Book Description
Release date: October 2, 2012 | Series: Building Stories
New York Times Book Review, Top 10 Books of the Year
Time Magazine, Top Ten Fiction Books of the Year
Publishers Weekly, Best Book of the Year
Kirkus Reviews, Top 10 Fiction of 2012
Newsday, Top 10 Books of 2012
Entertainment Weekly, Gift Guide, A+
Washington Post, Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2012
Minneapolis Star Tribune, Best Books of the Year
Cleveland Plain Dealer, Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year
Amazon, Best Books of the Year/Comics
Boing Boing, Best Graphic Novel of the Year
Time Out New York, Best of 2012
Entertainment Weekly, Best Fiction of 2012
Everything you need to read the new graphic novel Building Stories: 14 distinctively discrete Books, Booklets, Magazines, Newspapers, and Pamphlets.
With the increasing electronic incorporeality of existence, sometimes it’s reassuring—perhaps even necessary—to have something to hold on to. Thus within this colorful keepsake box the purchaser will find a fully-apportioned variety of reading material ready to address virtually any imaginable artistic or poetic taste, from the corrosive sarcasm of youth to the sickening earnestness of maturity—while discovering a protagonist wondering if she’ll ever move from the rented close quarters of lonely young adulthood to the mortgaged expanse of love and marriage. Whether you’re feeling alone by yourself or alone with someone else, this book is sure to sympathize with the crushing sense of life wasted, opportunities missed and creative dreams dashed which afflict the middle- and upper-class literary public (and which can return to them in somewhat damaged form during REM sleep).
A pictographic listing of all 14 items (260 pages total) appears on the back, with suggestions made as to appropriate places to set down, forget or completely lose any number of its contents within the walls of an average well-appointed home. As seen in the pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Building Stories collects a decade’s worth of work, with dozens of “never-before-published” pages (i.e., those deemed too obtuse, filthy or just plain incoherent to offer to a respectable periodical).
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Ware has been consistently pushing the boundaries for what the comics format can look like and accomplish as a storytelling medium. Here he does away with the book format—a thing between two covers that has a story that begins and ends—entirely in favor of a huge box containing 14 differently sized, formatted, and bound pieces: books, pamphlets, broadsheets, scraps, and even a unfoldable board that would be at home in a Monopoly box. The pieces, some previously published in various places and others new for this set, swarm around a Chicago three-flat occupied by an elderly landlady, a spiteful married couple, and a lonely amputee (there’s also a bee bumbling around in a rare display of levity). The emotional tenor remains as soul-crushing and painfully insightful as any of Ware’s work, but it’s really insufficient to talk about what happens in anything he does. It’s all about the grind and folly of everyday life but presented in an exhilarating fashion, each composition an obsessively perfect alignment of line, shape, color, and perspective. More than anything, though, this graphic novel (if it can even be called that) mimics the kaleidoscopic nature of memory itself—fleeting, contradictory, anchored to a few significant moments, and a heavier burden by the day. In terms of pure artistic innovation, Ware is in a stratosphere all his own. --Ian Chipman
Review
“I have now spent a week in sloppy communion with Building Stories and am ready to declare it one of the most important pieces of art I have ever experienced. I also sort of want to kill myself...What makes Building Stories monumental isn’t its unorthodox format. It’s Ware’s ruthless and tender pursuit of undisguised emotion. His work is brutal in the way all great art is. I can’t wait to experience it again.” –Steve Almond, The New Republic
“Stunning…As usual, Mr. Ware’s style is a model of compression in both word and picture. Less usual, for the genre as a whole, is the vividness with which he limns his heroine’s intense, if fairly ordinary, inner life…The lack of clear structure, much less traditional linearity, turns reading into an unusually active process. This is a great, easily ownable work of art.” –The New York Times
“In the end, the process Ware recreates here is universal, which is what gives Building Stories its resonance. The woman's dream, after all, is everyone's: the dream of making sense of ourselves, of having things add up. That they don't, that they can never, is the paradox, and yet what else can we do but try? Here we have the essential question Ware wants us to consider, and his answer—brave, beautiful and brilliant—is the story we build out of this box.” –David Ulin, The Los Angeles Times
