I didn't get into graphic novels until I was an adult. This one’s about a pompous armchair architect whose career was once promising, but not anymore due to his impractical theories.
Asterios nevertheless has this highfalutin view of himself–and is in a contentious relationship with a younger woman who idolizes him at first until she realizes that he’s washed up. It's such a situationship. But the breakups, non-breakups, and everything between leads to a very tender moment at the end. Yeah, pick this one up.
The triumphant return of one of comics’ greatest talents, with an engrossing story of one man’s search for love, meaning, sanity, and perfect architectural proportions. An epic story long awaited, and well worth the wait.
Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this “escape” really about?
As the story unfolds, moving between the present and the past, we begin…
I’d recommend this to a fiery young student who is coming to terms with his identity. Even though Jones gets really specific about certain encounters in this memoir, I’d risk the censorship for an adolescent to know he was not alone.
This book is absolutely divine. It really gets into the heart of a poet, his alienation on a Midwestern campus, his complicated relationship with family—leading to the last line of last lines, ‘We are both here because of our mothers’, which may not do anything for you now, but once you read the book, it will soak your heart with an emotion that you can’t undo.
WINNER OF THE 2020 STONEWALL BOOK AWARD-ISRAEL FISHMAN NONFICTION AWARD
"Jones's voice and sensibility are so distinct that he turns one of the oldest of literary genres inside out and upside down." NPR'S Fresh Air
Jones tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence-into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds…
There may or may not be a campaign to erase dead white men from the canon, but in defense of the bards, this joint was written in the 1950s and the youth that it portrays is so damn cool.
Picture the James Dean-esque teenager, white t-shirt, denims, bandanna hanging from them, running wild across the country with the boys, hitchhiking, stealing cars, hooking up with girls delightfully young and naive.
I tell you, the best form of writing will always be living. This really sings. Written in a stream of consciousness with twang and slang, On The Road inspired a whole artistic movement. These guys are a 100 and something years old and cold in the ground, but boy were they hip.
The legendary novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation, now in a striking new Pengiun Classics Deluxe Edition
Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naivete and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed…
At Banneker Terrace, everybody knows everybody, or at least knows of them. Longtime tenants’ lives are entangled together in the ups and downs of the day-to-day, for better or for worse. The neighbors in the unit next door are friends or family, childhood rivals, or enterprising business partners. In other words, Harlem is home. But the rent is due, and the clock of gentrification—never far from anyone’s mind—is ticking louder now than ever.
In eight interconnected stories, Sidik Fofana conjures a residential community under pressure.
We root for the tight-knit cast of characters as they weave in and out of one another’s narratives, working to escape their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love. All the while we brace, as they do, for the challenges of a rapidly shifting future.
