Lee Lai whose debut graphic novel, Stone Fruit, was published in May by Fantagraphics.
INTRODUCED BY
Jillian Tamaki author or coauthor of nine books, including Boundless, published in 2017 by Drawn & Quarterly.
Lee Lai is a cartoonist who centers bodies: how they are held, the space between them, the way they touch and are touched. Bodies communicate as much as words in her work, and they illuminate the underlying truths of the overlapping relationships in Stone Fruit. At the beginning of Lai’s debut graphic novel, we see Bron and Ray’s relationship at its best: caring for Ray’s little niece, Nessie. In the forest, the couple running wild and anchored by the exuberant child, the world kind of falls away. But when their coupledom starts to fissure, both women are set adrift and left to confront fractured family ties alone. Bron returns to her childhood home and strict family, looking for understanding, while Ray attempts to broker a detente with her resentful sister, Nessie’s single mom. Personal bonds—romantic, platonic, familial— are examined unflinchingly and tenderly in Stone Fruit. The complicated nature of care is threaded through much of Lai’s work, which has ranged from zines to webcomics to now a full-length graphic novel.
I am curious as to your path to comics. Were you always focused on comics as a medium? Or did you start with an interest in drawing or writing first?
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
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READING The Museum of Human History felt like listening to a great harmonic hum. After I finished it I found the hum lingering in my ears. Its echo continued for days.
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SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
The History of a Difficult Child
MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
The Sorrows of Others
AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
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