Donald Nicholson-Smith

Colonial history haunts this stunning, spectral-looking graphic novel, a spiritual sequel to the author's Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures. In Misery of Love, a spiritual sequel to the acclaimed Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures, Yvan Alagb continues his interrogation of race and family in modern France. The book focuses on the dream-like memories of a woman named Clare, who is spending time with her family for her grandfather's funeral. Alagb shifts between narratives of the family, all haunted by the legacy of France's colonial subjugation of Africa. Alagb works in stormy grayscale washes, using comics, as he puts it, as "a sacred dimension which celebrates, questions and perpetuates life.... I believe that life is not damnation but grace." This is another ambitious, devastating masterpiece from one of France's best contemporary cartoonists.

An illustrated artist's memoir of the motivations, feelings, ideas, figures (including Samuel Beckett and Walter Benjamin), travels, and love affairs that have influenced his life. The writer and artist Fr d ric Pajak was ten when he began to "dream of a work that would mingle words and images...bits of adventure, collected memories, sentences, phantoms, forgotten heroes, trees, the stormy sea," but it was not until he was in his forties that this dream took form as The Wind of Things. The utterly original book that he produced is a memoir born of reading and a meditation on the lives and ideas, the motivations, feelings, and fates of some of Pajak's heroes: Samuel Beckett and the artist Bram van Velde, and, especially, Walter Benjamin, whose travels to Moscow, Naples, and Ibiza, whose experiences with hashish, whose faltering marriage and love affairs and critique of modern experience Pajak re-creates and reflects on in word and image. Pajak's moody black-and-white drawings accompany the text throughout, though their bearing on it is often indirect and all the more absorbing for that. Between word and image, the reader is drawn into a mysterious space that is all Pajak's as he seeks to evoke vanished histories and to resist a modern world more and more given over to a present without a past. With the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

One of the Globe & Mail's 100 Best Books of 2018A timely collection of work about race and immigration in Paris by one of France's most revered cult comic book artists. Yvan Alagb is one of the most innovative and provocative artists in the world of comics. In the stories gathered in Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures--drawn between 1994 and 2011, and never before available in English--he uses stark, endlessly inventive black-and-white brushwork to explore love and race, oppression and escape. It is both an extraordinary experiment in visual storytelling and an essential, deeply personal political statement. With unsettling power, the title story depicts the lives of undocumented migrant workers in Paris. Alain, a Beninese immigrant, struggles to protect his family and his white girlfriend, Claire, while engaged in a strange, tragic dance of obsession and repulsion with Mario, a retired French Algerian policeman. It is already a classic of alternative comics, and, like the other stories in this collection, becomes more urgent every day. This NYRC edition is an oversized paperback with French flaps, printed endpapers, and extra-thick paper, and features new English hand-lettering and a brand-new story, exclusive to this edition.