New publishing house for Muslim books based in Ottawa, Murakami on stage, Brazilian brothers' new graphic novel, Luis Alberto Urrea, Storylines at the Guggenheim: Cultural Digest for August 11

• Three sisters in Ottawa have opened a small publishing house to feature works by and about Muslim women and about the Muslim world broadly.
• Luis Alberto Urrea (Blue Met 2014) talks about his latest book, a poetry collection entitled "The Tijuana Book of the Dead."
• Haruki Murakami's book Kafka on the Shore has been made into a stage production that was performed at Lincoln Center in New York in July.
• Anticipation is building for the brotherly duo, Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, two of the comics world's biggest names, and their latest book, Two Brothers, which comes out later this fall. Their 2011 book, Daytripper, was one of the best graphic novels/serials I've ever read.
• The Paris Review looks at the connection between writers and the visual arts after a Guggenheim exhibition on the same theme, called Storylines.

Murakami on-stage

Blue Met 2015: Gene Luen Yang in Montreal at Drawn & Quarterly

Comics artist Gene Luen Yang will be here in Montreal for Blue Met 2015 and on March 18 at 7pm, there's a great opportunity to read some of his work with other fans or newbies.

Librairie Drawn & Quarterly (211 Bernard Ouest in Mile End) will be doing a session of their very popular graphic novel book club with his work, Boxers & Saints. This is great news: whether you're a big fan of graphic novels/comics and want to be a part of one of the most revolutionary voices in the medium OR whether you're new to comics in its most contemporary iteration and want to become familiar with what kind of experience reading a comic/graphic novel is about, this book club is your chance.

The bookstore is offering a 20% discount on his work, Boxers & Saints, from now until March 18.

Boxers & Saints

This book, a two-volume piece which looks at the Boxer Rebellion from two very distinct (and competing) perspectives, and won a slew of awards for its blending of myth, history and character. Much has been written about the Boxer Rebellion in recent years and its entire place in Chinese and Western history is being rewritten in many key ways. But Yang's work is not a dry historical treatise: it's moving and funny and shows us how we are shaped by the history we are fed and raised with (the book tells the story of the Boxer Rebellion from two quite distinct perspectives).

As the New York Times puts it:

Both volumes show how everyday humiliations by foreigners bred fear and hatred in the Chinese. But Yang also portrays the missionaries' tireless efforts to spread Christian learning and help orphaned children. Though many Chinese found Christianity threatening (and with good cause - it stirred up social conflicts that killed millions), the faith liberated and strengthened others, like the heroine of "Saints," a fatherless, outcast girl whose nocturnal visits from the spirit of Joan of Arc help her imagine herself a Christian warrior.

Get the book (again, if you buy it at the Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, you'll receive 20% off!), then attend the session, then have your chance to meet Yang in person at Blue Met 2015: Yang will be in Montreal for events on Friday, April 24 and Saturday, April 25.

Drawn & Quarterly's book club session is scheduled for March 18 at 7pm in their shop at 211 Bernard Ouest in Mile End. Refreshments will be served.

New comics series: Manifest Destiny

Been loving this new series by Chris Dingess, called Manifest Destiny.

Based on the travels of Lewis & Clark, the first one in the series hints at supernatural beings and creatures that lived out in the wild west, creatures that Lewis & Clark secretly described and notated in a classified journal only for the eyes of Jefferson.

There's also intrigue and "bad guys" that have infiltrated the Louis & Clark group.

I look forward to seeing how this one develops.

Miriam Katin: Letting it Go

I've long been a fan of comics in novel or memoir form and so I was really happy when Drawn & Quarterly contacted us about doing an event at the Festival with Miriam Katin's new book, Letting it Go. Katin was born during WWII in Hungary but her work simmers with youthful and contemporary rhythms.

In Letting it Go, the author/artist (the book is a memoir) is confronted with her fears and anger, traumas from her past which centre around Berlin after her grown son informs her that he is moving there with his girlfriend. The book unfolds in these emotional bursts as Katin works through all her charged feelings that linger from her experience as a young girl, her prejudices against the city, her worries for her son.

It's beautifully drawn with a (what seems to me) intentionally amateur style (almost like it was taken directly from a sketchbook and publishes), naive, blunt coloured pencil drawings and no panels. But in the pages are gorgeous sketches of New York, of Berlin, of the past, and one gets a real sense of Katin's personality and her contemporary life as a New Yorker.

I am really excited that we can host Miriam for the book party at Blue Met. Her event, which will also feature Drawn & Quarterly Editor-in-Chief, Chris Oliveros, will be held at Hotel 10 on April 28 at 1:00 p.m.

And, hey, hey, it's free to attend!

