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Whether they're finished pieces or simply sketches toward a greater work, the drawings included in Master Drawings Close-Up by Julian Brooks, offer the reader a glimpse of the creative process from some of history's greatest artists. The drawings included cover a wide range of techniques: from pen and ink, to watercolor, gouache, and chalk. Expect the usual names here, but some of the best work, and some of the most intriguing "close-ups," comes from the lesser-lauded: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Jean-Antoine Watteau's red chalk sketches are remarkable in their subtlety, and Petro da Cortona's modello is exceptional in its reflection of the intended finished painting. Academic in its approach but perfect for any casual art fan.

No doubt about it, Michiko Kakutani’s scalding review of Jonathan Littell’s “willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent” The Kindly Ones may be true. It is violent and graphic. It is probably one of the more intensely prurient and horrific books I’ve read. I would not contest her categorization, but its cumulative effect on the reader: one of the more dazzling and frightening glimpses of World War II and the Holocaust I have ever encountered. We advance with Max Aue, an SS officer, across Eastern Europe and Russia to the devastating siege of Stalingrad where the abandonment and destruction of the German army is described as if in a fever dream. Then we follow long, haphazard retreat of the Third Reich all the way back to Berlin. I would not recommend this book to just anyone (beach readers, please, don’t bother). Jonathan Littell set out to explore evil and warfare in the most intimate way possible—to become the figure of evil. This is a difficult book but one that, though repellent, challenges the term, Literature.

Combining conspiracy, aliens, magic, time travel, psychedelic wanderings and a character who may be the second Buddha, The Invisibles is Morrison’s great brain child. The Invisibles are a group founded to fight the Archons of Outer Church, who have enslaved most of the human race, using all (and I mean all) forms of mad science at their disposal. This is Morrison at his best. His characters are counter-cultural misfits, martial artists, telepaths, transvestites and magicians. I couldn’t stop myself from reading these—late nights and early mornings until the final volume. These books will challenge you, as most of Morrison’s nonlinear, metafictional, writing does, but you’ll enjoy the trip the whole way.

Meet Michael Jones: ex-British Secret Service and experimental “Desolation” test subject now confined to Los Angeles along with the “community” of other secret service rejects. Jones is hired to find and retrieve Hitler’s stolen pornography, but steps into a whole lot more than he bargained for. Warren Ellis exploits every seedy, dirty secret the underbelly of Los Angeles offers up. This is a compelling read, filled with strange characters, government conspiracies and, of course, intense violence. In combination with J. H. Williams III stellar artwork—where every paneled page becomes a work of art, every border and outline a part of the dynamics of the story—it is hard not feel this book come alive.

In Justice (Volumes 1-3), the Justice League of America faces a consolidated enemy. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are taken down; the rest of the JLA are neutralized one by one, but the world is freed of its unelected superhero guardians only to fall prey to a union of villains. So begins Alex Ross and Jim Krueger’s fantastic three-volume graphic novel. Even for long time fans, and new ones too, nothing compares to the fantastic assemblage of art, story and intrigue offered here. I especially enjoyed the intricate ways each of the heroes is taken down by a concert of villains. As a bonus, each volume comes with an appendix of all the characters.

At once standard Science Fiction fare and a metafictional retelling of the Grail quest, Nova is an excellent introduction to a neglected author. There is a new element in the universe, “illyrion” and it’s invaluable. Captain Lorq Von Ray discovers its source and heads an expedition to the nearest star, battling the nefarious Ruby Red of Red Shift, Ltd. for a lucrative position near the soon-to-go-nova star. Delany’s characters come from all over the galaxy and their alienness never diminishes his knack for creating endearing characters with lush, sometimes melancholy, past lives. As with many of Delany’s works, it’s more than just a story; expect art and reality to intersect.

