Recommended: Graphic Novels

Have you seen the new exhibit on display at the Bailey/Howe yet? It features comics and graphic novels, including those of Vermont’s own Alison Bechdel. Fun Home and Are You My Mother? can be found upstairs in our graphic novel section, along with these other recommendations.

 

Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli

PN6727.M2476 A77 2009

“David Mazzucchelli's boldly ambitious, boundary-pushing graphic novel is remarkable for the way it synthesizes word and image to craft a new kind of storytelling, and for how it makes that synthesis seem so intuitive as to render it invisible…Asterios Polyp is a fast, fun read, but it's also a work that has been carefully wrought to take optimum advantage of comics' hybrid nature — it's a tale that could only be told on the knife-edge where text and art come seamlessly together.” –NPR’s The Five Best Books to Share with Your Friends

 

Anya’s Ghost, by Vera Brosgol

PN6727.B757 A59 2011

“Remarkable. . . . With an attitude and aptitude reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) who likewise conveyed the particulars of an immigrant adolescence, Brosgol has created a smart, funny and compassionate portrait of someone who, for all her sulking and sneering, is the kind of daughter many parents would like to have. And the kind of girl many of us maybe once were.” ―The New York Times

 

The Wrong Place, by Brecht Evens

PN6790.B4 E83 2011

With a hand as sensitive as it is exuberant, Angouleme winner Brecht Evens's first English graphic novel captures the strange chemistry of social interaction as easily as he portrays the fragmented nature of identity. The Wrong Place contrasts life as it is, angst-ridden and awkward, with life as it can be: spontaneous, uninhibited, and free. – Drawn & Quarterly

 

Embroideries, by Marjane Satrapi

PN6747.S245 E42 2005

From the best–selling author of Persepolis comes this gloriously entertaining and enlightening look into the sex lives of Iranian women. Embroideries gathers together Marjane’s tough–talking grandmother, stoic mother, glamorous and eccentric aunt and their friends and neighbors for an afternoon of tea drinking and talking. Naturally, the subject turns to love, sex and the vagaries of men…Full of surprises, this introduction to the private lives of some fascinating women, whose life stories and lovers will strike us as at once deeply familiar and profoundly different from our own, is sure to bring smiles of recognition to the faces of women everywhere—and to teach us all a thing or two. – Amazon 

 

Through the Woods, by Emily Carroll

PZ7.7.C369 Th 2014 

Journey through the woods in this sinister, compellingly spooky collection that features four brand-new stories and one phenomenally popular tale in print for the first time. These are fairy tales gone seriously wrong...Already revered for her work online, award-winning comic creator Emily Carroll’s stunning visual style and impeccable pacing is on grand display in this entrancing anthology, her print debut. - Amazon