I’m psyched. I’m totally psyched. I’m not a loser. Who the hell am I kidding? Life sucks for Dave Miller—he’s broke, girlfriendless, and stuck in a dead-end job. Life sucks harder because his job is night manager at the Last Stop, LA’s finest vampire-owned 24-hour convenience store. Dave’s facing an eternity of turning the hot dogs and installing pork cracklins displays for Radu, his crappy boss and Vampire Master. It’s bad enough that Dave is clinging to his days as a vegetarian by refusing to feed off of humans, leaving him weak as a kitten and so not capable of superhuman feats of strength. But when he finds himself competing with psychotic surfer-vamp Wes for the affections of Rosa, a beautiful mortal with a romantic fixation on the dark side, life is about as sucky as it can possibly get.

Life Sucks

Teen & Young Adult

Abel, Jessica

Soria, Gabriel

Literature & Fiction

Square Fish

From the Harvey and Lulu award–winning creator of Artbabe comes this riveting story of a young woman’s misadventures in Mexico City. Carla, an American estranged from her Mexican father, heads to Mexico City to “find herself.” She crashes with a former fling, Harry, who has been drinking his way through the capital in the great tradition of his heroes, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Harry is good—humored about Carla’s reappearance on his doorstep—until he realizes that Carla, who spends her days soaking in the city, exploring Frida Kahlo’s house, and learning Spanish, has no intention of leaving. When Harry and Carla’s relationship of mutual tolerance reaches its inevitable end, she rejects his world of Anglo expats for her own set of friends: pretty-boy Oscar, who sells pot and dreams of being a DJ, and charismatic Memo, a left-wing, pseudo–intellectual ladies’ man. Determined to experience the real Mexico, Carla turns a blind eye to her new friends’ inconsistencies. But then she catches the eye of a drug don, el Gordo, and from that moment on her life gets a lot more complicated, and she is forced to confront the irreparable consequences of her willful innocence. Jessica Abel’s evocative black–and–white drawings and creative mix of English and Spanish bring Mexico City’s past and present to life, unfurling Carla’s dark history against the legacies of Burroughs and Kahlo. A story about the youthful desire to live an authentic life and the consequences of trusting easy answers, La Perdida–at once grounded in the particulars of life in Mexico and resonantly universal–is a story about finding oneself by getting lost.

La Perdida

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

Pantheon

A Library Journal Best Book of 2015 Go behind the scenes of seven of today’s most popular narrative radio shows and podcasts, including This American Life and RadioLab, in graphic narrative. Every week, millions of devoted fans tune in to or download This American Life, The Moth, Radiolab, Planet Money, Snap Judgment, Serial, Invisibilia and other narrative radio shows. Using personal stories to breathe life into complex ideas and issues, these beloved programs help us to understand ourselves and our world a little bit better. Each has a distinct style, but every one delivers stories that are brilliantly told and produced. Out on the Wire offers an unexpected window into this new kind of storytelling—one that literally illustrates the making of a purely auditory medium. With the help of This American Life's Ira Glass, Jessica Abel, a cartoonist and devotee of narrative radio, uncovers just how radio producers construct narrative, spilling some juicy insider details. Jad Abumrad of RadioLab talks about chasing moments of awe with scientists, while Planet Money’s Robert Smith lets us in on his slightly goofy strategy for putting interviewees at ease. And Abel reveals how mad—really mad—Ira Glass becomes when he receives edits from his colleagues. Informative and engaging, Out on the Wire demonstrates that narrative radio and podcasts are creating some of the most exciting and innovative storytelling available today.

Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio

Crown

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Presents instructions for mastering the creation of comic books and graphic novels, providing guidelines for the intermediate cartoonist on technique, story generation, narrative tools, and business and industry insights.

Mastering Comics (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

Matt Madden

Turtleback

Radio: An Illustrated Guide is a comic book that explains how to make a radio program. Specifically, it explains how to make the public radio program This American Life. In comic book form, the producers of This American Life explain how to find a story, how to do an interview, how to edit sound, how to write for radio and how to mix a radio story. It also explains how the narrative structure of a radio story works, and how it's different from other kinds of stories. This American Life is the most popular documentary program on American radio, with a weekly audience of over a million listeners, on more than 380 public radio stations nationwide. It's produced at WBEZ Chicago and distributed by Public Radio International.

