Kaleidoscope

[ biblioscope ]

Don't look for milestones in the 2009 edition of The Best American Comics (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp., $22, Oct. 8), just enjoy the journey. This year's anthology, edited by The Believer's/Philadelphia's Charles Burns, has its dead ends (Kaz and Tim Hensley are boregasmic), but Michael Kupperman, Adrian Tomine and, yes, Chris Ware continue to burn torches along the medium's smartest, darkest frontiers.

The McSweeney's name has an aura of smug robotics, but that's not fair and that's just the Web site. Its Quarterly Concern lit journal is a reliable source of short stories and format-flipping word nerdiness. Released on Tuesday, The San Francisco Panorama (McSweeney's, 320 pp., $16, Dec. 1) — aka Issue 33 — is a gloriously colorful broadsheet newspaper with contributions by George Saunders, Miranda July, Daniel Clowes, Stephen King and tons more. Nothing smug about newsprint.

Some people's lives are just more interesting than others'. Following The Liar's Club and Cherry, Lit (Harper, 400 pp., $25.99, Nov. 3) is Mary Karr's third memoir and she still has stories to burn. Here, she recounts her alcoholism and eventual redemption in harrowing, poetic detail. It's a fitting third act for Karr's memoirist triptych, but hopefully she's not out of stories.

Now that you've absorbed the mission behind our DIY Gift Guide — that handmade prezzies are more thoughtful/less wallet-assaulting than store-bought ones — Joel Waldfogel is here to harsh your yuletide buzz: The Wharton prof's Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton Press, 186 pp., $9.95, Oct. 25) calls gift-giving a "deadweight loss": Presents generate waste and unhappiness and credit card debt, Waldfogel says, and in the end, we all lose. And while this little 4-by-6 party-pooper's perfectly sized as a stocking-stuffer, gifting a $10 book about thriftiness is a conundrum. To buy or not to buy?