Books by Alison Bechdel
Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama
From the New York Times bestselling author of Fun Home, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama is a brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be.
A New York Times, USA Today, and Time Best Book of the Year
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven.
Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother — to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.
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Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama
From the best-selling author of Fun Home, Time magazine’s No. 1 Book of the Year, a brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be.
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.
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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books.
This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form.
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 a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.
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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED, NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Time Magazine #1 Book of the Year • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist •
Winner of the Stonewall Book Award • Double finalist for the Lambda Book Award •
Nominated for the GLAAD Media Award
Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir that charts her fraught relationship with her late father.
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.
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$18.99
Fun Home: The Deluxe Collector’s Edition: A Family Tragicomic
A special hardcover Deluxe Collector’s Edition of Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir and basis for the Tony Award–winning musical—featuring a cloth case with new art, a reversible jacket with new art on both sides enhanced with teal and silver foil, and sprayed edges.
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the “Fun Home.” It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a confused legacy for his daughter to resolve.
In her hands, personal history becomes a work of subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.
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$32.50
Spent: A Comic Novel
The celebrated and beloved New York Times bestselling author of the modern classic Fun Home presents a laugh-out-loud, brilliant, and passionately political work of autofiction.
In Alison Bechdel’s hilariously skewering and gloriously cast new comic novel confection, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel, running a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont, is existentially irked by a climate-challenged world and a citizenry on the brink of civil war. She wonders: Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathingly self-critical memoir about her own greed and privilege?
Meanwhile, Alison’s first graphic memoir about growing up with her father, a taxidermist who specialized in replicas of Victorian animal displays, has been adapted into a highly successful TV series. It’s a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group (recognizable as characters, now middle-aged and living communally in Vermont, from Bechdel’s beloved comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For).
As the TV show Death and Taxidermy racks up Emmy after Emmy—and when Alison’s Pauline Bunyanesque partner Holly posts an instructional wood-chopping video that goes viral—Alison’s own envy spirals. Why couldn’t she be the writer for a critically lauded and wildly popular reality TV show…like Queer Eye...showing people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life?!!
Spent’s rollicking and masterful denouement—making the case for seizing what’s true about life in the world at this moment, before it’s too late—once again proves that “nobody does it better” (New York Times Book Review) than the real Alison Bechdel.
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$32.00
The Secret To Superhuman Strength Signed Edition
Comics and cultural superstar Alison Bechdel delivers a deeply layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the 60s ("Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!") to the existential oddness of present-day spin class. Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. She turns for enlightenment to Eastern philosophers and literary figures, including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence in the great outdoors appears in moving conversation with the author’s own. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others.
A heartrendingly comic chronicle for our times.
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The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For
Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and the rest of the cast of cult-fav characters. Most of them are lesbians, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis. Bechdel’s brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends—academics, social workers, bookstore clerks—fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents. Bechdel fuses high and low culture—from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory—in a serial graphic narrative “suitable for humanists of all persuasions.”
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The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For
From the author of Fun Home—the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and others
For twenty-five years Bechdel’s path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a “rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down” (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form.
Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis.
Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends—academics, social workers, bookstore clerks—fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents.
Bechdel fuses high and low culture—from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory—in a serial graphic narrative “suitable for humanists of all persuasions.”
Copies
No copies available.
The Secret To Superhuman Strength
The Best Graphic Book of 2021 by Publishers Weekly | A New York Times Best Graphic Novel of 2021 | A New York Times Notable Book | An Autostraddle Best Queer Book of the Year | A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year | A St. Louis Post Dispatch Best Book of the Year | NPR, 12 Books NPR Staffers Loved | Shelf Awareness Best Books of 2021
From the author of Fun Home, a profoundly affecting graphic memoir of Bechdel's lifelong love affair with exercise, set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times
Comics and cultural superstar Alison Bechdel delivers a deeply layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the 60s ("Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!") to the existential oddness of present-day spin class. Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. She turns for enlightenment to Eastern philosophers and literary figures, including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence in the great outdoors appears in moving conversation with the author’s own. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others.
A heartrendingly comic chronicle for our times.
Copies
No copies available.
The Best American Comics 2011 (The Best American Series ®)
by Alison Bechdel, Matt Madden, Jessica Abel
“If you have spent a long time resisting the status quo—whether it’s in art, society, or the political world—what happens when that status quo at last gives way?
A universe of possibility opens up.”
—Alison Bechdel, from the Introduction
Featuring: Gabrielle Bell, Joe Sacco, Dash Shaw, Sabrina Jones, Chris Ware, Jillian Tamaki, Jaime Hernandez, Jeff Smith, Paul Pope, Kevin Huizenga, and others
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Dykes to Watch Out for
A collection of cartoons recounting the lives and loves of Mo and Harriet and their diverse group of lesbian friends is accompanied by an autobiographical account of the difficulty of finding a permanent relationship
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Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out for
Book 11 in the Dykes to Watch Out For series finds Alison Bechdels beloved cast of characters discovering that nothing but change is constant in our multihued terror alert system world. Mo is working her way through library school by shelving bestsellers at Bounders Books and Muzak, Sparrow and Stuart face parenthood with a mixture of ambivalence and zeal, Clarice and Toni clash over the gay marriage debate while their 10-year-old son Raffi jacks cars and slaps hos on his best friends computer, Sydneys mammogram yields very bad news, Gingers love life is finally looking up, and is a Hello Kitty thong really the best gift Lois can give 13-year-old Jonas when s/he becomes Janis? Alison Bechdel is legendary for her ability to examine global politics through the prism of dinner conversations, and this book is no exception. Sydneys doctor insists in likening her malignant cells to terrorists, Stuarts home improvement project develops disturbing parallels to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Gingers best student turns out to be her most conservative, resulting in an ideology-busting clash of red- and blue-state values.
Alison Bechdel has been writing and illustrating Dykes to Watch Out For since 1982. Her books have won multiple awards, and she was most recently a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award and two Eisner awards. She lives in Vermont and is working on a graphic memoir about her queer father.
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