Overview

How to encapsulate a life in all its messiness, epiphanies, misunderstandings, disappointments, and joys? Seth, cartoonist of Clyde Fans, the first graphic novel nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, offers his tragicomic answer with George Sprott: 1894 1975. Page by page, we learn about George outmoded television host, creature of habit, charming if pompous old man, selfish lover, man about to die and though this is ultimately the story of one man s death, Seth leavens it with humour and restraint. The book s omniscient narrator offers a patchwork tale: a series of interviews with the people who cared about George, flashbacks, and personal reminiscences. The thwarted love of his life, Olive Mott, and the woman he marries, Helen. His trips to the Arctic and the exoticized portrait his documentaries painted of a Great White North. His habit of falling asleep on-air. His humdrum demise. What emerges is a story about memory, loss, time, and the stories we tell (and retell) to get through the day. George s romanticizing and repeating of his adventures up North, adventures that are revealed to be entirely fictional, holds a mirror to the ways we each historicize our own lives. Originally serialised in The New York Times Magazine before being published in an expanded, large-format hardcover by Drawn & Quarterly, this new edition is the definitive George Sprott.

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9781770464094

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Reviews

A stunning oversize fictional biography of a local television host, bore, and boor who fancies himself a man of the world. The New York Times. Haunting and exquisite . . . Seth uses Sprott s selfish, pathetic existence to make gentle points about love and death and loneliness. Chicago Tribune. Intriguing [and] multifaceted. NPR

[Seth] is exceptionally gifted at evoking the passing of time and the stasis of space. --The Washington Post on Seth

Author Information

Seth is the cartoonist behind the comic book series Palookaville and Clyde Fans, the first graphic novel nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His comics have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Comics, and McSweeney's Quarterly. His illustrations have appeared on the covers of The New Yorker, The Walrus, and Canadian Notes & Queries. He is Lemony Snicket's partner for the series All the Wrong Questions and designs several classic comics reprint series, notably collections of work by Charles Schulz, John Stanley, and Doug Wright. He was the subject of a National Film Board documentary entitled Seth's Dominion. Seth lives in Guelph, Canada, with his wife, Tania, and two cats in a house he has named Inkwell's End.

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