The Red Shoes adopted by Sun Young Yoo

AMMO Books' adaptation of The Red Shoes, the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale, beautifully comes to life as re-envisioned by artist Sun Young Yoo.

In the original fairy tale, The Red Shoes were symbolic of taboo desire that could only be erased through suffering and repentance. In contrast, this contemporary version of The Red Shoes offers a positive message to young girls that is much more in tune with our time. This adaptation focuses on the transcendent love between a mother and daughter and the key notion that perseverance, ingenuity and hard work can allow one to overcome some of the greatest obstacles in life in order to pursue one's artistic and creative dreams.

Sun Young Yoo's exquisite, labor intensive pen and ink drawings are both technically masterful and artistically stunning. Her lyrical illustrations evoke a magical world, and her unique hand-drawn style resonates today amidst a sea of computer generated art and design. The revisited story and beautiful illustrations cross genres as both a classic children's tale, and as a lovely fashion oriented art book. Young children and grown up fashionistas alike will delight in its beauty and inventiveness.

American Rust by Phillip Myer

Buell, Pennsylvania lies in ruins, a dying--if not already dead--steel town, where even the lush surrounding country seethes with concealed industrial toxins. When Isaac English and Billy Poe--a pair of high-school friends straight out of Steinbeck--embark on a starry-eyed cross-country escape to California, a violent encounter with a trio of transients leaves one dead, prying the lid off a rusted can of failed hope and small-town secrets. American Rust is Philipp Meyer's first novel, and his taut, direct prose strikes the perfect tone for this kaleidoscope of fractured dreams, elevating a book that otherwise might be relentlessly dour to the level of honest and unflinching storytelling.





Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

First translated into English more than a quarter-century ago, Fuentes's acclaimed novel about modern Mexico has since gone through nearly 30 printings. Despite its popularity, the original English version often was unclear, obscuring Fuentes's language and intent. MacAdam's meticulous new rendering gives the English-reading public a fresh slant on the fictional Cruz, a newspaper owner and land baron. The novel opens with Cruz on his deathbed, and plunges us into his thoughts as he segues from the past to his increasingly disoriented present. Drawn as a tragic figure, Cruz fights bravely during the Mexican Revolution but in the process loses his idealism--and the only woman who ever loved him. He marries the daughter of a hacienda owner and, in the opportunistic, postwar climate, he uses her family connections and money to amass an ever-larger fortune. Cocky, audacious, corrupt, Cruz, on another level, represents the paradoxes of recent Mexican history.

Push by Sapphire

Claireece Precious Jones endures unimaginable hardships in her young life. Abused by her mother, raped by her father, she grows up poor, angry, illiterate, fat, unloved and generally unnoticed. So what better way to learn about her than through her own, halting dialect. That is the device deployed in the first novel by poet and singer Sapphire. "Sometimes I wish I was not alive," Precious says. "But I don't know how to die. Ain' no plug to pull out. 'N no matter how bad I feel my heart don't stop beating and my eyes open in the morning." An intense story of adversity and the mechanisms to cope with it. Precious is now a major motion picture based on the novel Push by Sapphire.






Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout

Thirteen linked tales from Strout (Abide with Me, etc.) present a heart-wrenching, penetrating portrait of ordinary coastal Mainers living lives of quiet grief intermingled with flashes of human connection. The opening Pharmacy focuses on terse, dry junior high-school teacher Olive Kitteridge and her gregarious pharmacist husband, Henry, both of whom have survived the loss of a psychologically damaged parent, and both of whom suffer painful attractions to co-workers. Their son, Christopher, takes center stage in A Little Burst, which describes his wedding in humorous, somewhat disturbing detail, and in Security, where Olive, in her 70s, visits Christopher and his family in New York. Strout's fiction showcases her ability to reveal through familiar details—the mother-of-the-groom's wedding dress, a grandmother's disapproving observations of how her grandchildren are raised—the seeds of tragedy. Themes of suicide, depression, bad communication, aging and love, run through these stories, none more vivid or touching than Incoming Tide, where Olive chats with former student Kevin Coulson as they watch waitress Patty Howe by the seashore, all three struggling with their own misgivings about life. Like this story, the collection is easy to read and impossible to forget. Its literary craft and emotional power will surprise readers unfamiliar with Strout.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Garcia Marquez has rightfully earned a reputation as a master of magic realism. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is also a structural masterpiece. Anyone interested in how a novel's plot can be put together in a non-linear fashion should study carefully Marquez's carefully woven plot. How he manages to sustain dramatic tension after having revealed many of the characters' fates is a marvel of inventiveness
A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister.
Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society--not just a pair of murderers—is put on trial.