As a memoirist who writes about adventures in rural America, I wanted to learn how an Iranian American man experienced life off the grid in a tiny home in rural Idaho. The fact that This Country is also a graphic memoir made it that much more appealing as the graphic form seems well-suited to tense subject matter (plus it’s fun and easy to read). The result is a lightness about experiences like guns, politics, and race that would feel harder without the images.
I love the depictions of how Mahdavian and his wife navigate relationships with neighbors and locals. The illustrations convey the delight Mahdavian experienced living in this place along with reflections on times that didn’t feel funny as they were happening.
A gorgeously illustrated debut graphic memoir about belonging, identity, and making a home in the remote American West, by New Yorker cartoonist Navied Madhavian.
Before Navied Mahdavian moved from San Francisco in November 2016 to an off-grid cabin rural Idaho, one of the most remote and wild areas of the American West, he had never fished, gardened, hiked, hunted, or lived in a snowy place. But there, he could own land and start a family - the millennial dream. Over the course of the next three years, he leaned into the wonders of the natural landscape and found himself adjusting…
I appreciated this book’s up-close examination and meditation on snails. Bailey, bedridden by an unknown illness, discovers purpose in her own disrupted life by tending to a wild snail that arrives in a pot of violets.
I love watching snails and slugs and have been curious how they eat after I watched one chomp the petals of a buttercup and another gorge itself in doggie doo. One of the first things Bailey notices about the snail is a square-shaped snail bite on paper. I wanted to know more! Snails have teeth? Why was the hole square shaped?
While an illness keeps her bedridden, Elisabeth Bailey watches a wild snail that has taken up residence in a terrarium alongside her bed. She enters the rhythm of life of this mysterious creature, and comes to a greater understanding of her own confined place in the world. In a work that beautifully demonstrates the rewards of closely observing nature, she shares the inspiring and intimate story of her close encounter with Neohelix albolabris - a common woodland snail.
Intrigued by the snail's world - from its strange anatomy to its mysterious courtship activities - she becomes a fascinated and amused…
I picked up We the Animals when Torres won the National Book Award for Blackouts – it was a paperback and slim. I was immediately drawn in by the shattering loss of innocence the protagonist has with his mother and the bond with his two brothers. It's a story about masculinity and a boy discovering his own desires.
The prose is like a scalpel – a finely crafted knife edge, a precise instrument wielded deftly; I saw blood before I knew I’d been cut. The story is a joyous rough-and-tumble mixed with trauma and a slippery ending that captures the experience of not knowing what is real. Reads as truth because it is. Heart-breaking.
Three brothers tear their way through childhood - smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from rubbish, hiding when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn - he's Puerto Rican, she's white. Barely out of childhood themselves, their love is a serious, dangerous thing. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins…
When the 2008 recession hit, thirty-three-year-old me was single, underemployed, and needing a change. I returned to school, but my first term was not the liberating experience I had hoped. My gloom deepened. All I wanted to do was ride my bike. Then, an email sparked an idea that would have me pedaling all summer. In 2010, I departed from my home in Eugene, OR, to a historic roads conference in Washington, DC.
Propelled by my own grit, I never anticipated the dangers of suffocating heat in the heartland of the vast kindness of strangers. Heidi Across America offers a journey to self-love and respect for the people and spirit of place as pathways to find connection and home.
