This Beautiful, Ridiculous City

This Beautiful, Ridiculous City is a visually elaborate, full-colour graphic memoir about a literature, culture and New York A homecoming in reverse, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City is about moving across the world to escape a deeply abusive relationship, about recovering one''s memories from fragmentation through writing, about finding one''s way home through food, and about New York through an immigrant perspective. Kay Sohini''s New York City is more diverse than depicted in the nineties sitcoms the author grew up with, infinitely more ridiculous than captured in any cultural production, and more beautiful than she could have hoped for. This Beautiful, Ridiculous City uses the personal as a window into gendered abuse and its effect on memory, as well as into cultural imperialism, migration and assimilation. It is also about the implications of deeply loving and calling a place home where you are, on some level, always seen as foreign and the Other.

Autorentext
Kay Sohini is a writer and artist based in New York City. With the support of the Mellon Foundation and the ACLS, she drew her doctoral dissertation in English literature as a comic. Her work has been commissioned by the Washington Post, Nib, NYC Department of Education and others. This Beautiful, Ridiculous City is her first book.

Klappentext

At once heartrending and enlivening, this phenomenal graphic memoir is not another ode to New York but a meditation on how easy it is to fall beautifully, ridiculously in love

AN OBSERVER GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE MONTH

'This is such a rich book, both visually and narratively' - Isabel Greenberg, author of Young Hag

'A ravishing new take on a storied city' - Katherine May, New York Times bestselling author of, Wintering and Enchantment

On her first night in New York, Kay Sohini sits on the tarmac of JFK airport making an inventory of all she's left behind in India. Kay realises two things: she's finally made it to the city that made her in celluloid and prose from across the Pacific - Kerouac, Friends, Plath - and that trauma she's endured in her relationship has left gaping holes in her memory.

In New York, at last, Kay has room to begin the work of piecing herself back together through art and food. But as her personal story becomes a window onto a mystifying metropolis both inhospitable and inspiring to the many who call it home, Kay embarks on an electric exploration of how to forge the self and a life of one's own today.

At once heartrending and enlivening, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City is not another ode to New York but a phenomenal meditation on how easy it is to fall beautifully, ridiculously in love with places - and indeed people - that do not always love us back but somehow still save us in weird, unexpected ways.

'A stunning graphic memoir... a praise-song to her adopted home... with its glorious, candy-coloured drawings' - FINANCIAL TIMES