Alison Bechdel

From the author of Fun Home, a profound graphic memoir of Bechdel's lifelong love affair with exercise, set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times Comics and cultural superstar Alison Bechdel delivers a deeply layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the 60s ("Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!") to the existential oddness of present-day spin class. Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. She turns for enlightenment to Eastern philosophers and literary figures, including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence in the great outdoors appears in moving conversation with the author’s own. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others. A heartrendingly comic chronicle for our times.

A graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be.Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.

Tras nueve años de silencio, llega la obra de madurez de Alison Bechdel. Un libro emocionante y necesario. Durante toda su vida, Alison Bechdel ha buscado un secreto escurridizo. Ha rastreado en sus libros preferidos, en las vidas de sus ídolos, en el celibato, en el poliamor, en el activismo y en la terapia psicológica, pero sobre todo en su pasión casi obsesiva por hacer ejercicio: esquí, running, kárate, ciclismo, yoga# lo que fuera. Sin embargo, al hacerse mayor, el cuerpo ya no siempre le sigue, quizá porque el secreto más importante de todos no esté donde una espera. En su tercer libro de memorias gráficas, tras Fun Home y ¿Eres mi madre?, Alison Bechdel teje un relato íntimo sobre la identidad, la mortalidad, la adicción, la alegría, la fortuna y las preocupaciones de toda una generación. El secreto de la fuerza sobrehumana es una crónica extraordinaria e hilarante sobre los arcanos de la búsqueda de nuestro lugar en el mundo.

From the author of Fun Home -- the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and othersFor twenty-five years Bechdel’s path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a “rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down” (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form.Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis.Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends -- academics, social workers, bookstore clerks -- fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents.Bechdel fuses high and low culture -- from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory -- in a serial graphic narrative “suitable for humanists of all persuasions.”

In this graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father.Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.

"La narración de la autora se muestra ágil, vivaz y corrosivamente ácida ante el lector y sus trazos se perfilan hasta definir un perfecto mosaico que te transporta hasta la casa de Bechdel." Inés Martín Rodrigo, ABC"Divertida, irreverente y valiente." Publishers Weekly"Me sorprendió el gran dominio literario que aquella mujer poseía para mostrar, lejos de los estereotipos al uso, el lado más cotidiano y a veces hasta cómico de la homosexualidad femenina." Felipe Hernández Cava, El Mundo"Sus lesbianas chifladas parecen más cuerdas que cualquiera de nosotros,además de bellas." Dwight Garner, The New York Times"De Alison Bechdel se dice que es, desde que publicó su primera tira cómica en 1983,  una "institución contracultural", y se cita la opinión de una revista, Comics Journal, que sostiene que su arte "destila los placeres de Friends y The Nation; reconocemos nuestro mundo en ella, con sus penas y alegrías". Doy estas referencias porque el  mundo de la novela gráfica me resulta totalmente ajeno y seguramente me hubiera perdido esta historia si un compañero del periódico (Javier Rodríguez Marcos) no me la hubiera recomendado con insistencia." José Andrés Rojo, EL PAÍS"Bechdel me parece la mejor. Gráficamente es de veras innovadora. Su utilización de los mapas para mostrar la geografía de la acción es muy brillante. También es una extarordinaria narradora." Bryan Appleyard, The Times "El géneroautobio(gráfico) desde una perspectiva femenina ha tenido dos momentos importantes en los últimos tiempos: el primero fue Persépolis, la historia con la que la iraní Marjane Satrapi ha cosechado fama universal [...], y el segundo Fun Home, de la norteamericana Allison Bechdel." Jaime Rodríguez Z., Quimera

A collection of cartoons recounting the lives and loves of Mo and Harriet and their diverse group of lesbian friends is accompanied by an autobiographical account of the difficulty of finding a permanent relationship

In Alison Bechdel’s hilariously skewering and gloriously cast new comic novel confection, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel, running a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont, is existentially irked by a climate-challenged world and a citizenry on the brink of civil war. Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathingly self-critical memoir about her own greed and privilege? Meanwhile, Alison’s first graphic memoir about growing up with her father, a taxidermist who specialized in replicas of Victorian animal displays, has been adapted into a highly successful TV series. It’s a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group (recognizable as characters, now middle-aged and living communally in Vermont, from Bechdel’s beloved comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For). As the TV show Death and Taxidermy racks up Emmy after Emmy—and when Alison’s Pauline Bunyanesque partner Holly posts an instructional wood-chopping video that goes viral—Alison’s own envy spirals. Why couldn’t she be the writer for a critically lauded and wildly popular reality TV show…like Queer Eye...showing people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life? Spent’s rollicking and masterful denouement—making the case for seizing what’s true about life in the world at this moment, before it’s too late—once again proves that “nobody does it better” (New York Times Book Review) than the real Alison Bechdel.