Stitches – A Memoir - Hardcover

Small, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393068579 ISBN 13: 9780393068573

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009

Synopsis

One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die. In Stitches, Small, the award-winning children's illustrator and author, re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. As the images painfully tumble out, one by one, we gain a ringside seat at a gothic family drama where David-a highly anxious yet supremely talented child-all too often became the unwitting object of his parents' buried frustration and rage. Believing that they were trying to do their best, David's parents did just the reverse. Edward Small, a Detroit physician, who vented his own anger by hitting a punching bag, was convinced that he could cure his young son's respiratory problems with heavy doses of radiation, possibly causing David's cancer. Elizabeth, David's mother, tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding, ran the Small household under a cone of silence where emotions, especially her own, were hidden. Depicting this coming-of-age story with dazzling, kaleidoscopic images that turn nightmare into fairy tale, Small tells us of his journey from sickly child to cancer patient, to the troubled teen whose risky decision to run away from home at sixteen-with nothing more than the dream of becoming an artist-will resonate as the ultimate survival statement. A silent movie masquerading as a book, Stitches renders a broken world suddenly seamless and beautiful again. Finalist for the 2009 National Book Award (Young Adult); finalist for two 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (Best Writer/Artist: Nonfiction; Best Reality-Based Work).

About this title

Review:

With its mixture of stark realism and devilish fantasy, Stitches achieves a vibrant emotionalism that's rare in both memoirs and graphic work of this kind. It's never sentimental, but it may well move you to tears.--Ken Tucker "Shelf Life "

One word. Phenomenal....If you haven't read a graphic novel before, let this be your first. I cannot say enough about this book, which will be released in September and is something to look out for. Highly Recommended. I reluctantly give this novel 5 stars; reluctantly, only because there aren't 6 stars to give out.--Jeff Rivera

Starred Review. Emotionally raw, artistically compelling and psychologically devastating graphic memoir of childhood trauma....Graphic narrative at its most cathartic.

A beautifully drawn, tragicomic graphic memoir about a childhood from hell.

Stitches is one of the most compelling books I've read in a long time. David Small, with his ground-breaking work, has elevated the art of the graphic novel and brought it to new creative heights.--Stan Lee, co-creator of Spider-Man and other Marvel Comics

From the Back Cover:

"David Small presents us with a profound and moving gift of graphic literature that has the look of a movie and reads like a poem. . . . We know that we are in the hands of a master."--Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist

"David Small's Stitches is aptly named. With surgical precision, the author pierces into the past and, with great artistry, seals the wound inflicted on a small child by cruel and unloving parents. Stitches is as intensely dramatic as a woodcut novel of the silent movie era and as fluid as a contemporary Japanese manga. It breaks new ground for graphic novels."--Françoise Mouly, art editor, The New Yorker, and editorial director, TOON Books

"David Small evokes the mad scientific world of the 1950s beautifully. Small is an innocent lamb, a sensitive boy, caught in a nightmare situation. Capturing body language and facial expressions subtly, Stitches becomes in Small's skillful hands a powerful story, an emotionally charged autobiography."--Robert Crumb, author of The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb

"In Stitches, David Small, one of our most gifted storytellers, exposes the deepest part of a painful youth--as cathartic and disturbing as memoirs get. This one will resonate long after you put it down."--Harry Bliss, cover artist for The New Yorker

"Add David Small's book to the illustrated bible of artists who have had to will themselves--invent themselves--and ultimately seize success as the only way to keep the gritty, dark beginning of a home life from snuffing them out altogether."--Jack Gantos, author of Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, finalist for the National Book Award

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0393068579
• ISBN 13: 9780393068573
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336