100 books like A Closer Look

James McMullan is one of America’s preeminent illustrators, working consistently from the 60s to today. He may be most familiar for his long series of posters for Broadway shows at Lincoln Center, but he has also done magazine illustrations, children's books, record covers, and animation. Running parallel to his illustration work has been a long career in teaching, principally at New York’s School of Visual Arts (for which he also has done a series of subway posters). I was privileged to take his SVA illustration course– which had a stringent portfolio review – for two years early in my career, about the time this book appeared. No collection of greatest hits, or even a guide to achieving McMullan’s juicy watercolor style, this is a thoroughly candid tour through an illustrator’s work process, including a generous selection of preliminary sketches and reference photos.

Like many of the students who passed through… show more.

Gary Faigin is the guy I took my first and only perspective class from, back when he was teaching at the New York Academy of Arts. Eventually we became friends, and fortunately for me he never wrote a book on perspective. Instead, Gary channeled his considerable knowledge of anatomy and drawing into the indispensable book on facial expressions. In profusely illustrated chapters, Gary breaks down the daunting complexity of facial expressions into six basics: joy, anger, sadness, disgust, fear, and surprise. Like the primary colors, this basic palette yields the full spectrum of extreme to subtle, in-between, and mixed expressions. 

Legendary artist and printmaker M.C. Escher wrote very little about his working method, but fortunately, he gave writer and longtime friend Bruno Ernst full access to his creative process. Ernst does a superb job unpacking the reasoning and revealing the secrets of this always logical but sometimes opaque master. After I read Ernst's chapter explaining the cylindrical perspective in Escher’s classic prints "House of Stairs" and "High And Low", I went right to work drawing my own cylindrical grid, which eventually appeared in my second instructional book Extreme Perspective!

I owe Francis D.K. Ching big time. What I learned about perspective in art school served me well enough during my first few years as a working illustrator, but there came a time when I faced a perspective problem beyond my experience on deadline, and I needed to pick up new skills fast. I knew the neighbor in the next apartment over was a graphic designer, so I knocked on her door to ask if she had any books on perspective, and this is what she had on the shelf. The perspective section is only a small part of this elegantly drawn and hand-lettered book, but the information in it was enough to solve my immediate problem and set me to exploring perspective on my own (and some thirty years later, I found my neighbor again on LinkedIn and returned her copy).

It's almost impossible to dive into Southern Gothic narratives without exploring the work of William Faulkner at some point, and his collected stories are a great place to start. Specifically, the story "A Rose for Emily" pretty much created the Southern Gothic literary genre. The writing is beautiful, evocative, haunting, and a springboard for the aspirations of many Southern writers, myself included.

Similar to Cioran, Ligotti has a profoundly dark worldview, but not one that is unearned.

Ligotti’s own experiences with anhedonia and despair seep through his writing. I cannot get enough of it. Through his prose, he creates his own world wherein doom is assured and life seems like a poorly written, performed, and directed play that is in profoundly bad taste.

It may seem like work like this would depress you, but for me, it gives me a sense of understanding. Someone out there, even if it’s just Ligotti’s characters, has felt that gloom.

This is one of my all-time favorite novels, though I'm not quite sure how to explain it. Set in a small Texas town, Come, The Restorer is a strange, hallucinatory, and comical novel where nothing is quite normal, in fact far from it. Among the cast of characters are Mr. de Persia who becomes a prophet to the townspeople after he is discovered in a glass bathtub with an erection, the virginal Jewel Adair who following her husband's fiery death begins roaming the countryside naked, and Addis, Jewel's adopted son, who is on a singular quest to make himself a Panhandle saint. There's just no other book like this one.

Crawling with cockroaches, mold, and touching moments, this dark love story of a protagonist unable to move on and his neighbor whose boyfriend is so controlling he’s stitched himself to her is a bizarro classic. I’ve lived with both pretty abhorrent apartments and breakups, and the grotesque escalation of the novel as both the protagonist and their dwelling fall apart get under my skin in the best way possible. Full of nightmarish yet recognizable characters (maybe this says a lot about me), the plot propels itself forward through so many twists and turns that the ending is a true surprise. Slater’s ability to fascinate and repulse in equal measure is on full display as he explores the nightmare side of relationships, and I can’t help but sympathize with the protagonist as their heartbreak causes a brutal and irrecoverable decay.

You can’t know where this one is going. Even as the… show more.

Georgia-born Flannery O’Connor gifted the world with dozens of stories, which can be read individually or collectively.

Set on farms, in small towns, and off-the-beaten path, she colorfully explores both people and places, inviting readers along to do the same. Some stories are folksy, some are humorous, and some are dark, but one thread is constant: her highly individualized style is built on strong literary conventions.  

Published in 1957, this book is one of the few comic novels about London, and it is genuinely funny.

In a dead-end suburb, variety entertainment is dying a painful death in a flea-pit cinema that attracts a parade of fantastical characters, from the Falstaffian impresario Sam Yudenow to a pair of Greek caterers and bomb makers.

It makes a lost world seem both alluring and deeply unsavoury.