Click here to win a copy of David Small's graphic novel Stitches: A Memoir |
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Award-winning children's author and illustrator David Small recounts a Kafka-esque childhood from hell in the graphic memoir Stitches. |
19 Nov. '09:
Thomas Pynchon's
Inherent Vice
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A childhood from hell
One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die.
In the searing yet redemptive graphic memoir Stitches, the award-winning children’s illustrator and author re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. As the images painfully tumble out, one by one, we gain a ringside seat at a gothic family drama where David—a highly anxious yet supremely talented child—all too often became the unwitting object of his parents’ buried frustration and rage.
Depicting this coming-of-age story with dazzling, kaleidoscopic images that turn nightmare into fairy tale, Small tells us of his journey from sickly child to cancer patient, to the troubled teen whose risky decision to run away from home at sixteen—with nothing more than the dream of becoming an artist—will resonate as the ultimate survival statement.
Click for more on Stitches: A Memoir.
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