In his inimitable style, British cartoonist Tom Gauld has opened comics to a crossover audience and challenged perceptions of what the medium can be. Noted as a “book-lover’s cartoonist,” Gauld’s weekly strips in The Guardian, Britain’s most well-regarded newspaper, stitch together the worlds of literary criticism and pop culture to create brilliantly executed, concise comics. Simultaneously silly and serious, Gauld adds an undeniable lightness to traditionally highbrow themes. From sarcas...

What happens to a cat who goes through a wormhole?Tom Gauld returns with Physics for Cats, his second collection of science-based cartoons for the New Scientist. Find out why every scientist worth their sodium chloride has a Tom Gauld cartoon taped to their electron microscope. This new batch of hilarious gags will be as important to every self-respecting scientist as a lab coat and goggles and oversize rubber gloves.Find out what the hadr...

"We read The Three Musketeers to experience a sense of romance and for the sheer excitement of the story," reflected Clifton Fadiman. "In these violent pages all is action, intrigue, suspense, surprise--an almost endless chain of duels, murders, love affairs, unmaskings, ambushes, hairbreadth escapes, wild rides. It is all impossible and it is all magnificent."First published in 1844, Alexandre Dumas's swashbuckling epic chronicles the adventures of D'Artagnan, a gallant young nobl...

The Guardian cartoonist relates the daily deadpan adventures of the last policeman living on the moon "Living on the moon…Whatever were we thinking? ...It seems so silly now.” The lunar colony is slowly winding down, like a small town circumvented by a new super highway. As our hero, the Mooncop, makes his daily rounds, his beat grows ever smaller, the population dwindles. A young girl runs away, a dog breaks off his leash, an automaton wanders off from the Museum of the Moon. Each day tha...

Tom Gauld returns with his wittiest and most trenchant collection of literary cartoons to date. Perfectly composed drawings are punctuated with the artist’s signature brand of humour, hitting high and low. After all, Gauld is just as comfortable taking jabs at Jane Eyre and Game of Thrones. Some particularly favoured targets include the pretentious procrastinating novelist, the commercial mercenary of the dispassionate editor, the willful obscurantism of the vainglorious poet. Quake in the...

A side-splitting skewering of the sober world of STEM No one is safe when humorist and cartoonist Tom Gauld directs his hilarious gaze to your profession. Just as he did with writers, poets, and literary classics for the Guardian books page, Gauld now does with hapless scientists, nanobots, and puzzling theorems for his weekly New Scientist strip, the international magazine that covers all aspects of science and technology. Gauld's Department of Mind-Blowing Theories presents one hundred a...

The Guardian publishes over forty thousand reader comments a day below the line. This is a miscellany of the best and most baffling thoughts from their witty, well-meaning readers. In the book, Guardian readers ponder the big questions ('Am I the only one who thinks that ham and cheese is a ghastly mix?') reflect with nostalgia on better days ('Airline employees were so much more agreeable back when they were all drunk') and share hard-won wisdom ('Dishwashers make lousy ...

A New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Book of the YearIn this fresh new fairy tale, a wooden robot embarks on a quest to find his missing sister-- making for a memorable contemporary bedtime story in acclaimed graphic novelist Tom Gauld's first picture book for children.For years, the king and queen have tried desperately to have a baby. Their wish was granted twice, when an engineer and a witch gave them a little wooden...

For years, the king and queen have longed for a child. Their wish is miraculously twice granted in the form of a little wooden robot and an enchanted princess, both of whom they raise lovingly. There’s just one catch: every night when theprincess falls asleep, she transforms into a log. She can only be woken with the magic words “Awake, little log, awake.”The two siblings are inseparable, until the day when the sleeping princess is mistaken for an ordinary log and carted off...

From the celebrated, award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov: a lavish volume of stories by one of the most influential short fiction writers of all time.Anton Chekhov left an indelible impact on every literary form in which he wrote, but none more so than short fiction. Now, renowned translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky give us their renderings of fifty-two Chekhov stories. These stories, which span the...

**"A world-class intellectual. . . . [Colin Woodard’s] research can help Americans rediscover their common identity in spite of all the attempts to divide them." —Garry Kasparov"A powerful paradigm for understanding the defining hot button issues of contemporary America and the action we can take to bridge our cultural divisions and save the republic." —The Next Big Idea Club“A lucid exercise in political geography with tremendous—and disturbing—explanatory power.” —Kir...

Longlisted for The Story PrizeFrom the acclaimed author of Beasts of a Little Land and City of Night Birds, an exquisite, globetrotting story collection about humans in precarious balance with the natural worldSpanning multiple locales and epochs, and rendered in fine detail and vivid color, this transportive collection shows what it means to live as human inhabitants on our one miraculous planet. Lyrical, at times hilario...