Essays discussion
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Have you read any of these?
I have to admit I’m not very good at reading comics (except Calvin & Hobbes! Those I devour!) I couldn’t even finish the 25 page comic-Iliad.
I suspect I just haven’t met the right style though.
No--I never knew these existed either. I knew NYRB did some children's classics, and had a poetry imprint too, but I didn't know about the graphic novels. I cut my teeth on comic books, so I still have an affinity for sequential art, but I like it more now without the capes.
If you've never tried The Complete Persepolis, you might like it. I did. The Complete Maus is also very good, but rather brutal.
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The Iran-Iraq War
Saddam decided to commit his last Tupolev 22s and the few MiG-25s modified for high-altitude bombing missions to what would be the final episode of the war of the cities. These aircraft carried out about forty night raids on Tehran, Qom, Shiraz, and Esfahan; two Tu-22s and three MiG-25s were shot down by Iranian air-superiority fighters. The Iranians mobilized a handful of Phantoms, whose crews braved the Iraqi capital’s anti-aircraft defense to bomb Baghdad and its suburbs.
For fifty-two days running Iraq fired three or four Al Hussein missiles a day at Tehran, striking both by day and by night. Tehran’s inhabitants were shocked by the brutality and regularity of the Iraqi strikes, as shown in Marjane Satrapi’s remarkable animated film Persepolis (2007). Fearing chemical attacks, countless city dwellers sought shelter in the country, further disrupting the country’s economic activity and public services. In a few weeks a third of Tehran’s population fled the city. As a precautionary measure, the Ayatollah Khomeini was evacuated to a medical clinic in the provinces.
What I liked about Persepolis was that it made the people of Iran seem like people. I remember the Hostage Crisis very well back in '79, and since then, the view from here of Iran has been slanted, to say the least.
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
“The great male writers of the European tradition, be it Proust, Tolstoy, Turgenev, deemed that those most inspiring to them existed in a white aristocracy,” he says. “You read those books and you wouldn’t even know that people of colour existed in Europe. To each his own, and that was their choice. But I wanted to say: these lives, of women, and even of poor white people – these lives are worthy of literature. As Turgenev looked at the crumbling Russian empire, I look at these folks in a different crumbling empire and deemed that these are inspiring lives to an artist.”
If it shows up on this list, it's probably not in my library (yet.)
Underland: A Deep Time Journey