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September 9, 2009 A wondrous new graphic novel tells the tale of South Africa's first post-apartheid president. Inspirational and informative, Nelson Mandela: The Authorized Comic Book is as much for adults as it is for children.

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August 14, 2009 John Updike tended to let his characters age with him, and his final group of short stories, My Father's Tears, is no exception. He wrote of characters who are "taking up space at an age when most of our fathers were considerately dead."

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August 6, 2009 One of the most popular and venerable Webcomics, Goats, is being collected into books. Jonathan Rosenberg's crazy plot twists and one-liners make you feel like you're 15 again, discovering the joys of Matt Groening while on a Froot Loops sugar rush.

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July 30, 2009 Ray Bradbury's novel about a futuristic America where books are not merely banned but burned remains one of science fiction's most popular works. And now it's one of the best graphic novels of 2009.

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May 22, 2009 One of the last surviving members of the Beat generation, Jack Gilbert still writes with a freshness that astonishes. He's fascinated by mythology, but what moves him most in The Dance Most of All are the mythic moments we experience day to day.

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May 22, 2009 Joanna Smith Rakoff's sweeping novel about twenty-something Oberlin grads living in New York, A Fortunate Age, may be the long-awaited book that perfectly captures the '90s — that time of excess that set the stage for the current economic collapse.

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April 27, 2009 The criminals in Denis Johnson's hard-edged Nobody Move aren't cool. But with a Mamet-like ear, Johnson — who won the National Book Award for Tree Of Smoke — wrings poetry from his hapless heroes' deadly exploits.

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March 24, 2009 Two years before his Watchmen series, Alan Moore mixed environmentalism with pop psychology to create the eco-avenger Swamp Thing. This hardback reissue revives Moore's surreal discourse on the blurry line between man and monster.

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March 9, 2009 Lauren Groff's lyricism and brash, adolescent bravura help her stories wear their graver themes as lightly as summer dresses. Smart-alecky chick-lit tales even a man can love.

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February 5, 2009 In this final volume of Neil Gaiman's collected Sandman books, Morpheus faces the Furies and pays the price for killing his own son. This may be the most emotionally complex finale in comics history.

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January 23, 2009 Co-written by Joss Whedon, the Buffy comic series picks up where the TV show ended, with Buffy leading a horde of supergirl slayers. Wolves at the Gate flirts with bisexuality while offering the series' signature blend of earnestness and camp.

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January 8, 2009 Novelist Jonathan Lethem's retelling adds a post-modern twist to the mysterious superhero series Omega the Unknown, which introduced 1970s comic readers to a world of Borgesian paranoia.

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December 16, 2008 Don't let the capes and external underwear fool you; no longer escapist entertainment, superhero comics capture the timbre of the times as no pollster can. And this year, the mood is dark.

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December 4, 2008 No longer only for kids, geeks, nerds and aging baby boomers longing for a second childhood, graphic novels are showing themselves a medium of startling breadth and grace. Don't call them a genre anymore; cutting-edge graphic novels exist for everyone.

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November 6, 2008 First published in 1978, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! revisits and restores the lost and mildly X-rated nascent years of a great American artist.

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