Portland author and artist Joe Sacco won a 2014 PNBA Book Award for his 244-page illustrated panorama, The Great War. This month on Lithub, he has a stunning piece about our current crisis and how it might be seen in the future. It is titled Will We One Day Honor the Veterans of the Great …
I want to talk guilty pleasures, but I realized that I don’t feel guilty about anything that I read. The only time I feel guilty about books is when I waste time with a crappy book when I could be spending time with something awesome. But, there are books that other people try to make …
Receiving a book award for a book without any words was a bit of a surprise and has left me slightly uneasy. It is not as though I think of my book The Great War – a 24-sheet foldout illustration depicting the Battle of the Somme – as unworthy of attention and enormous sales. It …
The Book Awards Committee of the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Association (the pro-indie bookstore professional organization behind this blog) announced the six 2014 PNBA Book Award winners today! Over the next month, nwbooklovers.org will publish essays from the winning authors and local independent northwest stores will host the winners for celebrations. Committee comments for the winners (as …
“Swiftly and skillfully, Joe Sacco’s new masterpiece draws the reader into the tortured world of the Gaza Strip, using his present-day return there as a documentary framing device for what obsesses him, two little-known, large-scale killings of civilians in 1956, the greatest massacre of Palestinians on Palestinian soil. Sacco’s ace is his uncanny skill at characterization—a …
“Footnotes in Gaza is energized by Sacco’s relentless reporting, self-deprecating asides (‘And thus begins the aggravating mismatch pitting hapless cartoonist against wily ex-guerrilla,’) and the design sense that he brings to each of its 389 pages. The graphic investigation provides essential context for the bitterness that keeps Palestinians and Israelis at one another’s throats. And …
