Wizards, Warmongers and the West Coast

13. A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932. John Richardson. The word magisterial gets kicked around a lot with reference to biographies of larger-than-life figures, but this time it goes double: Picasso has no rivals as the emblematic artist of the last century, and Richardson, now up to his third volume chronicling the painter's achievement, is well on his way toward giving his subject the biography he deserves.

14. Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Ishmael Beah. There are reportedly some 300,000 children currently forced into military service around the world. Beah's account of how he found himself with a gun in his hands and at the mercy of an army of killers in Sierra Leone reads like Dickens on acid.

15. The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. Edited by Otto Penzler. Pulp fiction from the '30s was the breeding ground of everything hardboiled in American culture and the launching pad for at least three of the best novelists of the 20th century: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. This 1,150-page omnibus, complete with a lot of the original illustrations from Black Mask and the other magazines of the period, is a trove of lurid writing, some of it hilariously so, and plenty of gems. Youse had better love it.

© 2007