“This book is a masterpiece….Building Stories is a masterpiece, above all, because it cares about human beings, many of them women. It cares enough to observe human beings closely, both when they are behaving themselves, and when they are engaging in their manifold selfishnesses. It cares enough about them to depict them when they are attractive and when they are singularly unattractive. The contemporary novel, it bears mentioning, does not care this much, because the contemporary novel is so preoccupied with affirmation that it will not risk what Ware is willing to risk. Perhaps Ware risks in this way because, as a person who began by illustrating, he is willing to see exactly what’s taking place around him, all of it. But by building up his stories from the fragments, from the discontinuous moments, episodes of glancing contact, and the disconnections as well as the connections, he has made something that, if possible, is more literary than most contemporary literature. The American novel, that is, has a lot to learn from this very convincing and masterful work.” –Rick Moody, Los Angeles Review of Books
“There’s no writer alive whose work I love more than Chris Ware. The only problem is it takes him ten years to draw these things and then I read them in a day and have to wait another ten years for the next one.”—Zadie Smith
“Ware provides one of the year’s best arguments for the survival of print…the spectacular, breathtaking visual splendor make this one of the year’s standout graphic novels.” –Publisher Weekly, starred review
"Chris Ware's Building Stories is the rarest kind of brilliance; it is simultaneously heartbreaking, hilarious, shockingly intimate and deeply insightful. There isn't a graphic artist alive or dead who has used the form this wonderfully to convey the passage of time, loneliness, longing, frustration or bliss. It is the reader's choice where and how to begin this monumental work—the only regret you will have in starting it is knowing that it will end." –J. J. Abrams
“You could call Stories a game-changer, except so few besides Ware could ever construct such a retro-aesthetic feat.” –Washington Post, “Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2012”
“A treasure trove of graphic artworks—they’re too complex to be called comics—from Ware, master of angst, alienation, sci-fi and the crowded street . . . A dazzling document.” —Kirkus, starred review
“Ware has been consistently pushing the boundaries for what the comics format can look like and accomplish as a storytelling medium…More than anything, though, this graphic novel mimics the kaleidoscopic nature of memory itself—fleeting, contradictory, anchored to a few significant moments, and a heavier burden by the day. In terms of pure artistic innovation, Ware is in a stratosphere all his own.”
—Booklist, starred review
“So far ahead of the game that it tempts you to find fault just to prove that a human made it…Ware is remarkably deft at balancing the demands of fine art, where sentimentality is an error, and those of storytelling, where emotion is everything.” –New York Times Book Review
“Ware’s innovative graphic novel deepens and enriches the form by breaking it apart…tackles universal themes including art, sex, family and existential loneliness in a way that’s simultaneously playful and profound.” –The New York Times Book Review, “The 10 Best Books of 2012”
“Building Stories is the graphic novel of the season or perhaps the year, a story that must be experienced rather than read . . . Ware takes visual storytelling to a new level of both beauty and despair in a work people will be talking about for a long time.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"This is more than a book; it's a profusion of printed paper....told in Ware's instantly recognizable style, with panels so silent and perfectly composed, they're reminiscent of stained-glass windows."—TIME
“The standout work of the year is Chris Ware’s breathtaking treasure chest.” –Boston Globe gift guide
“Building Stories is a momentous event in the world of comics—the unusual format of Ware’s book is bound to help redefine yet again what a “graphic novel” can be.” –New Yorker blog
“Surely, no comic book artist has ever created anything quite like this: a glorious treasure box of sorts containing books, pamphlets, leaflets and old-timey newspapers - all of which tell of the daily struggles of the residents of a Chicago building. Heartbreak and flashes of hope illuminate even the tiniest of panels.” –San Francisco Chronicle Gift Guide
“Pages of extraordinary inventiveness…Throughout Building Stories, Ware’s attention to the awkward physicality, the constant humiliations and cruelties of human existence is as precise and as brutally funny as it is in his previous work.” –New York Review of Books
