Praise for David Small’s
STITCHES
“Like the boy in this autobiographical work, my first reading of
Stitches
left mespeechless. And in awe. David Small presents us with a profound and moving gift ofgraphic literature that has the look of a movie and reads like a poem. Spare in words,painful in pictures, Small, in a style of dry menace, draws us a boy’s life that youwouldn’t want to live but you can’t put down. From its first line four pages in,‘Mamahad her little cough,’we know that we are in the hands of a master.”—Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist“Tremendous. One of the most moving graphic stories I’ve ever read.”—M. T. Anderson, National Book Award winner for
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing
“David Small’s
Stitches
is aptly named. With surgical precision, the author pierces intothe past and, with great artistry, seals the wound inflicted on a small child by cruel andunloving parents.
Stitches
is as intensely dramatic as a woodcut novel of the silentmovie era and as fluid as a contemporary Japanese
manga
. It breaks new ground forgraphic novels.” —Françoise Mouly, art editor,
The New Yorker
,and
editorial director, TOON Books“David Small evokes the mad scientific world of the 1950s beautifully, a time wheneveryone believed that science could fix everything. Small is an innocent lamb, a sen-sitive boy, caught in a nightmare situation. His parents and grandmother are reallycreepy. Capturing body language and facial expressions subtly,
Stitches
becomes inSmall’s skillful hands a powerful story, an emotionally charged autobiography.—Robert Crumb, author of
The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
“Add David Small’s book to the illustrated bible of artists who have had to will them-selves—invent themselves—and ultimately seize success as the only way to keep thegritty, dark beginning of a home life from snuffing them out altogether. If this book werea wine, you’d discover a nose full of Truffaut, Baudelaire, and John Waters. And yet, afterall the blows, despair, and desperation, David Small skillfully manages to draw a doorout of his past and invite us into his present.”—Jack Gantos, winner of Printz and Sibert Award Honors for
Hole in My Life