On sale date: January 31, 2023
The internationally acclaimed activist follows up her satirical work of graphic medicine with this collection of humorous comics essays about how historical and societal shifts have altered — and perhaps destroyed — "romantic love."
The deceptively simple through-line for Swedish media personality and activist Liv Strömquist's The Reddest Rose is the question: Why does Leonardo DiCaprio date an endless string of 20-something models? Her answer — in the form of this collection of well-researched, humorous comics essays — tracks how philosophers and artists, from the Ancient Greeks to Beyoncé, conceptualized romantic love. Strömquist's signature characters, drawn in a flat, blocky style, ask each other questions and offer sharp commentary as they guide readers throughout history and the change in societies' values, from showing love/loving to getting love/being loved. (Poet Hilda "H.D." Doolittle — who was so love-stricken by a man taking off his glasses that she believed they viewed dolphins together in another dimension — lends the book its title.) Lord Byron, Socrates, Byung-Chul Han, Ezra Pound, Slavoj Žižek, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Ariadne, and many others have cameos. For the first time in English, in The Reddest Rose, Strömquist wonders: in a rationalist, consumerist world, can romantic love survive?
Praise
"[On Fruit of Knowledge]: Veers from the educational to the whimsical..." — Hillary Chute - The New York Times
"A nervy application of social theory that makes for an invigorating primer and a jarring riposte to present-day assumptions on dating, attachment, and the nuclear family." — Publishers Weekly
"If her strips are clever, angry, funny and righteous, they're also informative to an eye-popping degree." — The Guardian
"Stromquist didn't make a comic book; she made a journalistic examination with a cartoonist's eye." — AIPT Comics
"In her feminist, irreverent comics, Strömquist delights in tackling massive (even titanic) topics from surprising angles, educating readers while making them laugh and blush." — Words Without Borders
Specs
- Pages
- 184
- Format
- Paperback / Softback
- Color
- Black and white.
- Dimensions
- 6.9" × 9.7"
- ISBN-13
- 9781683964599