Pushwagners Soft City

The legendary Norwegian pop artist Pushwagner’s scathing comics masterpiece—lost for decades, and never before published in the U.S.—is an epic vision of a single day in a world gone wrong: a brightly smiling, disturbingly familiar dystopia of towering skyscrapers, omnipresent surveillance, and endless distant war. “CLEAN BOMB THE HAPPY-HAPPY WAY,” blares the morning paper. “Heil Hilton!” barks an overlord on the news. Welcome to Soft City. Now don’t be late for work. This NYRC edition is a giant-sized hardcover extra-thick paper and spot-color throughout.

This is the story of a girl and a boy and and a deserted reservoir. The girl wants only to impress her mother, and finds the perfect challenge to prove herself. The boy suffers a tragedy, becomes fixated with a lost memento and makes it his mission to find it. The water is where, one day, the two will meet. Cormorance is a story of an accidental encounter, an unbreakable bond, and the redemptive force of connecting with the natural world. A wordless, purely visual story, it is - like any work by Nick Hayes - a book of the utmost beauty, and a wonder to hold in your hand.

A surreal and stunningly beautiful graphic novel about death, mourning, and family by one of the most promising young artists working today. “We buried one of dad’s lungs,” announces the narrator of The Tenderness of Stones. The lung is so large it takes three men to carry it—and that is just the beginning. The family looks on as, under the dispassionate orders of anonymous white-clad strangers, their father is disassembled, piece by piece: His nose is removed from his face and tied, temporarily, to his neck; his other lung is pulled out and he is forced to lug it around in a cart; his mouth is pried off and stored away, leaving him mute. Beneath it all is one devastating truth: Soon, he will be gone entirely. Marion Fayolle is one of the most innovative young artists in contemporary comics, and in this startling, gorgeously drawn fable she offers a vision of family illness and grief that is by turns playful and profound, literal and lyrical. She captures the strange swirl of love, resentment, grief, and humor that comes as we watch a loved one transformed before our eyes, and learn to live without them.

This is the first major monograph on the cult Norwegian artist Hariton Pushwagner (aka Terje Brofos, b. 1940). Provocative, unconventional and wild, Pushwagner is fêted as a celebrity in his home country, renowned for his homelessness and hedonistic lifestyle and compared to a modernday Edvard Munch. Recent international exposure has also seen him enjoy growing recognition and acclaim beyond Norway. Pushwagners defining creation is the graphic novel Soft City, produced between 1969 and 1976 and set in a dehumanized, dystopian metropolis. Arguably his central work, it was a highlight of the 2008 Berlin Biennial, both timely and prescient with its epic satire on capitalism and modern life. His art also takes the form of intricate and obsessively detailed paintings, presenting a personal mythology of a world under perpetual siege from pollution, totalitarianism and mass destruction. This book, which accompanies the artists first international touring solo exhibition, includes critical writings on Soft City, the silkscreen series A Day in the Life of Family Man, and the intricate Apocalypse frieze of paintings, the zenith of his technical and imaginative accomplishment. An interview with the artist, in which in typically colourful fashion he discusses these and other key works, and an illustrated biography of his extraordinary life complete this visually striking and compelling volume.

In the wake of the monstrous projects of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others in the twentieth century, the idea of utopia has been discredited. Yet, historian Jay Winter suggests, alongside the “major utopians” who murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world were disparate groups of people trying in their own separate ways to imagine a radically better world. This original book focuses on some of the twentieth-century’s “minor utopias” whose stories, overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag, suggest that the future need not be as catastrophic as the past. The book is organized around six key moments when utopian ideas and projects flourished in Europe: 1900 (the Paris World's Fair), 1919 (the Paris Peace Conference), 1937 (the Paris exhibition celebrating science and light), 1948 (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 1968 (moral indictments and student revolt), and 1992 (the emergence of visions of global citizenship). Winter considers the dreamers and the nature of their dreams as well as their connections to one another and to the history of utopian thought. By restoring minor utopias to their rightful place in the recent past, Winter fills an important gap in the history of social thought and action in the twentieth century.

Now in paperback, a “tender, affecting” (NYTBR) memoir unlike any other, and the first book to appear in English by the acclaimed Belgian artist Dominique Goblet. In a series of dazzling fragments—skipping through time, and from raw, slashing color to delicate black-and-white—Dominique Goblet examines the most important relationships in her life: with her partner, Guy Marc; with her daughter, Nikita; and with her parents. The result is an unnerving comedy of paternal dysfunction, an achingly ambivalent love story (with asides on Thomas Pynchon and the Beach Boys), and a searing account of childhood trauma—a dizzying, unforgettable view of a life in progress and a tour de force of the art of comics.

In a futuristic city, two mega-companies share power, while indulging in a thankless war to eliminate the other, by any means necessary. The crash of an extraterrestrial flying saucer will, perhaps, change that. This masterfully crafted, witty and irreverent graphic novel is Argentine cartoonist and graphic designer Lucas Varela's debut.

On the surface, the relationship between comics and the ‘high’ arts once seemed simple; comic books and strips could be mined for inspiration, but were not themselves considered legitimate art objects. Though this traditional distinction has begun to erode, the worlds of comics and art continue to occupy vastly different social spaces. Comics Versus Art examines the relationship between comics and the most important institutions of the art world, including museums, auction houses, and the art press. Bart Beaty's analysis centres around two questions: why were comics excluded from the history of art for most of the twentieth century, and what does it mean that comics production is now more closely aligned with the art world? Approaching this relationship for the first time through the lens of the sociology of culture, Beaty advances a completely novel approach to the comics form.

The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars from around the world. Crewe’s insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions. She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are constructed as sites of work, debate and the nation in miniature; and how politicians and officials engage with hierarchies, continuity and change. This book also proposes how to study parliaments through an anthropological lens while in conversation with other disciplines. The dive into ethnographies from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Region demolishes hackneyed geo-political categories and culminates in a new comparative theory about the contradictions in everyday political work. This important book will be of interest to anyone studying parliaments but especially those in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology; politics, legal and development studies; and international relations.