Book cover of The Man Without Talent

Book description

A Japanese manga legend's autobiographical graphic novel about a struggling artist and the first full-length work by the great Yoshiharu Tsuge available in the English language.

Yoshiharu Tsuge is one of comics' most celebrated and influential artists, but his work has been almost entirely unavailable to English-speaking audiences. The Man…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Man Without Talent as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Like Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes, this graphic novel fuses Camus’s Sisyphus with Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” as a test of character: would you live your life over again for eternity?

Sukezo fails the test miserably. He’s a talented cartoonist, but it doesn’t pay the bills, so he shuffles through half-hearted money-making schemes (including an aptly Sisyphean rock-selling venture), succeeding only at making himself, his wife, and his young child miserable and increasingly hateful towards themselves and each other. 

Sukezo becomes the bad Nietzsche of popular misconception. If only success and esteem count, better to be nothing at…

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Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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