Alison Bechdel and Judith Thurman

As I noted a few posts ago, I am a big fan of comics (or graphic novels; I have such a hard time with which term to use). This afternoon I had the great opportunity to see two personalities I admire in conversation.

I came to Dykes to Watch Out For late in life: far after it had been syndicated across the country and just before its run ended in the late 2000s. I never read it regularly but I did end up finding an anthology a few years after its run that I quite enjoyed. It`s got a soap opera quality to it: like Will & Grace and Queer as Folk and R Crumb all rolled into one. It`s got a normalcy that easy to relate to yet for me it contains a distance that makes it compelling and exotic.

Are you my mother

Bechdel`s two post-Dykes memoirs are tales of her family: Fun Home about her father and the latest, Are You My Mother, about her relationship with her mother. Bechdel really pushes the limits of what graphic novels can and should do. As she noted in her discussion this afternoon, she is interested in how comics can represent the internal lives of characters (as they have so long been focused on action or external lives). And her works do what good movies do: tell stories in a way that you forget the form or the attractiveness of the medium and just let the story overtake you.

Thurman is an amazing writer though I wonder how well-suited she was to Alison Bechdel`s on stage personality. Bechdel leans toward being an introvert, it seems to me, and Thurman likes the cerebral idiom frequently: lots of questions that seemed to be to esoteric and far too psychological for the subject herself to address (questions of `the other`etc etc don`t seem to be very instructive when discussing comics with the artist. That`s not to suggest that Bechdel isn`t amazingly charming and bright but there is a highly pragmatic aspect to her approach as an interview subject).

Excellent questions from the audience: about color choices, about comics a form geared at a society becoming less (traditionally) literate, about the presence of Dykes in today`s queer culture.

Great show overall and I definitely have Bechdel`s two memoirs at the top of my reading list for the fall.

from Dykes to Watch Out For

Graphic Novels: some of my favorite titles

I developed a taste for comics (or graphic novels) later in life. As a young person, I didn't really read comics. Not sure why: no one that I can recall did as a matter of fact, not my brothers or cousins or classmates. It just wasn't part of our lives growing up.

But in my early 30s I started reading books by writers like Alan Moore, Frank Miller and others. I started reading the classics but soon branched out into personal favorites. I still read comics frequently though I try to just read for 30 minutes or an hour each day because 1) they go so fast and 2) I am too interested in too many other kinds of writing.

Jason Lutes' Berlin

Lately, coming back from Berlin, I've been reading non-stop about the city and that has led to other kinds of connections: Christopher Isherwood, Joseph Roth, Käthe Kollwitz, Robert Walser, and others. I was up at Drawn and Quarterly recently and discovered Jason Lutes' Berlin which is fascinating. Set in the years between the end of WWI and the start of WWII, his book explores the political turmoil in the city through the eyes of a cast of characters from all walks of life.

The work is beautifully drawn, compelling, tragic and funny. Apparently Lutes is only halfway through his story though he hasn't published a new one in a number of years. For some reason, this makes it even more appealing to me (nothing's worse than starting a series that's already over).

The End of Men?

A couple of years back, I was really into the work of Brian K. Vaughan. His series Y: The Last Man took inspiration from a nearly forgotten Mary Shelley novel, The Last Man. In Vaughan's version, a deadly virus hits in the Earth and every male mammal on the planet dies suddenly. All except one man, Yorick, and his pet monkey. The series traces the end of the world as we know it as Yorick crosses the US in search of the cause or a cure for the disease in order to start life again. Along the way, he encounters lesbian terrorists, Israeli spies, Russian agents, and every woman wants him for various reasons. Unfortunately, as they are want to do, Hollywood is now adapting this for film which I'm sure will make the series popular but also ruin it slightly.

Brian K Vaughan's other work (later than Y: The Last Man) is a more traditional super-hero tale: Ex-Machina, about a NYC politician who is a retired superhero but has been called back into active duty reluctantly. This series is an interesting exploration of the media, what it means to be "good" or moral, and what power actually means.

I tend to prefer graphic novels that are set in the "real" world. I don't like science fiction series or alternative universes (that's true of fiction, too, for the most part). The only exception to this is The Walking Dead which is great though I haven't seen any new issues in a long time.

Some other series I like include Matz's The Killer, and Jay Faerber's Near Death (set in the noirish streets of modern Seattle).

As I write this, I have to say that though I never liked comics growing up, I did love graphic illustrators and early graphic novelists like Frans Masereel were some of my favorite artists. I had (and still have) several of his "novels in woodcuts" that tell a story with only images. Frans Masereel himself was a fascinating figure and deserves an entire post himself.

Frans Masereel