Lydia
Brookline Bookseller Lydia recommends:
If you'd relish the chance to rummage through classified museum archives or wander the seaside moors where children once vanished into Celtic burial mounds, these stories are for you. A dose of prickling wonder/terror for the modern skeptic.
~ recommended September, 2014
Lockwood (aka the Poet Laureate of Twitter) has no shortage of critics who sneer at her work's accessibility and nonsensical raunchiness. The poet skewers and satirizes elitists without letting them in on the joke - her verse has more important things to do. You may recognize her most famous piece: the gut-wrenching "Rape Joke", a viral hit and minor masterpiece first published online by The Awl.
~ recommended September, 2014
Vaughn-James is an unsung god of the graphic medium. He combines Lovecraft's marrow-gnawing dread with Jodorowsky's vivid grotesquerie and adds a boundless desolation that's all his own. This world is half
wasteland, half wonderland.~ recommended May, 2014
The title does an awful job conveying Kelly Link's bizarre brilliance in crafting fairy tales. Modern when she wants to be, sly, funny, and VERY dark. Read if you enjoy: B-horror flicks, Doctor Who, the Brothers Grimm, Charles de Lint, people made of cats.
~ recommended March, 2014
If Richard Yates and Alice Munro fused into one body and took up the position of an oracular coroner from the Twilight Zone, the result might look something like Jamie Quatro. Rarely is a voice so viscerally honest with no hint of brutality. She's one to watch out for.
~ recommended January, 2014
Shiro was a locavore before it was cool, gathering seaweed and salmon roe from Puget Sound in his rubber wellies. This book is a testament to what small presses and printed, non-electronic books can give us. Maps, postcards, old photos:. it's too gorgeous not to fall into.
~ recommended October, 2013