Staff Picks

A beautiful, genre-blurring graphic novel using mixed media (watercolor, pencil, collage) to weave a poetic narrative focusing on the connection between humanity and the natural world. Undone and messy, you feel as if you're getting a sneak peek into Koch's artistic process and world. So special!

 

Publisher's description:

For years, Aidan Koch's comics have been pushing the boundaries of the medium, helping reimagine what a comic can look like, and the kinds of stories it can tell. Koch has been living and working in the desert of California, turning her focus toward the ways humans and the natural world converge. Spiral and Other Stories is a triumph of that continuing process. Using watercolors, pencils, crayons, charcoals, and collage, Koch builds worlds of dense detail and vast open spaces, urgent scrawled text and long silences, telling a series of stories about people and the places they inhabit. Characters yearn for each other, even as they're pulled toward different lives. Rivers dance together and then diverge as they make their way to see the sea. With an accompanying essay by the author and critic Nicole Rudick, who explores Koch's craft and her move into environmentally focused comics, Spiral and Other Stories is a showcase of Koch's mastery of the form of comics, as a medium that can contain astonishing forms and tell new stories for our uncertain times.

 

The bond between Alessandra and her mother is delightfully threatened by a piano student. Alessandra gives "her side of the story," detailing the broad and lasting effects their encounter has on her life and her community at large in fascist Italy. For fans of (and with an afterword by) Elena Ferrante.

 

Publisher’s description:

"Alessandra witnesses her mother, an aspiring concert pianist, suffer from the inability to escape her oppressive marriage. Later, she is sent away to live with her father's relatives in the country, in the hope she’ll finally learn to submit herself to the patriarchal system and authority. But at the farm, Alessandra grows increasingly rebellious, conscious of the unjust treatment of generations of hardworking women in her family. In Rome, Alessandra meets Francesco, a charismatic anti-fascist professor, who ostensibly admires and supports her sense of independence and justice. But she soon comes to recognize that even as she respects Francesco and is keen to participate in his struggle to reclaim their country from fascism, this respect is unrequited, and that her own beloved husband is ensnared by patriarchal conventions when it comes to their relationship."--adapted from jacket.

Find Her side of the story in our catalog