SHUBEIK LUBEIK, by Deena Mohamed. (Pantheon, $35.) This imaginative debut graphic novel is set in a magical, stratified Egypt where wishes are bottled and commodified for the wealthy and powerful. With bold, gritty drawings and sharp narration, Mohamed presents the stories of the last “three first-class” wishes bought at a small kiosk in Cairo.
CHILDREN OF PALOMAR AND OTHER TALES: A Love and Rockets Book, by Gilbert Hernandez and Mario Hernandez. (Fantagraphics, paperback, $24.95.) This omnibus includes previously uncollected comic strips from the Hernandez brothers’ “Love and Rockets” series, which focuses on a U.S. citizen on the run in Latin America, a childless woman haunted by apparitions and more.
WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME? by Paul B. Rainey. (Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95.) Claire and Mark are living in the quiet resignation of their crumbling marriage — rendered in Rainey’s clean, sparse lines — when the announcement of an imminent nuclear war spurs them to urgently reimagine their lives.
WHERE I’M COMING FROM, by Barbara Brandon-Croft. (Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95.) A compilation of the comic strip that ran from 1989 to 2005 focusing on nine Black women talking about their joys, jokes and struggles, with additional reflections by the author and memorabilia from the strip’s heyday.
THE RED-HEADED PILGRIM, by Kevin Maloney. (Two-Dollar Radio, paperback, $18.95.) In the throes of an existential crisis, a middle-aged web developer renounces his humdrum life in Portland, Ore., and embarks on a cross-country trip, finding love, meaning and a new life on the coast of Maine.
BETWEEN STARSHINE AND CLAY: Conversations From the African Diaspora, by Sarah Ladipo Manyika. (Footnote Press, $26.95.) This collection presents the author’s conversations with notable Black figures, including Wole Soyinka, Michelle Obama and Henry Louis Gates Jr., and her reflections on being racialized in Africa, Europe and America.
BLACK EMPIRE, by George S. Schuyler. (Penguin Classics, paperback, $18.) Dr. Henry Belsidus gathers a “Black Internationale” of Black intellectuals with the task of creating new technologies to take Africa back from white imperial powers in this classic work of satirical, speculative fiction, first serialized in the 1930s.
TOUGH GUY: The Life of Norman Mailer, by Richard Bradford. (Bloomsbury, $28.) This biography of the two-time Pulitzer winner explores the “ghoulish” nature of Mailer’s art and life, from his violent streak (he stabbed his wife and broke an actor’s jaw) to his failed correspondences with Ernest Hemingway.
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