In the Flesh: Stories - Softcover

Shadmi, Koren

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345508718 ISBN 13: 9780345508713

Publisher: Villard, 2009

Synopsis

A graphic novel for the twenty-first-century featuring tales of tortured souls and tormented passion—brilliantly etched in words and striking visuals Some people fall in love, get married, and thrive in happy relationships—and then there are others. From Israeli enfant terrible Koren Shadmi comes a wickedly literate, darkly poetic, beautifully illustrated story collection that exposes with nightmarish clarity the sorrows of love and desire. Read in these pages such tales as:Satisfaction Av.: The terrifying depths to which an unloved child once sank return to haunt her.Radioactive Girlfriend: A student embarks on a torrid love affair with a young woman whose powerful allure is literally nuclear. Pastry Paradise: A near-death experience takes away a woman's will to live and love...but awakens in her a dark and insatiable appetite.Antoinette: A young man becomes obsessed with the girl of his dreams: a gorgeous—but headless—sylph. ...and another six tales of alienation and angst.With brutal strokes and lacerating wit, Shadmi introduces a haunting gallery of lost souls that will both repel and captivate.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

In his debut collection of graphic short stories, Israel-born Shadmi tries to have the last word in sexual malevolence in angst-ridden tales of couplings that go horrendously awry. Alienation reigns in pieces like The Fun Lawn, where a man with an underage online porn habit who works in a giant dog suit on a children's TV show is flummoxed when a beautiful young woman comes on to him, but may just like him for the dog suit. Most of the more effective stories go straight for David Cronenberg–style issues of bodily invasion, such as Radioactive Girlfriend, in which a man's proximity to his lover proves potentially fatal. Surrealist pieces like Pastry Paradise and A Lavish Affair not so subtly conflate issues of sexual desire, hunger and disgust to fairly little effect. The more simply constructed stories tend to have more punch, like What Is Wrong with Me? which humorously contrasts what happens after a late-night hookup separates in the morning; the man pines in agonized love while the woman ignores his calls and watches TV. Shadmi's art is expressive and simple, focusing on entwined limbs and eyes pinned open with worry, but it's his sharp writing (shades of Etgar Keret's violent whimsy) that really brings this collection together. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

Israeli American Shadmi’s 10 stories mostly feature young men and women, though some characters are as young as preadolescent, and a few are middle-aged or older. In more than half the stories, faces and even heads are disguised by elaborate masks or plain paper bags. This isn’t incidental to what they’re about, which is sometimes ennui (“A Date”) and occasionally kinky (“Fun Lawn”) or ominous (“Grandpa Minolta”). One story of a lover and his muse, who is seen on a large screen as he tries and fails to paint below her running monologue, has a nearly perfect musical quality, while “Radioactive Girlfriend” twists together the personal and the political. “Pastry” is a nightmare riff on consumption, of books as well as food. The black-and-white artwork is realistic, as are the scenes of clinching but not those of the headless date in “Antoinette.” The figures express as much with posture as with their sometimes cutting, sometimes purposefully miserly utterances. Good stuff, especially if you like Kafka or comics creators Rutu Modan and Mark Murphy. --Francisca Goldsmith

Edition details

• Publisher: Villard
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0345508718
• ISBN 13: 9780345508713
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 160