Alison Bechdel's cult following for her early comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For expanded wildly for her family memoirs, the best-selling graphic memoir Fun Home, adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, and Are You My Mother? Bechdel has been named a MacArthur Fellow and Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont, among many other honors. Her new memoir, The Secret to Superman Strength, is forthcoming in 2021.
"A splendid autobiography...refreshingly open and generous." --Entertainment Weekly "Fun Home must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. . . . pioneering." --The New York Times Book Review "A masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other." --Time Magazine "Graphic storytelling at its most profound." --Los Angeles Times, Favorite Book of the Year "The great writing of the twenty-first century may well be found in graphic novels and nonfiction....Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is an astonishing advertisement fro this emerging literary form." --USA Today "Brilliant and bittersweet." --The Boston Globe "Beautiful combines the mundane with the macabre, adding doses of wry, poignant humor on every page." --Washington Post "One of the best memoirs of the decade ... at once hypercontrolled and utterly intimate." --New York Magazine, Best Books of the Year "A revelation ... feels like a true literary achievement, something with characters who baffle and disappoint and break hears the way people do in life and in the best of prose." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune "If David Sedaris could draw, and if Bleak House had been a little funnier, you'd have Alison Bechdel's Fun Home." --Amy Bloom, author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You "Alison Bechdel - she's one of the best, one to watch out for." --Harvey Pekar "Masterful...an enormously successful work." --Village Voice "A staggeringly literate and revealing autobiography." --Seattle Times "Brave and forthright and insightful--exactly what Alison Bechdel does best." --Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina "Stupendous...mesmerizing...The details...are devastatingly captured by an artist in total control of her craft." --Chip Kidd, author of The Cheese Monkeys "[Alison Bechdel] hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best...She's made a story that's quiet [and] dignified." --Publishers Weekly, Starred "[With] uncommon richness [and] depth...[Fun Home] shares as much in spirit with...other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishment." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred "One of the very best graphic novels ever." --Booklist, ALA, Starred Review --
This autobiography by the author of the long-running strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, deals with her childhood with a closeted gay father, who was an English teacher and proprietor of the local funeral parlor (the former allowed him access to teen boys). Fun Home refers both to the funeral parlor, where he put makeup on the corpses and arranged the flowers, and the family's meticulously restored gothic revival house, filled with gilt and lace, where he liked to imagine himself a 19th-century aristocrat. The art has greater depth and sophistication that Dykes; Bechdel's talent for intimacy and banter gains gravitas when used to describe a family in which a man's secrets make his wife a tired husk and overshadow his daughter's burgeoning womanhood and homosexuality. His court trial over his dealings with a young boy pushes aside the importance of her early teen years. Her coming out is pushed aside by his death, probably a suicide. The recursively told story, which revisits the sites of tragic desperation again and again, hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best. Bechdel presents her childhood as a "still life with children" that her father created, and meditates on how prolonged untruth can become its own reality. She's made a story that's quiet, dignified and not easy to put down. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
"A splendid autobiography...refreshingly open and generous." --Entertainment Weekly "Fun Home must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. . . . pioneering." --The New York Times Book Review "A masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other." --Time Magazine "Graphic storytelling at its most profound." --Los Angeles Times, Favorite Book of the Year "The great writing of the twenty-first century may well be found in graphic novels and nonfiction....Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is an astonishing advertisement fro this emerging literary form." --USA Today "Brilliant and bittersweet." --The Boston Globe "Beautiful combines the mundane with the macabre, adding doses of wry, poignant humor on every page." --Washington Post "One of the best memoirs of the decade ... at once hypercontrolled and utterly intimate." --New York Magazine, Best Books of the Year "A revelation ... feels like a true literary achievement, something with characters who baffle and disappoint and break hears the way people do in life and in the best of prose." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune "If David Sedaris could draw, and if Bleak House had been a little funnier, you'd have Alison Bechdel's Fun Home." --Amy Bloom, author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You "Alison Bechdel - she's one of the best, one to watch out for." --Harvey Pekar "Masterful...an enormously successful work." --Village Voice "A staggeringly literate and revealing autobiography." --Seattle Times "Brave and forthright and insightful--exactly what Alison Bechdel does best." --Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina "Stupendous...mesmerizing...The details...are devastatingly captured by an artist in total control of her craft." --Chip Kidd, author of The Cheese Monkeys "[Alison Bechdel] hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best...She's made a story that's quiet [and] dignified." --Publishers Weekly, Starred "[With] uncommon richness [and] depth...[Fun Home] shares as much in spirit with...other contemporary memoirists of considerable literary accomplishment." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred "One of the very best graphic novels ever." --Booklist, ALA, Starred Review --
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
