Karen Haber

The Art of Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Steampunk, Hi­roshi Unno (PIE 9784756249753, $49.95, 360pp, tp) June 2018.

The Art of Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Steampunk is a delightful book crammed full of beautiful im­ages and surprising artistic connections that will take you on an art history journey through the precursors of fantasy, sci-fi, and steampunk art. It’s a pleasure to flip through, dip into, and use for inspiration. At the very ...Read More

Hâsib & the Queen of Ser­pents: A Tale of a Thousand and One Nights, David B. (NBM Graphic Novels 978-1-68112-162-8, $24.99, 112pp, hc) June 2018. Cover by Da­vid B.

The brilliant French cartoonist and comic artist David B. (David Beauchard) has switched gears, moving away from black-and-white linework and personal stories to create a full-color fantasy tour-de-force in Hâsib & the Queen of Serpents.

Co-founder of L’association, the ...Read More

Aliens: Past, Present, Future, Ron Miller, ed. (Watkins Pub­lishing 978-1-78028-968-7, $32.50, 224pp, hc) October 2017.

The somber, dignified cover and design of Aliens: Past, Present, Future gives no indication of how much fun this book really is. Perhaps, given the colorful, flamboyant depiction of extraterrestrial life in popular culture over, say, the past 70 years, the design decision naturally embraced the oppo­site. That is not to say that his ...Read More

Line of Beauty: The Art of Wendy Pini, Wendy Pini (Flesk 978-1-933865-88-1, $50.00, 304pp, hc) June 2017. Cover by Wendy Pini.

Wendy Pini is a remarkable outlier who, from a very early age, seemed destined to pursue a career in art and illustration. Despite a lack of support from her adoptive parents, and growing up without art instruction or role models in the pre-digital age, she taught herself how ...Read More

Weinberg Tales: Collecting Fantasy Art, Doug Ellis, Bob Garcia & Phyllis Weinberg, eds. (Amer­ican Fantasy Press 978-0-99078466-1, $25.00, 269pp, pb) April 2017. Cover by Douglas Klauba.

Weinberg Tales is an affectionate memorial to the late, great, fantastic art collector and authority Bob Weinberg. Designed to echo the look of an old pulp magazine, printed on pulp paper, it provides surprisingly good image reproduction. The charm­ing, old-style cover by Douglas ...Read More

Celtic Faeries, English De­luxe Edition, Jean-Baptiste Monge (Goblins Way Pub­lishing 978-2-9815289-1-9, C$30.00, 144pp, hc) July 2016. Cover by Jean-Baptiste Monge.

French artist Jean-Baptiste Monge is an award-winning practitioner of time-honored handskills whose crowdfunded book Celtic Faeries: The Secret Kingdom is filled with color and black-and-white illustrations of dwellers in faerie.

From his studio in Canada, home of his Gob­lins’ Way Press, Monge depicts characters who are by turns whimsical, ...Read More

Infected by Art, Volume 5, Todd Spoor & Bill Cox, eds. (Art Order 978-0-69291-194-5, $49.99, 326pp, hc) November 2017. Cover by Rob Rey & Jeremy Deveraturda.

This year’s Infected by Art annual, the fifth juried volume of Imaginative Realist artwork, is considerably improved over last year’s book, IBA 4. Attention has been paid to margin treatment, proofreading, and general appearance, with a defi­nite payoff. This year’s volume has ...Read More

Timeless: Diego and the Rangers of the Vast­lantic, Armand Baltazar (Katharine Tegen 978-0-06-240236-3, $19.99, 607pp, hc) October 2017. Cover by Armand Baltazar. Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction, Grady Hendrix (Quirk 978-1-5947-4981-7, $16.95, 256pp, tp) September 2017. Flora & Fauna, J.A.W. Cooper (Flesk 978-1-933865-96-6, $25.00, 80pp, tp) October 2017. Cover by J.A.W. Cooper. Familiars, J.A.W. Cooper (Flesk 978-1-933865-95-9, $25.00, 80pp, ...Read More

Spectrum 24: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, John Fleskes, ed. (Flesk 978-1-933865-99-7, $45.00, 304pp, hc) November 2017. Cover by Iain McCaig & Emily Chen.

Spectrum 24 is remarkable in its consistent excel­lence in production values, design, and selection of art, all the more impressive when you consider that the roster of judges changes with each annual, as does the art submitted for consideration.

John Fleskes’s masterful editing and ...Read More

The Art of the Pulps, Douglas Ellis, Ed Hulse & Robert Weinberg, eds. (IDW 978-1-68405-091-8, $49.99, 240pp, hc) October 2017.

Pulp magazine lovers should be delighted with The Art of the Pulps: An Illustrated History, the first definitive visual history of the genre magazines that provided popular “literary” entertainment before the birth of paperback books, circa 1900-1949. The Art of the Pulps is a treasury of pulp ...Read More

Above the Timberline, Gregory Manchess (Saga 978-1-4814-5923-5, $29.99, unpaginated, hc) October 2017. Cover by Gregory Manchess.

Master artist Gregory Manchess’s fiction debut is a fascinating combination of art and storybook. Above the Timber­line is an illustrated tale of adventure that verges on a painterly graphic novel or movie treatment. More than 120 paintings by the much-acclaimed and -awarded artist – GoH at World Fantasy Con 2017 – do the ...Read More

Norse Myths: Tales of Odin, Thor, and Loki, Kevin Crossley-Holland, illustrated by Jeffrey Alan Love (Candlewick Studio 978-0-7636-9500-2, 226pp, hc, $27.99) September 2017. Cover by Jeffrey Alan Love.

When the combination of writer and illustrator is just right, the result is a memorable book both to read and to look at. Norse Myths: Tales of Odin, Thor, and Loki by Kevin Crossley-Holland & Jeffrey Alan Love is a happy ...Read More