Now available on Vimeo.
Please join us at at 7 p.m. as we host superstar Alison Bechdel in zoom conversation with Northampton's own Susan Stinson as they celebrate the first ebook publication of Susan's novel Venus of Chalk.
Alison Bechdel is the author of many fantastic graphic novels including most recently The Secret To Superhuman Strength — Susan and Alison have known and read each other for years and Alison had this to say about Venus of Chalk:
“This neatly-stitched tale of a latter-day home economist’s ‘glaring departures from sensible living’ is a religious experience. Under Susan Stinson’s microscopic needlework, the fabric of the phenomenal world shimmers with sublime beauty. A can of baking soda, a traffic pylon, a city bus—these things will never look the same again. Stinson lavishes the same minute reverence on her human subjects, discovering rich, sacramental meaning in their most banal small talk. This book unravels what you think you know about women and men, the freakish and the normal, shame and salvation—then mends it anew into a most surprising story.”
— Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
There is no print edition of Venus of Chalk but if you'd like signed copies of Susan's novels, Martha Moody and Spider in a Tree, or her chapbook, Belly Songs — please order below and add your request in the comments, thank you!
At once a love story and a lush comic masterpiece, Martha Moody is a speculative western which embraces the ordinary and gritty details -- as well as the magic -- of women's lives in the old west.
Stinson reads the natural world as well as Scripture, searching for meaning. But instead of the portents of an angry god, what she finds there is something numinous, complicated, and radiantly human.--Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
The Best Graphic Book of 2021 by Publishers Weekly | A New York Times Best Graphic Novel of 2021 | A New York Times Notable Book | An Autostraddle Best Queer Book of the Year | A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year | A St.
CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED, NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Time Magazine #1 Book of the Year • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist •
Winner of the Stonewall Book Award • Double finalist for the Lambda
Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and the rest of the cast of cult-fav characters. Most of them are lesbians, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis.