Book picks similar to
Poetry Is Useless by Anders Nilsen


graphic-novels
comics
graphic-novel
poetry

Rascal


Jean-Luc Deglin - 2017
    My cat. I didn't ask for him, he just sort of... happened to me. But that's just how it works sometimes, isn't it?When a mysterious mewling package arrives in the mail, one busy young woman's life changes forever. Rascal lives up to his name, filling every day with wild adventures and long naps: brave expeditions into closets, fierce battles with curtains, and wrestling with slumbering giants... Sometimes she's tempted to throw him out the window. He's lucky he's cute.Over 128 pages, Jean-Luc Deglin paints a purring portrait of one unforgettable black cat, an elegant inky swirl in a world of striking blue tones. Hilarious and heartwarming, exasperating and enchanting, Rascal captures the full range of emotions that come with keeping God's cutest killing machine as a pet.If you love cats, or dream of having one, this book is dedicated to you. Once you bring Rascal into your life, you'll wonder how you ever lived without him.

Feelings: A Story in Seasons


Manjit Thapp - 2021
    From the spark of possibility and jolt of creativity in High Summer, to the need for release from anxiety and pressure during Monsoon, to the desolation and numbness of Winter, Thapp implores us to consider the seasons of our own emotional journeys.Articulating and validating the range of feelings we all experience, this is a book that allows us to feel connected and comforted by the experiences that make us human.

Spaniel Rage


Vanessa Davis - 2005
    . . She just has a funny, truthful voice.” —Audrey NiffeneggerVanessa Davis’s autobiography, more observational than confessional, delighted readers ten years ago when she first began telling stories about her life in New York as a young single Jewish woman. Spaniel Rage is filled with frank and immediate pencil-drawn accounts of dating woes, misunderstandings between her and her mother, and conversations with friends.Her keen observation of careless words spoken casually is refreshingly honest, yet never condemning. Unabashedly, Davis offers up gently self-deprecating anecdotes about her anxieties and wry truths about the contradictions of life in the big city. These comics are sexy, funny, lonely, beautiful, spare, and very smart—the finest work from a natural storyteller.

Shoplifter


Michael Cho - 2014
    Studying English literature in college, she imagined writing a successful novel and leading the idealized life of an author. But she’s been working at the same advertising agency for the past five years and the only thing she’s written is . . . copy. Corrina knows there must be more to life, but and she faces the same question as does everyone in her generation: how to find it? Here is the brilliant debut graphic novel about a young woman’s search for happiness and self-fulfillment in the big city.(With two-color illustrations throughout.)

Arsène Schrauwen


Olivier Schrauwen - 2014
    Together they would build something deemed impossible: a modern utopia in the wilderness but not before Arsene falls in love with his cousin s wife, Marieke. Whether delirious from love or a fever-inducing jungle virus, Arsene s loosening grip on reality is mirrored by the graphic novel reader s uncertainty of what is imagined or real by Arsene. This first full-length graphic novel from the critically-acclaimed Olivier Schrauwen is an engrossing, sometimes funny, slightly surreal and often beautiful narrative."

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge


Josh Neufeld - 2009
    follows each of the six from the hours before Katrina struck to its horrific aftermath. Here is Denise, a sixth-generation New Orleanian who will experience the chaos of the Superdome; the Doctor, whose unscathed French Quarter home becomes a refuge for those not so lucky; Abbas and his friend Mansell, who face the storm from the roof of Abbas's family-run market; Kwame, a pastor's son whose young life will remain wildly unsettled well into the future; and Leo, a comic-book fan, and his girlfriend, Michelle, who will lose everything but each other. We watch as they make the wrenching decision between staying and evacuating. And we see them coping not only with the outcome of their own decisions but also with those made by politicians, police, and others like themselves—decisions that drastically affect their lives, but over which they have no control.Overwhelming demand has propelled A.D. from its widely-read early Internet installments to this complete hardcover edition. Scheduled for publication on the fourth anniversary of the hurricane, it shines an uncanny light on the devastating truths and human triumphs of New Orleans after the deluge.

Capacity


Theo Ellsworth - 2008
    Ellsworth's careful line gives shape to profound and profoundly silly thoughts alike, bringing a visionary, startling new life to the doubts and hopes that are so familiar to everyone. This is the 2010 reprint of Theo Ellsworth's debut graphic novel. Capacity.

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D.


Dash Shaw - 2009
    The latter three-quarters will collect his acclaimed short stories from MOME, as well as several little-seen stories from elsewhere, and a new 20-page story.The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. is Shaw’s first book since his breakthrough graphic novel of 2008, Bottomless Belly Button, which was named Publishers Weekly’s best graphic novel of 2008, one of Entertainment Weekly’s top ten books of 2008, and one of Amazon.com’s top ten graphic novels of the year, amongst numerous other accolades.The book also collects Shaw’s acclaimed, genre-bending short stories from MOME, including “Look Forward, First Son of Terra Two,” a remarkable story of two lovers traveling in opposite directions… in time. Also featured: “Galactic Funnels,” the 2008 Ignatz Award nominee for “Outstanding Story,” about the parasitic relationship between an artist and his lover/mentor; “Satellite CMYK,” a sci-fi mindwarp that ingeniously drives the narrative through Shaw’s masterful control of color, and “Making the Abyss,” a fictionalized story of a surreal film set filled with nuclear tanks, hot tubs, and blind ambition.“Like the very best illustrated fiction, Shaw’s work moves between pathos and humor, between the fantastic and the familiar.”—The Christian Science Monitor“Shaw’s style deftly combines cartoon drawings with a slavish attention to detail…Masterfully using the comics medium to juggle all the different characters, weaving their stories together seamlessly.”—Publishers Weekly

Everywhere Antennas


Julie Delporte - 2014
    Told in the first person, it offers diary-like entries from an anonymous narrator who is undergoing a nervous breakdown and struggling to hold together a failing relationship. In soft, flowing colored pencil, Delporte shows her narrator coming to terms with a rare and misunderstood sensitivity to the radiation emitted by the televisions, cell phones, and computers that permeate urban life. On each page a few words are paired with an image or two, conveying a moment or a thought simply but effectively. Over the course of the book, the anonymous narrator moves from place to place, looking for solutions to her melancholy in the countryside via isolation and in the city with friends, sometimes turning to medication for answers. Throughout, her emotional and intellectual landscape receives as much attention as her physical surroundings.Everywhere Antennas is the portrait of a woman caught in the margins, struggling to balance the demands of technology and modern life with the need to find meaningful relationships and work. Roughly hewn figures, sketched in pencil crayon on brightly contrasting backgrounds, populate the pages of this flowing, emotive work. With Everywhere Antennas, Delporte proves herself a master craftswoman of heartbreakingly personal, beautifully literary graphic fiction.

Blood Stain, Volume 1


Linda Šejić - 2016
    Chemistry major, Elliot Torres has been unable to keep a steady job and eventually accepts a job by a rumored mad scientist Dr. Vlad Stein. Humorous hijinks ensue as their collaboration becomes epic.

Black Hole


Charles Burns - 2005
    We learn from the out-set that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways—from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable)—but once you've got it, that's it. There's no turning back. As we inhabit the heads of several key characters—some kids who have it, some who don't, some who are about to get it—what unfolds isn't the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it, or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself—the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape. And then the murders start. As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it—back when it wasn't exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skin…

Upgrade Soul


Ezra Claytan Daniels - 2018
    Can the original Hank and Molly coexist in the same world as their clones? In Upgrade Soul, McDuffie Award-winning creator Ezra Claytan Daniels asks probing questions about what shapes our identity-Is it the capability of our minds or the physicality of our bodies? Is a newer, better version of yourself still you? This page-turning graphic novel follows the lives of Hank and Molly as they discover the harsh truths.

Paying for It


Chester Brown - 2011
    In his 1992 book, The Playboy, he explored his personal history with pornography. His bestselling 2003 graphic novel, Louis Riel, was a biographical examination of an extreme political figure. The book won wide acclaim and cemented Brown's reputation as a true innovator.Paying for It is a natural progression for Brown as it combines the personal and sexual aspects of his autobiographical work with the polemical drive of Louis Riel. Brown calmly lays out the facts of how he became not only a willing participant in but a vocal proponent of one of the world's most hot-button topics—prostitution. While this may appear overly sensational and just plain implausible to some, Brown's story stands for itself. Paying for It offers an entirely contemporary exploration of sex work—from the timid john who rides his bike to his escorts, wonders how to tip so as not to offend, and reads Dan Savage for advice, to the modern-day transactions complete with online reviews, seemingly willing participants, and clean apartments devoid of clichéd street corners, drugs, or pimps.Complete with a surprise ending, Paying for It provides endless debate and conversation about sex work and will be the most talkedabout graphic novel of 2011.

How to Be Perfectly Unhappy


Matthew Inman - 2017
    Matthew Inman—Eisner Award-winning creator of The Oatmeal and #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You—serves yet another helping of thoughtful hilarity in this charming, illustrated gift book for anyone who is irked by the question: "Are you happy?"In How To Be Perfectly Unhappy, Inman explores the surprising benefits of forgetting about “happiness,” and embracing instead the meaningful activities that keep us busy and interested and fascinated.

The Alcoholic


Jonathan Ames - 2008
    Unfortunately, the first place his search takes him is the bottom of a bottle as he careens from one off-kilter encounter to another in search of himself.