"The influential cartoonist hits his stride as he celebrates the charms and oddities of rural postwar culture. Yoshiharu Tsuge leaves early genre trappings behind, taking a light, humorous approach in these stories based on his own travels. "Red Flowers"ranges from deep character studies to personal reflections to ensemble comedies set in the hotels and bathhouses of rural Japan. There are irascible old men, drunken gangsters, reflective psychiatric-hospital...

In this enthusiastic, heartfelt, and sometimes humorous ode to bookstores and booksellers, 84 well-known writers pay tribute to the bricks-and-mortar stores they love and often call their second home. Writers include: Isabel Allende, Wendell Berry, Rick Bragg, Dave Eggers, Louise Erdrich, Fannie Flagg, Ian Frazier, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., John Grisham, Pete Hamill, Ann Hood, Stephanie Kallos, Laurie R. King, Kate Niles, Ann Packer, Chuck Palahniuk,...

"Best-selling author and licensed mortician Caitlin Doughty answers real questions from kids about death, dead bodies, and decomposition. Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. What would happen to an astronaut's body if it were pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poop when they die? Can Grandma have a Viking funeral? In the tradition of Randall Munroe's What If?, Doughty's new book, Will My Cat...

"My whole life I planned on going to pilot school like the rest of my friends--then I got rejected! Along came a little green guy named Yoda who invited me to Jedi Academy. Now I'm at a school with aliens, robots, and lightsaber-wielding bullies who can lift things with their minds! How am I supposed to compete with that? As if starting middle school wasn't hard enough..." The story of Roan Novachez, Jedi Academy student, is told through comics, journal...

Part memoir, part manifesto, in Eat Like a Fish Bren Smith, a former commercial fisherman turned restorative ocean farmer, shares a bold new vision for the future of food: seaweed. Through tales that span from his childhood in Newfoundland to his early years on the high seas aboard commercial fishing trawlers, from pioneering new forms of ocean farming to surfing the frontiers of the food movement, Smith introduces the world of sea-based agriculture,...

"We live in a shallow "junk" pleasure-seeking culture, searching for connection in the wrong places, keeping our restlessness and anxiety at bay with unfulfilling distractions. The results of our junk pleasure culture are obvious: hundreds of articles have been published about the rise of loneliness and its detrimental effects on our mental, emotional, and physical health. Even those of us who have succeeded in the ways that society encourages--getting...

"Matt Taibbi's first piece on the 2016 presidential election, published in August 2015, opens with these words: "The thing is, when you actually think about it, it's not funny. Given what's at stake, it's more like the opposite, like the first sign of the collapse of the United States as a global superpower. Twenty years from now, when we're all living like prehistory hominids and hunting rats with sticks, we'll probably look back at this moment as...