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A death throws a family's life into turmoil in one of the most anticipated graphic novel releases of 2021.
R. Kikuo Johnson has created an intimate and compelling graphic novel-length drama of young men on the cusp of adulthood. First-rate prep school, S.U.V., and a dream house in the heights: This was the island paradise handed to Loren Foster when he moved to Hawaii with his father six years ago. Now, with the end of high school just around the corner, his best friend, Shane, has grown distant. The rumors say it's hard drugs, and Loren suspects that Shane has left him behind for a new group of friends. What sets Johnson's drama apart is the naturalistic ease with which he explores the relationships of his characters. It is at once an unsentimental portrait of that most awkward period between adolescence and young adulthood and that rarest of things: a mature depiction of immature lives.
In graphic novel format, retells the Hawaiian story of Nanaue, born of human mother and shark father, who struggles to find his place in a village of humans.
From the Afterword by Franklin S. Odo: The most important feature of Milton Murayama's brilliant All I Asking for Is My Body is the quality of the storytelling. It deserves thorough discussion and criticism among literary professionals and students. The work has a further genius, however, in its evocation of several major topics in modern Hawaiian history, specifically during the 1930s, the decade before United States involvement in World War II. I suggest that Murayama’s novel provides us with valuable insights into the worlds of language, sugar plantation history, and the second-generation Japanese Americans, the nisei. . . . Critic Rob Wilson noted: “Part of the accomplishment of the ...
Crash Site, the debut graphic novel from British cartoonist Nathan Cowdry, is the story of Rosie, a young drug trafficker who uses her lovelorn talking dog, Denton, to mule drugs across international lines. When Rosie and Denton’s return flight to England goes down and they find themselves stranded in the Amazon basin (with fifty grand worth of coke in Denton’s stomach), well, getting busted becomes the least of their concerns as they try to find their way out. Did we mention that Rosie is also wearing a pair of anthropomorphic underwear she calls Pants Dude, and that he may have other plans for her and Denton? Crash Site is a darkly funny, character-driven graphic novel that calls to mind the sense of humor of Simon Hanselmann, with a Tarantino-level appetite for gratuitous acts of sex and violence and use of flashbacks to allow the story to unfold. Cowdry’s confident storytelling skills, attractive artwork, and sense of comedic timing makes Crash Site a winning recipe for fans of adult humor.
Unreal City contains five highly charged stories about relationships: “Echoes into Eternity,” “Evelyn Dalton-Hoyt,” “Emordana,” “The Yellowknife Retrospective,” and “Objet d’Art.” The stories address gender, narcissism, marriage, subjectivity, objectification, and the thin line that divides love from hate. Bryant’s characters sometimes feel like they are navigating their way through the darkness in an attempt to make sense of love, sex, art, and life. Existential and elliptical, the stories play beautifully against Bryant’s precise and fully-realized artwork, which echoes such masters as Jaime Hernandez and Daniel Clowes. In Unreal City, characters cannot walk into a room without their world turning inside out. Readers will be similarly upended by the discovery of this major new talent.
A 2016 YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults Finalist National Book Award winner M. T. Anderson delivers a brilliant and riveting account of the Siege of Leningrad and the role played by Russian composer Shostakovich and his Leningrad Symphony. In September 1941, Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht surrounded Leningrad in what was to become one of the longest and most destructive sieges in Western history—almost three years of bombardment and starvation that culminated in the harsh winter of 1943–1944. More than a million citizens perished. Survivors recall corpses littering the frozen streets, their relatives having neither the means nor the strength to bury them. Residents b...
After a successful hunt with his mate, a male fox is captured by the “two leggers” and thrust into captivity. There, he faces dangers more insidious than the simple eat-or-be-eaten laws of the forest: complacency, fear of the unknown, pack mentality, and loss of identity.
This fine art monograph/faux underground comic facsimile is a psychedelic trip through the hippie movement. In 2017, Gary Panter created an art installation, Hippie Trip, inspired by his first visit to a head shop in 1968. It expanded his mind to the possibilities of psychedelic art and music, analog crafts and drug culture. Crashpad is an extension of that installation and a riff on underground comics creators such as Zap's R. Crumb, Victor Moscoso, Robert Williams, and other icons of that era.
A luminous memoir from the award-winning author of The Vagrants and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers 'What a long way it is from one life to another. Yet why write if not for that distance?' Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is a memoir of a life lived with books. Written over two years while the author battled suicidal depression, Dear Friend is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Li grew up in China, her mother suffering from mental illness, and has spent her adult life as an immigrant in a country not her own. She has been a scientist, an author, an immigrant, a mother - and through it all, she has been sustained by a deep...