Buon Anno!

 

vi auguriamo uno splendido 2026 di nuovo con una copertina del New Yorker. Questa è uscita sul primo numero del 2024 della rivista ed è stata disegnata da Bianca Bagnarelli, illustratrice e fumettista italiana. 

“Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?”

In 2014, The New Yorker showcased “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?,” an excerpt from Chast’s illustrated memoir about her parents’ challenging final years. Well into their nineties, the elder Chasts, a pair of retired Brooklyn teachers, resisted any acknowledgment of their own mortality, as well as efforts to prepare. With tenderness and humor, irritation and dismay, Chast captures a difficult stage of the child-parent relationship in a manner that will resonate with anyone who has cared for aging relatives, and with those who haven’t. The full-length version won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, and exemplifies one of Chast’s many gifts: what her colleague Adam Gopnik describes as the “weight beneath apparent whimsy” of her work. Roz Chast, The New Yorker

sempre piacevole (ri)leggere Roz Chast. 

Colette, Pig-Pen and Intelligence

che cos'hanno in comune Colette, Pig-Pen e l'intelligenza? Che sono tutti qui, questa settimana. Di Colette, che sta godendo di grande popolarità in America al momento, ci parla Michael LaPointe sul New Yorker:

Physical beauty was always important to Colette. She prized the body over the mind—as suggested by the title of Judith Thurman’s excellent biography, “Secrets of the Flesh”—and believed that focussing on the physical was essential to writing “like a woman, without anything moralistic or theoretical.” 

di Pig-Pen ci parla Elif Batuman su Astra: 

Readers’ love of Pig-Pen was reportedly a burden to Charles M. Schulz. Much as Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill off Sherlock Holmes in 1893 only to bring him back nine years later, so did Schultz write Pig-Pen out of the series from 1967 to 1976. Pig-Pen himself is not uninfluenced by Conan Doyle: he is, in essence, a walking clue. “I can tell just where you’ve been all week from the dirt on your clothes,” Charlie Brown tells a consternated Pig-Pen in August 1965, proceeding to rattle off a series of dusty locations.] [... Discussion of genetics and intelligence is particularly fraught because of how it’s been twisted by racists to justify oppression and violence. Simply typing the words “genes” and “intelligence” in the same sentence can be enough to raise eyebrows.

infine Tom Bartlett affronta la controversa questione del rapporto genetica-intelligenza umana:

Research on human intelligence tends to be a magnet for controversy, with papers leading to protests and speakers drawing scorn. [...] Discussion of genetics and intelligence is particularly fraught because of how it’s been twisted by racists to justify oppression and violence. Simply typing the words “genes” and “intelligence” in the same sentence can be enough to raise eyebrows. The Chronicle of Higher Education

 

Neil Gaiman va dai Simpsons

Lo scrittore e fumettista inglese Neil Gaiman è entrato a far parte dell'episodio dei Simpsons in onda domenica su Fox. "So Neil Gaiman's gone yellow. After winning the Newbery medal, the Carnegie award, as many Hugos as you can shake a stick at and – of course – the Nax Und Moritz Award for Best Foreign Writer, on Sunday he'll finally win the only literary award that really matters: an appearance on The Simpsons". guardian.

Starting from Happy

Starting from Happy (Scribner) è una storia d'amore - molto divertente - scritta a fumetti da Patricia Marx. Ecco quel che dice di sé e del libro l'autrice:

Starting from Happy is your first illustrated novel; your cartoons are speckled throughout its pages. Can you tell me about your process?

Oh, I am not good enough to have a process. I made a lot of mistakes, so I wasted about a rain forest of paper. I used computer paper and magic markers with thin points. My father sold stationery when I was growing up, so it kind of kills me that I have to pay for office supplies. 

Per saperne di più cliccare qui.

Dante a fumetti

"I, Dante, will tell you the story of my trip to the after world... but will I come back?" So begins Seymour Chwast's noirish graphic adaptation of what is perhaps the world's most famous tale of spiritual tourism, the Divine Comedy. The list of artists who have tried their hand at visually interpreting Dante's epic is both long and distinguished, but it would be safe to say that Chwast, a co-founder of Push Pin Studios and a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, may have had the most fun with the subject since Dante himself. newyorker.