BTTM FDRS (Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore)

Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore are both major comics talents -- Daniels is already celebrated for Upgrade Soul and Passmore for Your Black Friend and DAYGLOAYHOLE -- so the two of them together is a real dream-team scenario. BTTM FDRS is a work of afrofuturist gentrification horror-comedy set in a fictional version of Chicago's south side. Amazing art, visceral horror, and cutting satiric laughs -- this graphic novel has it all!

Hawking (Jim Ottaviani &  Leland Myrick)

The writer and illustrator behind Feynman are back with another science-related graphic biography, this time about superstar physicist (and disability rights advocate) Stephen Hawking. From his childhood in Britain and his diagnosis with ALS at age 21 to his eventual groundbreaking work in cosmology and rise to pop culture icon, Ottaniani and Myrick craft an intricate portrait of Hawking as a great thinker, public figure, and flesh-and-blood human. 

The Dry Heart (Natalia Ginzburg)

Natalia Ginzburg (1916-91) is today regarded as one of the leading lights of modern Italian literature, though during her lifetime she was sometimes prevented from publishing under her own name due to anti-Semitic laws. While publishing twelve books and two plays, she raised five children and lost her husband to fascist torture. In The Dry Heart, freshly republished by New Directions, an unhappy wife murders her flighty spouse. It’s a slim, deceptively simple psychological thriller that entrances with its sternly chilling clarity.

Costalegre (Courtney Maum)

Inspired by the real-life relationship between legendary heiress, art collector, and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter Pegeen, Courtney Maum’s Costalegre is set in a mysterious resort in the Mexican jungle where the fictional Leonora Calaway has spirited an elite group of expat Surrealist artists in order to shield them from the Nazi crusade against “cultural degenerates.” Told from the point of view of Calaway’s neglected fifteen-year-old daughter, Costalegre is a sinuous, strange, heartbreaking coming-of-age story that unfolds in a lush hothouse of art and intrigue.

Malina (Ingeborg Bachmann)

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is still little-known in English, though she is widely regarded as one of the greatest German-language writers of the 20th century, championed by the likes of Paul Celan, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, and Elfriede Jelinek. This extensively-revised new translation of her 1971 novel Malina depicts an unnamed narrator in Vienna, torn between two men to the point of obsession. With incantatory prose reminiscent of Virginia Woolf or Clarice Lispector, Bachmann’s voice renders a singular portrait of female consciousness.