Without Blood
By Alessandro Baricco, Alfred A. Knopf, $18

Alessandro Baricco is the master of the brief and elegant; his titles are simple, like “Silk” and “City,” and his prose is swift and light, like a fairy tale or fable, which may be his greatest weakness. “Without Blood,” a meditation on the effects of war on average people, lacks all the geopolitical specificity that connects the characters to the world. Nina witnesses her father killed in a post-civil war purging, then grows up to hunt down her father’s killers, including Tito, the child-soldier who pulled the trigger. Short and disconnected, it strives for the universal, annoying you despite its affecting story. —Jeremy M. Barker

Cats Don’t Exist
By Jis (Jose Ignacio Solorzano), Fantagraphic Books, $12.95

“Cats Don’t Exist” is a collection of comic strips, both in color and black and white, that will have you laughing, arching your eyebrows, and scratching your head thinking, “what the hell is this?” It’s just a Mexican cartoonist making his American debut. Jis has created a book that is one serious mind-fuck after another. As the pages keep on turning, the book shocks, confuses, and amuses. Read it once, read it 15 times and you still might not get it, but you’ll definitely like it. —Cathy Zegelin