Chelsea Cain’s Holiday Gift Suggestion

You may recall Chelsea Cain’s Author2Author feature with Susan Kandel earlier this year. You should definitely track down her Nancy Drew parody, Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, which is a full 180 degrees from her holiday gift recommendation…

Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill: A National Book Award finalist (I know! A risky pick on my part!), Veronica is a twisted, beautiful, grotesque, graceful, lyrical little masterpiece in which a beaten-down former model ruminates about her life. Hint: It’s not happy. But it’s sooooo good. I am confident that I will write the rest of my life, and not come up with five sentences as good as any in this book.

4 December 2005 | gift ideas |

Some of MY Holiday Gift Suggestions

• If you’ve already bought The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane! and are looking for something else to give your film buffs, try Alain Silver’s The Samurai Film. It’s so good, I wish I’d written it, not least of all so I could have seen all those amazing films for research.

• I love Nicholson Baker’s The World on Sunday (which, I should disclose, is published by the same folks who do Stewardess!) because I’m a sucker for old newspapers, and these giant-sized illustrations, mostly from the New York World, are absolutely gorgeous, like this magazine section cover from 1907 (left).

• By now, with The Complete Peanuts four volumes in, you don’t need me to tell you to go out and get the 1957 and 1958 strips, but did you know that Fantagraphics is also republishing the collected Dennis the Menace strips of Hank Ketcham? 1951 and 1952 are available now, and if you’ve been bored by the daily strip for years, let me tell you: In the ’50s, this kid really was a menace. Ketcham’s sense of humor—and the stunts Dennis pulls—are a lot more wicked, the parents actually have flashes of personality, including dark sides, and when he was at his peak, Ketcham was a master draughtsman.

• Before The Time Traveler’s Wife made her a famous novelist, Audrey Niffenegger was primarily a visual artist—and the “illustrated novel” The Three Incestuous Sisters shows off both sides of her talent to awesome effect. You don’t have to be an Edward Gorey fan to fall in love with her pictures, but it’ll definitely up the odds…

More recommendations soon…and keep an eye out this weekend for some gift ideas from other writers!

1 December 2005 | gift ideas |