Shaun Tan, Author . Simply Read $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-0-9688768-3-1
Strange, melancholy imagery and pessimistic forecasts ("sometimes the day begins/ with nothing to look forward to") weigh like millstones on this slender book, but the appearance of a stunning "red tree" lifts the burden in the end....
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Shaun Tan, Author . Scholastic/Levine $19.99 (96p) ISBN 978-0-545-05587-1
The term “suburbia” may conjure visions of vast and generic sameness, but in his hypnotic collection of 15 short stories and meditations, Tan does for the sprawling landscape what he did for the metropolis in The Arrival
.Here, the...
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Shaun Tan. Scholastic/Levine, $19.99 (128p) ISBN 978-0-545-46513-7
“Why isn’t the finished work as good as the sketch?” Tan (The Arrival) asks in the introduction to this collection of loose illustrations and rough ideas, wondering why drawings lose their spontaneity as they undergo revision. These sketches took...
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Shaun Tan. Scholastic/Levine, $18.99 (48p) ISBN 978-0-545-63912-5
In a book that reads like an homage to The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, Lindgren award-winner Tan (The Arrival) offers a sequence of paintings that represent a boy’s cumulative summer knowledge, framed as rules and populated by Tan’s now-familiar...
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Shaun Tan. Scholastic/Levine, $24.99 (192p) ISBN 978-0-545-94612-4
Tan (Rules of Summer) fashions 75 haunting sculptures, each meant to capture the spirit of one of Grimms’ fairy tales. A short excerpt from the tale that inspired the artwork appears on the left of each spread, accompanied by a photograph of its...
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Shaun Tan, Author, Shaun Tan, Illustrator . Simply Read $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-894965-10-1
Tan's affecting and sophisticated picture books, including The Red Tree
, pack an emotional and visual wallop, but saturate readers with ennui. This melancholy story, despite pale whimsy, cannot muster much hope for those "lost things"...
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Shaun Tan, Author, Shaun Tan, Illustrator . Scholastic/Levine $19.99 (128p) ISBN 978-0-439-89529-3
With this haunting, wordless sequence about a lonely emigrant in a bewildering city, Tan (The Lost Thing
) finds in the graphic novel format an ideal outlet for his sublime imagination. Via pencil illustrations that resemble sepia photographs or...
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Shaun Tan. Scholastic/Levine, $24.99 (224p) ISBN 978-1-338-29840-6
Like its predecessor, Tales from Outer Suburbia, these short stories by Tan imagine a collection of alternate worlds; here, they chronicle the lives of animals who dwell cheek by jowl with humans amid urban sprawl. Tan’s skill as a writer provides...
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Shaun Tan. Scholastic/Levine, $19.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-338-29839-0
Like the stories in Tan’s Tales from the Inner City, this fable stars a creature who interacts with human society but stands apart from it—or, in Cicada’s case, is excluded from it with stiff-necked contempt. Cicada is a loyal company employee, and...
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