-obese nerd strives for nothing more than to make it with a girl. All while a curse follows his family from the Dominican Republic (which the family fled during the Dominican diaspora, the political set forth in detail) to Paterson, New Jersey. Throw in a slew of references from comic books, sci-fi lit, D&D, comic books, plus footnotes and mucho Spanish slang, and Wao is a tasty brain-tickling stew. 

#1 Recommendation

Perhaps one of the most influential cult movies, at least in the scifi space. EVER.

Saw this at twelve and I'm certain my brain melted and oozed from my ears. In the nine-story animated anthology (inspired by Heavy Metal magazine), an evil green orb narrates the tales, extolling to a frightened girl its history of wrecking havoc throughout the galaxy. I never fathomed so much awesomeness might exist in one serving: Wicked animation. Thundering metal music. Irreverent anti-heroes. Galactic drugs. Sex. Swords. Lasers. A lanky teen sucked through a wormhole lands on a strange planet as a brawny hero (hint, hint: my new novel). A badass female warrior rides a winged dinosaur. Green-eyed zombies.

What sets Heavy Metal apart are not only the amazing characters, but how the psychedelia and sexuality mix with the Game-of-Thrones-level-violence and the cerebral-yet-low-brow humor. The Guardians of the Galaxy films and Thor Ragnarok borrow heavily from this formula, but hamstrung by Disney and PG-13 ratings they only scratch the surface. 

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Always loved short stories, and the late Thom Jones' debut collection is still the best.

With the highs and lows of a bipolar second-grader on a late night candy binge, his stories scream: Boxing. Vietname War. PTSD. Madness. Gran mal seizures, Paul on the Road to Damascus. The I-Ching. 

His style? Anything BUT minimal. In fact, I've never encountered short stories so stuffed to the seams. Yet they all work. 

It's the Voice (Bene Gesserit, of course)

Thom Jones' Voice is so willful and angelic and tragic all at once. 

An absolute must read.  Here's a full review of the Pugilist at Rest that I wrote for VICE. 

Also check out Joyce Carol Oats' tribute following Thom's death in 2016. 

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Really dug The Oracle Year by comic-book writer Charles Soule. 

The gist: Will Dando wakes up from a dream with predictions of the future. He places a few of these predictions online. A few come true and his site goes viral. Worldwide sensation. Lauded by commoners. Denounced as evil by the clergy. Wanted by governments. He sells some of the predictions for hundreds of millions. Investigators on his trail. Escalating tensions throughout. 

Loved the clear writing and casual voice.

Highly recommend.