NW
By Zadie Smith
“Smith’s piercing new novel, her first in seven years, traces the friendship of two women who grew up in a housing project in northwest London, their lives disrupted by fateful choices and the brutal efficiency of chance. The narrative edges forward in fragments, uncovering truths about identity and money and sex with incandescent language that, for all of its formal experimentation, is intimate and searingly direct.”
BUILDING STORIES
By Chris Ware
“Ware’s innovative graphic novel deepens and enriches the form by breaking it apart. Packaged in a large box like a board game, the project contains 14 ‘easily misplaced elements’ — pamphlets, books, foldout pages — that together follow the residents of a Chicago triplex (and one anthropomorphized bee) through their ordinary lives. In doing so, it tackles universal themes including art, sex, family and existential loneliness in a way that’s simultaneously playful and profound.”
via NYTimes’ “10 Best Books of 2012”
Congratulations to both Zadie and Chris for writing two of the 10 best books of the year! We’re thrilled to have them as our closing guests for the season on December 11 and hope you’ll join us in welcoming these masters of their crafts to the stage. (It also doesn’t hurt that they’re pretty much in friend-love with each other already.)
And yet despite this haphazardness, whereby the reader pieces this fractured graphic narrative together in whatever way comes to hand, there is always a forceful sense of the steady passage of time. We see the woman’s face change, her sadness seeming to settle into its structure; and, in Ware’s many unclothed depictions of her, we see the inevitable slump and spread of her body, her shoulders hunched under a private history of tolerable defeats.
Building Stories carries, in its box of 14 books, pamphlets and Möbius comic strips, a certain buffer against criticism. Forster said, “One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it,” and I’m fearful of a related effect here. Ware’s work is so impressive – the composition, the structure, the detail, the art – that it’s tempting to switch off critical faculties; or, worse, fail to notice that they’ve been switched off. (Hang on though, that doesn’t sound so bad.) At the same time, why should a publication as different as this be judged in the same terms as those anodyne, anaemic books without pictures?
But the format also troubled me a little. A collection of stories to be read in any order always risks seeming like an abdication of responsibility by the writer, though I admit that my response (“Just tell me what order to read it in!”) might be mostly to do with my own completist and obsessive impulses….Yet the conceit worked for me. There seemed to be a direction built in to my random reading order: from the gold-spined hardcover which introduces the main characters, through cycles in the life of the main heroine, to a literally tear-jerking conclusion – spliced with episodes from the life of Branford, the Best Bee in the World.
—John Self reviews Chris Ware’s new collection, Building Stories.
Ware will be at LIVE on December 11 with Zadie Smith to discuss Building Stories alongside NW. Learn more and get tickets here…
If you can’t wait for Chris Ware’s Building Stories to come out, you could always pass the time assembling his Multi-Story Building Model! It seems Ware has thought out every detail for the building, including: “Shampoo bottles sitting in the bathroom window sill? Check. Clothing rods in the closets? Check. Toilet with working lid? Check.”
And of course don’t forget to come see Chris Ware in conversation with Zadie Smith at LIVE!
Another exciting book release: Zadie Smith’s NW is on the shelves today! She’ll be coming to LIVE this fall with Chris Ware to discuss her new novel along with Ware’s latest graphic novel, Building Stories. If you can’t get to a bookstore right now, read an excerpt from NW here.
And if you want more Zadie Smith, get a glimpse of her thoughts on NW in this interview for Foyles. She also shared some of her favorite titles and authors, and guess who made the list? In Smith’s own words:
“There’s no writer alive whose work I love more than Chris Ware. The only problem is it takes him ten years to draw these things and then I read them in a day and have to wait another ten years for the next one.”
Luckily, we only have to wait one month for the release of Ware’s Building Stories. If you’re a fan of either Smith or Ware, come see them join in conversation at LIVE this fall! You can purchase tickets on Friday for this event—but if you want them now, become a Friend of the NYPL!
A panel from Chris Ware’s upcoming release, Building Stories, which will take the form of a box set rather than the traditional book.
