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‘You have to let things die’: how Alison Bechdel’s exercise memoir became a matter of life and death

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Books to read if you’re considering psychotherapy

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6 unforgettable fathers in literature

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17 mesmerising graphic novels

A Family Tragicomic

Fun Home

A work of passion... It's perhaps one of the best books I've read that explores sexuality and identity

DISCOVER the BESTSELLING GRAPHIC MEMOIR behind the Olivier Award nominated musical. 
 
'A sapphic graphic treat' The Times 
 
A moving and darkly humorous family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's gothic drawings. If you liked Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis you'll love this. 
 
Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive. 
 
Interweaving between childhood memories, college life and present day, and through narrative that is equally heartbreaking and fiercely funny, Alison looks back on her complex relationship with her father and finds they had more in common than she ever knew. 
 
 
'A groundbreaking masterpiece' The Independent 
 
'A finely woven blend of yearning and euphoric fantasy' Evening Standard 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

Astonishing . . . How on earth does she do it? The ingenious concision, the warmth of feeling . . . I cannot hope to capture all that this extraordinarily generous and roomy book contains.

Drawing is often seen as a cartoonist's primary skill, but Bechdel can also really write . . . Fresh, clever and moving . . . It [The Secret to Superhuman Strength] is probably her most beautiful [work].

The long-anticipated return of . . . one of the most acclaimed authors in the genre, this should be one of the year's highlights.

Every bit as deep, searching and multi-layered as Bechdel's previous efforts . . . The new book is fun, too . . . A sort of very sweaty A Portrait of an Artist.

Everything you'd expect in a work from Alison Bechdel: wry, insightful and multi-layered. It even almost made me want to do some exercise.

Matthew Dooley, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2020

Alison Bechdel's literary, illustrated dive into a lifetime of fitness fads - from skiing to karate to yoga - is characteristically expansive and profound.

Astonishing... Through her precise drawings, we can feel the yearning for a sense of equilibrium, an attempt to abolish the dissonance of being fully alive while racing down a ski slope, at the same time knowing with certainty that one day she will die.

Gorgeous...The Secret to Superhuman Strength feels perfectly pitched to meet the nervy uncertainties of our almost-post-lockdown moment. It's a wise, wry, generous look at selfhood, ageing and mortality, a sort of hymn to transformation, to the importance of forging connections and the necessity of letting things go.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength practically glows with a beguiling mixture of intellect, warmth and humour, the suppleness of which is helped by a surprisingly lavish use of colour.

An astonishing graphic novel/memoir.

A multi-layered book that is both wildly witty and deeply wise.

A tender, witty and poignant look back at a lifelong obsession with fitness.

An astonishing graphic novel/memoir whose precise drawings capture Bechdel's life-long hunt for transcendence through physical exertion.

The biggest event of the year was the return of Alison Bechdel... Bechdel's previous books have made her one of the superstars of graphic fiction, and this funny, perceptive and merciless account shows that...her talent remains undimmed.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength... demands to be reread immediately... and does the reader far more good than a Peloton class and a cup of turmeric tea.

A joyful book, a feast of colour, wit and ideas about living in ever-changing times

The brilliant cartoonist traces her own history of (sometimes obsessive) exercise in this stunning graphic memoir.

**A GUARDIAN, OBSERVER AND FINANCIAL TIMES 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK** 
**A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021** 
 
From the bestselling, award-winning author of Fun Home comes this Christmas's must-gift graphic novel. 
 
All her life, Alison Bechdel has searched for an elusive secret... 
 
The secret to superhuman strength. 
 
She has looked for it in her favourite books, the lives of her heroes, celibacy, polyamory, activism, therapy, and most obsessively, in her lifelong passion for exercise. Skiing, running, karate, cycling, yoga, weightlifting - you name it, she's tried it. "Oh, to be self-sufficient! Hard as a rock! An island!" 
 
But as she gets older, her body isn't getting any stronger. And in a changing, sometimes overwhelming world, are "cantaloupe-sized guns" all a person needs? Maybe the all-important secret is not where she expected to find it . . . 
 
'The Secret to Superhuman Strength practically glows with a beguiling mixture of intellect, warmth and humour' Daily Telegraph 
 
In this, her third graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel has written a deeply layered, personal story about selfhood, self-sabotage, mortality, addiction, bliss, wonder, and the concerns of a generation. This is an extraordinary, laugh-out-loud chronicle of the conundrums we all grapple with as we seek our true place in the world. Truly, a must-gift book this Christmas.

Are You My Mother?

An expansive, moving and captivating graphic memoir from 'one of the finest cartoonists at work today'.

Fun Home and Are You My Mother? are the kind of head-spinningly thoughtful and textured works that make you rejoice in the comic-book form.

I emotionally lost myself in this book… It made me realise that people aren’t always perfect.

It’s a beautiful (and beautifully illustrated) look at the complexity and dysfunctionality of family through a unique lens – and frames things in such a way that you can’t help but re-examine your own relationships, too.

Are You My Mother? is a work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.

As absorbing as it is graced with a deceptive lightness of touch, it is clever, brilliantly pieced together, and utterly unusual.

One of the chief pleasures of this book is how the words and pictures collaborate to gesture at a territory that neither might reach alone.

Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this, sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it - and you must!

Bechdel’s engaging, original graphic memoir explores her troubled relationship with her distant mother.

A complex, fascinating and intellectually rich memoir.

Throughout, there are magnificent feats of connectivity, startlingly complex internal monologues that unfold with perfect simplicity… I haven’t encountered a book about being an artist, or about the punishing entanglements of mothers and daughters, as engaging, profound or original as this one in a long time.

Lively, fresh and expressive…humane, complex and beautiful.

Don’t let the cartoons fool you, this is an exciting and intelligent book and, at many points, highly moving. It doesn’t just tell Alison’s story, Are You My Mother? allows to you to think about your own.

Find everything this author has written. Every jot she makes on the paper enriches the baroque, painful, exhilarating story she has to tell.

It’s first and foremost funny, using graphical and verbal tricks to express the psychological dramas of an American household.

Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times, and People among others. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life - queer and otherwise - considered 'one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics genre.' Alison Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney's, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and the New York Times Book Review. 
 
http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/

An expansive, moving and captivating graphic memoir from the author of Fun Home. 
 
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home was a literary phenomenon. While Fun Home explored Bechdel's relationship with her father, a closeted homosexual, this memoir is about her mother - a voracious reader, a music lover, a passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood... and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter goodnight, for ever, when she was seven. 
 
Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. 
 
'As absorbing as it is graced with a deceptive lightness of touch, it is clever, brilliantly pieced together, and utterly unusual. Sunday Times 
 
'It's a beautiful (and beautifully illustrated) look at the complexity and dysfunctionality of family through a unique lens - and frames things in such a way that you can't help but re-examine your own relationships, too.' Stylist

The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For

This long-awaited collection of comic strips by the internationally-acclaimed graphic-literary talent Alison Bechdel offers an acerbically funny insight into the lesbian culture of 1980s America.

So much more than a comic strip... No one comes close to Alison Bechdel

This compendium is testament to a unique literary-graphic talent

For 25 years Bechdel's path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip has been collected in award-winning volumes. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers an irresistible selection from all 11 volumes

Ms. Bechdel began her strips... partly to provide ''an antidote'' to culture's image of gay women as ''warped, sick, humorless and undesirable.'' Boy, has she succeeded. Her crazy lesbians seem saner than the rest of us, and beyond beautiful

The greatest lesbian soap opera... is Bechdels miraculously well-sustained chronicling of a circle of friends over the course of 20 years, Dykes to Watch Out For

Breezy, efficient storytelling and all-round smarts

Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times and People, among others. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life - queer and otherwise - considered 'one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics genre.' Alison Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney's, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and the New York Times Book Review. 
 
http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/

Internationally-acclaimed graphic-literary talent Alison Bechdel offers acerbically funny insight into the lesbian culture of 1980s America in this comic strip collection. 
 
Bechdel's brilliantly imagined counter-cultural band of friends - academics, social workers, booksellers - fall in and out of love, negotiate relationships, raise children, switch careers and cope with aging parents. The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For fuses high and low culture - from foreign domestic policy to domestic routine, postmodern theory to hot sex - in a serial graphic narrative 'suitable for all humanist persuasions'. 
 
Alison Bechdel has been chronicling the lives of a small universe of cartoon characters in her strip Dykes To Watch Out For, which has been syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers in the USA and has been published in eleven volumes. For this first time, this collection gathers the best of those volumes. 
 
'So much more than a comic strip... No one comes close to Alison Bechdel' Times

To the Lighthouse

A must-have new edition of Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, featuring a cover illustrated by Alison Bechdel, The New York Times bestselling author of Fun Home, and a new foreword by Patricia Lockwood 
 
To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family, the Ramseys, whose annual summer holiday in Scotland falls under the shadow of war, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. The novel's use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of all that had gone before.

To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family, the Ramseys, whose annual summer holiday in Scotland falls under the shadow of war, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. The novel's use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of all that had gone before. 
 
This beautiful, collectable edition features a cover illustrated by Alison Bechdel, The New York Times bestselling author of Fun Home, and a new foreword by the inimitable Patricia Lockwood.

Alison Bechdel

From her pygmy goat farm in Vermont, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel wonders: Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathing memoir about her own greed and privilege? 
 
But how is she supposed to sit here writing a book when the world hangs on a thread? 
 
In this hilariously skewering comic novel, Alison is existentially irked by a climate-challenged world and a country on the brink of civil war. 
 
Her first graphic memoir about growing up with her taxidermist father has been adapted into a highly successful TV series, Death and Taxidermy. It’s a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group. 
 
As the TV show racks up Emmy after Emmy, Alison’s own envy spirals. Why couldn’t she be the writer for a wildly popular reality TV series which shows people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life?! 
 
In Spent, the celebrated, bestselling author of the modern classic Fun Home presents a laugh-out-loud and passionately political work of autofiction, and once again proves that “nobody does it better” (New York Times) than the real Alison Bechdel.

Alison Bechdel

Books by Alison Bechdel

Articles featuring Alison Bechdel

‘You have to let things die’: how Alison Bechdel’s exercise memoir became a matter of life and death

Books to read if you’re considering psychotherapy

6 unforgettable fathers in literature

17 mesmerising graphic novels

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