They adorn books, CD covers, business advertisements, theater posters, magazines—you name it and most likely there's an illustration on it. Every year the Society of Illustrators puts together a gorgeous collection of the best in the business, offering rewards and Hall of Fames all around. From editorial work to commissioned pieces and even to sequential work, expect to see a number of familiar drawings, paintings, etchings, and digital pieces (a whole lot of New Yorker covers, and of course the award winning cover to Chinua Achibe's Things Fall Apart). Besides the multitude of art to relish, most of the pieces are accompanied by the artist's inspiration, reasoning, or a funny anecdote about the piece.

Cryptic appearance notwithstanding, Robert Walser’s Microscripts is actually in an old form of German, not secret code. Facsimiles of torn papers, receipts and business cards covered with Walser’s minuscule text are just half of what makes this book amazing. One can spend just as much time with the beautifully printed pictures as the accompanying text. Walser’s prose pieces deal with everyday life, from children playing (and a dog watching, and all other sorts of “in-fact-having-occurred-nesses” of the day) to traveling to a small town, to beggars, to the anxieties of the self-referential (the telling of the story itself disrupting and confusing our narrator). This volume also includes the German text and a helpful supply of notes. Microscripts is just a small sampling of the collected six volumes of one of Modernism’s most esteemed writers.

The Book of the New Sun is one of the more literary science fiction series available. Complex and compelling, Gene Wolfe, creates a world that may or not be ours eons in the future, when the sun is in its final stages of decay. Our narrator is Severian, a torturer by trade. He is expelled from his guild for showing compassion and must go on a journey, performing his craft along the way. You’ll do well to keep the OED by your side for this one, as Wolfe treasures archaic words. With its unreliable narrator and story of deftly-orchestrated complexity, the series seems more like Joyce or Melville than a typical science fiction writer. This is a book for an educated reader (as Wolfe has said himself) and one that repays close reading.

An art book, a series of interviews, a collection of music—all of it centered on a collective representation of how our world might end. Alternately apocalyptic and eschatological, this book puts forward an impressive collection by a number of artists, scholars and writers (even George W. Bush). Morbid at times, funny at others, twisted and eclectic, ranging from environmentalist to fundamentalist, surrealist paintings to nightmare landscapes, drone and field recordings to the Sonic Youth, Signs of the Apocalypse / Rapture is at all times fascinating. It is one of those books you could pick up for a quick flip through or, out of a strange presentiment, sit down for long hours of reading, looking and listening.

This short, brilliant work by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely is about a dog, a cat and a rabbit who become experimental weapons for the government, codenamed “WE3.” They escape captivity and search for their lost homes, only to be hunted down again and again. Frank Quitely realistically and beautifully pens some of the most violent images I have seen in a comic book. Sometimes funny and quirky, sometimes surprisingly vicious, this work is everything one has come to expect from two such creative talents.

The narrator’s grandfather fleeing the Nazis across a wintry plain in Eastern Germany: “My whole existence,” the narrator explains, “is hanging by a thread.” So begins this often quirky family history, as told by Asger and his dying grandmother Bjork. Asger has returned home a failed painter (really, a painter that doesn’t paint) obsessed with his family legacy: from the inevitable bouts of cheating and depravity to moments of courage and love; from improbable adventure to the failure and weakness. Ramsland is a masterful storyteller and Doghead is (only the first of what I hope will be many) of his books to be translated into English.

What led me to this book were the large, vibrant pictures which are both beautiful and starkly incongruous: Nenets in Siberia tending an oil pipeline, West African Tuareg with headphones, a Yolngu Aborigine at a train station in Cairns, Australia in body paint with a Didgeridoo. The pictures alone will keep you glued to this book for hours. But The Survivors is largely a survey of the many aboriginal people of the world and how globalization, technology, and social and ecological change affects their communities. It is filled with a diverse range of brief essays on topics such as body art, slavery and the rites of passage. While in no way comprehensive, this is a thoughtful and meaningful examination of our world’s aboriginal populations and their continued struggle to maintain their traditional ways of life.