With “Slow Birding,” biologist Joan Strassman offers a call to study and savor deeply the birds that share the space we live in.

Strassman’s local habitat is St. Louis, which encompasses her backyard, nearby parks and forests, and the swampy, marshy habitats of the Mississippi drainage basin. She breaks the book into sections exploring these habitats, introducing us to a range of species that lives in each, from blue jays to great egrets.

Each section follows a similar pattern. She shares her personal observations, using them as a launching point for a deeper discussion of each species’ biology. She typically summarizes a long-term research project for each bird, sharing, for instance, how white-throated sparrows have, metaphorically, four sexes or how American robins philander to increase the number of offspring they leave behind.

I found Strassmann’s stories fascinating. I enjoyed the deeper dive into the science of each species, both for the behavioral diversity they revealed as well as the fanaticism of the scientists who studied them. (Spending 24 hours straight in a bird blind? Not for me!)

More than anything, Strassman’s passion for birds is clear, and she does an excellent job packaging it in such a way as to inspire the reader. I’m not likely to take a sketchbook outside or spend time mapping birds as they hop about my yard. But I have gained a new appreciation for my near avian neighbors after reading her book.

Quotes

“Starlings are our birds. We brought them here, and our mangling of the environment causes them to thrive. The least we can do is try to understand them. Removing them is impossible at this point. And remember, they do less damage to native birds than we do with habitat destruction.”

A decent collection of space and sci-fi based short stories inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. Like many anthologies, it’s uneven. I was on the verge of giving up after the first few–the writing seemed awkward and unpolished–but I’m glad I stuck with it, as I ended up finding several stories that satisfied the itch for the dark, weird and cosmic.

Favorites included:

• Ada Hoffman’s “Harmony Amid the Stars,” a spooky tale of long-haul transit through the whispering regions of space.
• Dan Webb’s “The Comet Called Ithaqua,” offered a nice, eerie “toxic house” tale.
• Pamela Rentz’s “Lottie vs. the Moon Hopper” offered a strong working-class voice in a creepy space station.
• Orrin Grey’s “The Labyrinth of Sleep” offered a slow, mysterious build as we navigate a dreamscape, something difficult to do well.
• Sean Craven’s “Deep Blue Dreams” offered a spooky, narcotic tale of jellies and bliss.

With “Birds of Maine,” comics creator Michael DeForge puts forth an off-kilter masterpiece. This extensive graphic novel follows the general format of a daily strip, with four panels and (typically) a gag to close. But it’s delightfully colorful and weird. Better, the panels gradually cohere into a larger journey of creation and self-discovery.

Our primary character is Ginni, a young cardinal. She has a supportive family, friends that she forms a band with and a dream of being a fashion designer (despite the fact that birds don’t wear clothes). She lives in a bird colony on the moon, a utopian, quasi-Marxist place, colonized long ago and now in distant contact with the humans (and birds) of Earth.

Things are pretty good on the moon. Birds there have a fungal computer network with which they can communicate, a “universal worm” to sustain them and ample polycules and bird orgies (along with a general “live and let live” attitude). Among this abundance, though, Ginni has to go through the young-person’s journey of self-discovery, figuring out who exactly she is and what role she should play.

DeForge uses his bird utopia to satirize life on Earth. Even with the help of the best bird historians, his cast can’t quite get a grasp on the need to work, health insurance or being forced to stay with your family of birth. Despite the political undertones of his avian perspective here, DeForge doesn’t come off as judgy or preachy. His birds have a sense of humor about themselves and are perfectly capable of being ridiculous when called for. Sections about human society are balanced with a well-placed F bomb or bird breeding joke.

The story doesn’t stay static. Ginni becomes pen pals with an Earth-based bird fan. A human astronaut drops in (although she’s more hung up on her ex-boyfriend than committed to any cross-species connection). But the story is a slow build, with the characters and their reactions to one another taking the forefront.

DeForge’s art is beautiful throughout. Colorful, wiggly and almost psychedelic, it uses the whole palate to convey the range of bird colors and types. He adapts a cartoony shorthand for most of the characters, rendering them as a simple configuration of shapes–more like flowers than birds. But his reduction of form makes the characters memorable and distinct, even as DeForge occasionally zooms in for more detailed depictions of angry swans and fungal networks.

