Long Story Short: 100 Classic Books in Three Panels

by Lisa Brown

Overview

Literature is long. Comics are short.
 
Does Proust get you down? Do you find The Unbearable Lightness of Being simply unbearable? Is The Inferno your own private hell? Do you long to be conversant about classics like Moby Dick, the Bhagavad Gita, Madame Bovary, and, um, Twilight?
 
Bestselling illustrator Lisa Brown (The Airport Book; Baby, Mix Me a Drink) did her homework. Long Story Short offers 100 pithy and skewering three-panel literary summaries, from curriculum classics like Don Quixote, Lord of the Flies, and Jane Eyre to modern favorites like Beloved, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Atonement, conveniently organized by subjects including “Love,” “Sex,” “Death,” and “Female Trouble.” Lisa Brown’s Long Story Short is the perfect way to turn a traipse through what your English teacher called “the canon” into a frolic—or to happily cram for the next occasion that requires you to appear bookish and well-read.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643751269
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Lisa Brown draws things like illustrations and comics, writes things like books and book reviews, and teaches things to kids and college students. Her debut picture book, How to Be, was one of the Thirteen Best Children’s Books for Family Literacy.  She is a comics contributor at The Rumpus and teaches illustration at the California College of the Arts. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and son. You can find her online at americanchickens.com or on Twitter: @lisabrowndraws.

Editorial Reviews

01/27/2020

Brown (The Phantom Twin) condenses classic and contemporary literature into summary comic strips, usually (though not always) three panels long in this feather-light collection. Sometimes she achieves the laugh: Interview with the Vampire is summarized as “It’s all fun and games until you have a kid”; the Walden strip pokes fun at Thoreau for living in Emerson’s backyard; and boiling the entire Bhagavad Gita down to three panels could only end in absurdity. But more often, each strip states the book’s premise or quotes a line without adding special perspective beyond the accomplishment of diminishment. Serious, hard-to-joke-about works like The Autobiography of Malcolm X or Beloved are reduced to pithy platitudes (e.g., “The legacy of slavery is haunting” superimposed on a ghost at a gravestone). There’s nothing wrong with the literal approach to this exercise, per se, but the Cliffs Notes level of commentary can be disappointing, and the better strips leave the rest paler. Brown’s simple but playful and boldly colored art carries off a visual unpretentiousness that suits the erudite-lite material. The result is a cute gift book with just enough going for it, though it could do with more punch. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"You probably began this quarantine with dreams of rereading Moby-Dick or Persuasion. But if you’re like me, you’re finding it hard to concentrate on anything more than a tweet. Fortunately, Lisa Brown has just published Long Story Short, a witty collection of cartoon book reviews."
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"A collection of three-panel comics that slyly condense hefty works of literature."
—Lucy Knisley, author and illustrator of Relish: My Life in the Kitchen

"It’s lighter than CliffsNotes and quite possibly more entertaining than the originals (the horror, the horror!)"
—Booklist


 

From the Publisher

05/22/2020

Gr 9 Up—Like a snarky SparkNotes, this mischievous, charming collection turns 100 classics into brief comic strips. Brown is an observant reader, and her comedic timing is impeccable. "Writers make the best of friends," she notes in her summary of E.B. White's Charlotte's Web. "And then they DIE." At times, she pushes readers to reconsider the canon. She transforms the Ingalls family of Little House on the Prairie from American heroes to "pioneers with a sense of entitlement," and she pokes fun at Henry David Thoreau's hypocrisy, pointing out that while writing his ode to self-sufficiency, Walden, or a Life in the Woods, he enjoyed "a lot of visitors and trips into town." Other comics are more homage than send-up—for Toni Morrison's Beloved, Brown depicts the ghostly outline of a young woman standing by a gravestone: "The legacy of slavery is haunting." While violence, nudity, and sexual scenes are included, the gentle, graceful cartoons and childlike characters keep the volume from becoming disturbing—even images of Oedipus with his eyes gouged out or dying soldiers on the Western Front are graphic without being distressing. The book's three indexes offer further opportunity for subversive fun (the subject index features categories such as "therapy, much-needed," "ew," "bodies, dead," and "bodies, undead"). VERDICT Literature students bored with their required reading will delight at this off-kilter look at the canon.—Mahnaz Dar, School Library Journal

School Library Journal