Radio: An Illustrated Guide

Humor & Entertainment

Glass, Ira

Radio

W B E Z Alliance Inc

Go from overwhelmed, anxious, and stuck, to consistent, clear, and in control of your creative life.If you feel like you’re floundering in the deep end (Not waving, drowning!), and anxiety over the complexity and enormousness of your creative projects overwhelms you, stop scrambling to fit everything in and feeling stretched thin.DIVE DEEP AND SWIM
<ul>
<li>Sustain the energy you feel when thinking of how awesome your projects could be. </li>
<li>Value your own creative work as highly as work you do for other people. </li>
<li>Build a reusable structure and process that will consistently get you to the finish line. </li>
<li>Blast through your stuck-ness. </li>
<li>Focus. Finish. Move on to the next project. </li>
</ul>You’re a creative person. Even if you have a hard time calling yourself a “writer” or an “artist” in public, making your creative work is core to who you are and how you see the world. You may be harboring a big, ambitious idea for a project. Possibly a lot of them.And it’s killing you.You lie awake thinking about it…and hating yourself for not doing more to make it real. And then in the morning you’re exhausted, and you can’t believe you “wasted” more time on this stupid idea. Who ever told you you were creative anyway? You try to shove your idea away, to forget it. But your creative work is what keeps you sane. You can’t not do this. So you live with guilt and anxiety all the time.You’ve tried to carve out the time and attention you need to devote to your creative work. You’ve made ambitious goals, you’ve written lists, you’ve scheduled calendars…you’ve installed shackles on your desk chair. But chaining yourself to your work only seems to make you more distractible and more miserable. (And those unsightly leg sores!)Maybe you've even tried to borrow time-management tips from the business world. Get things done! Build seven habits! Eat that frog! But following business-minded productivity systems just doesn’t work for you. The issue isn’t simply getting “things” done, it’s allowing yourself to devote precious time and attention to the vital, self-generated creative work that builds toward your vision for the future.The problem is, the life you’re living is already full. You’ve made a lot of promises, to yourself, your family, your friends, and your community, that you’ll be there for them. You probably have a job; you may have kids. You may well have many competing ideas for your creative work. Where, exactly, can you find that mythical Creative Focus Unicorn?In Growing Gills, you’ll discover that the power is already within you to make your work.The biggest obstacles to your getting your important creative work done lie in the unknowns you’re facing.Growing Gills takes you step by step through the process of pinning down exactly what’s stopping you from finishing your beautiful, inventive, and potentially game-changing projects.Using the power of conscious decision, you’ll build your own unique system for fitting creative work into your existing life, taking into consideration how you work best.Like a custom-designed, powered exoskeleton, your personal system will bolster and support your creative practice day in and day out, so that you can grow up and grow old while continuing to make your creative work…without chucking out all the other connections to your family and the world that make your life rich and worth living.GROWING GILLS: Breathe in the deep end.With your purchase of the ebook or print edition, you’ll also get:<ul>
<li>The Growing Gills Workbook for free</li>
<li>A checklist to identify what specifically stands in your way</li>
<li>An invitation to a 5-day free minicourse where you'll build a plan to overcome those obstacles.</li>
</ul>

Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You’re Drowning in Your Daily Life

Self-Help

Creativity

Independently published

After meeting the indigenous Martian, Qiqi, Trish Nupindju’s life changes forever. Qiqi has taught her to skate on terrain, helping her immensely on her hoverderby (a futuristic roller derby) team. She has also introduced a new way to harvest the moisture essential for life on Mars. But the suits at AREX are watching and they are not pleased. Trish’s innovations could cause irreparable damage for everyone in her life-including her team and family!

Trish Trash #3 (3) (Trish Trash graphic novels)

Maverick

200 years from now, Trish “Trash” Nupindju lives on the newly inhabited Mars, whose settlers live under harsh and ruthless conditions. Trish dreams of only one thing: becoming a hoverderby star. It seems like making the professional derby team is the only way to escape a future of poverty on her parents’ farm. But, what happens when a half-dead Martian shows up on her doorstep and changes everything?

Trish Trash: Rollergirl of Mars Omnibus (Trish Trash graphic novels)

Super Genius

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Abel, Jessica. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Abel, Jessica

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Abel, Jessica. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Life Sucks

La Perdida

La Perdida

Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio

Mastering Comics (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

Radio: An Illustrated Guide

Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You’re Drowning in Your Daily Life

Trish Trash #3 (3) (Trish Trash graphic novels)

Trish Trash: Rollergirl of Mars Omnibus (Trish Trash graphic novels)

Trish Trash: Rollergirl of Mars Omnibus (Trish Trash graphic novels)