“Birds of Maine” is a difficult work to describe, but it’s wonderful to experience. Thoughtful, playful and artistic, it’s an accomplishment to behold.

“The thing that sucks about trying to live in the moment is that you end up broke and hungover when you wake up tomorrow.”

Direct and down to earth, Colin Clancy’s “Ski Bum” follows ski enthusiast Jimmy as he drops out of college in Michigan to head out west to chase the big slopes of Colorado. Aimless and romantic in an understated, blue-collar kind of way, Jimmy is looking for more than fresh powder. He wants to live life, to chase new experiences, even as he discovers how tough that can be on a part-time ski instuctor’s budget.

Living in workers’ quarters, Jimmy falls in with a crew of friends and quickly settles into a service-job routine: shots at night, the monotony of teaching rich kids to ski in the mornings, and stealing moments on the slopes whenever he can. Uncomplicated without being simple (just like Clancy’s writing style), Jimmy seeks basic pleasures alongside the more difficult work of determining who exactly he wants to be.

That’s when he’s sober. When he’s partying, Jimmy can turn into someone else entirely–throwing his phone into a snowbank after a screaming match with his girlfriend or wading into a bar fight for the thrill of it. But he’s not the worst drunk in a party scene full of them, and Clancy does his strongest work capturing several hellish bacchanalias, the kinds of bleary binges that render the next morning into slush under your boots.

The group’s excursion to New Orleans is a particular lowlight, taking what’s supposed to be a fun party weekend and transforming it into something hateful and queasy, half-riot, half-purge. The characters are still young enough that it’s fun for them to tie one on and get out of control; I’m much older than they are now, and reading Clancy’s book, I couldn’t help but worry for them, seeing the trouble on the horizon.

But the book reminds us they’re still young enough to make mistakes, to flounder, and to bounce back. “Ski Bum” does a memorable job capturing a slice of youth in a special place. The characters aren’t sure what they’re doing, but they don’t have to be quite yet–they still have time to bum around a while before shifting back to conventional lives, finishing school, getting real jobs.

It’s unclear how things will turn out for these characters, but the easy read rewards us for the time we spend with them.

With “Farewell Transmission: Notes from Hidden Spaces,” Will McGrath offers a series of graceful essays taking us from the mountains of Lesotho to life outside a Phoenix homeless shelter.

McGrath is a thoughtful guide. He’s open enough to enjoy the pleasures of Elvis impersonators and church-basement wrestling matches, but he’s mindful of the depths beneath: a friend stabbed by his own brother in Lesotho, a homeless client embarking on one last bender as he fades out of life.

The author is open with his sympathies. He calls out a racist mine manager who invites him to watch a rugby match and chews out hospital workers who judge his client for turning back to cocaine on a terminal diagnosis. It’s easy to agree with McGrath, but while it’s understandable he doesn’t extend the same graciousness to his foes as his friends, it also feels like a missed opportunity in essays of this caliber. As he notes, he drank the mine manager’s beer, ate his food…and waited until they’d parted ways to write an essay calling out the man’s racism.

That said, the stories here are warm and memorable. Perhaps the standout is “Keyhole to Sana’a,” which shares how a sister-in-law’s lost iPhone made its way to Yemen, where it offered a window into a different world via photos uploaded by a teenage boy into a shared iCloud account. McGarth turns a personal connection into a geopolitical one, delicately linking the threads between this boy’s life and the civil war that may have consumed him. It’s a sensitive story carefully told, one that’s well at home in this excellent collection.

Quotes

“Elvis is a stocky First National man with a thick watermelon gut, thick gold sunglasses, thick black pomp. Very quickly he is sweating hard, aiming for verisimilitude that would make the King proud. His pipes are rich baritone and listening to him is an experience not unlike being rubbed in butter.”

“Come Friday night, the two of us stormed into the Legion, hot for combat. We swept past the horseshoe bar and into the packed community hall, the crowd adorned in flannel, camo, blaze orange, plaid, and Carhartt, all the shades of Minnesota’s rainbow.”

“Professional wrestling occupies a sui generis space in the culture, a strange nexus where “Star Wars”-quoting nerds and juiced-up gym rats might share space together and may in fact be the same person. It is one of the unique American artforms, like jazz, or comic books, or endowing corporations with the legal rights of people.”