“Ware’s Building Stories is a stunning reminder of the capabilities of print, telling a tender and crushing tale of missed opportunities.” –The Huffington Post
”Its brilliance is not debatable…The components of Building Stories can be read and combined and recombined in any order, producing chance connections and beautiful resonances—very much the way life itself does.” –TIME Top Ten in Fiction
“Chris Ware is one of the true modern masters of the sequential art medium and an absolute artisan when it comes to showing the beauty of an ugly truth…It’s truly masterful storytelling that will be a unique experience for each reader and something that would be impossible in any other medium than print…Each of us in our own way is desperately searching for our own sense of meaning, accomplishment, and self-worth, but anyone who has ever felt their creativity suppressed—or really anyone who has ever clung onto the good in their bad relationship (or the bad in their good relationship)—will see a lot of truth nestled in these almost magical pages. “ –New York Journal of Books
“Stunningly innovative… Basically a book-in-a-box, Building Stories is spread among 14 different pieces — 15 if you count the illustrated box itself — ranging in size and shape from small and booklet-size to a Little Golden Book-style hardback to a game-board-size fold-out board. All of which might just add up to a clever and daring experiment if Ware’s characters weren’t so alive, his art so precise and pleasing and his story so vital and heart-wrenching.” –Vancouver Sun
“Apparently, no one ever told Chris Ware that print is dead. Or maybe they did and this is his fantastic rebuttal. Ware, the master behind "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth," has created a batch of sad, highly detailed comics with "Building Stories." The catch is the presentation. Inside this oversized box are 14 different stories -- some are traditional books of various sizes, others are magazines, newspapers and small pamphlets. This isn't a graphic novel. It's a library ready to be explored.” –Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Ware’s latest has the makings of a modern classic…At times Ware's ‘great book’ feels like it could be about anyone's life. Other times, it doesn't feel like a book at all. It's a keepsake box full of things you won't want to forget.” –Entertainment Weekly, A+ grade
“A visionary boxed collection…a stunning triumph for graphic novels as a literature all its own.” –Publishers Weekly Comics World
“An eye-popping astonishment.” –St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“The b...
About the Author
CHRIS WARE is widely acknowledged as the most gifted and beloved cartoonist of his generation by both his mother and seven-year-old daughter. His Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth won the Guardian First Book Award and was listed as one of the "100 Best Books of the Decade" by The Times (London) in 2009. An irregular contributor to This American Life and The New Yorker (where some of the pages of this book first appeared) his original drawings have been exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and in piles behind his work table in Oak Park, Illinois.
Release date: October 2, 2012 | Series: Building Stories
New York Times Book Review, Top 10 Books of the Year
Time Magazine, Top Ten Fiction Books of the Year
Publishers Weekly, Best Book of the Year
Kirkus Reviews, Top 10 Fiction of 2012
Newsday, Top 10 Books of 2012
Entertainment Weekly, Gift Guide, A+
Washington Post, Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2012
Minneapolis Star Tribune, Best Books of the Year
Cleveland Plain Dealer, Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year
Amazon, Best Books of the Year/Comics
Boing Boing, Best Graphic Novel of the Year
Time Out New York, Best of 2012
Entertainment Weekly, Best Fiction of 2012
Everything you need to read the new graphic novel Building Stories: 14 distinctively discrete Books, Booklets, Magazines, Newspapers, and Pamphlets.
With the increasing electronic incorporeality of existence, sometimes it’s reassuring—perhaps even necessary—to have something to hold on to. Thus within this colorful keepsake box the purchaser will find a fully-apportioned variety of reading material ready to address virtually any imaginable artistic or poetic taste, from the corrosive sarcasm of youth to the sickening earnestness of maturity—while discovering a protagonist wondering if she’ll ever move from the rented close quarters of lonely young adulthood to the mortgaged expanse of love and marriage. Whether you’re feeling alone by yourself or alone with someone else, this book is sure to sympathize with the crushing sense of life wasted, opportunities missed and creative dreams dashed which afflict the middle- and upper-class literary public (and which can return to them in somewhat damaged form during REM sleep).
A pictographic listing of all 14 items (260 pages total) appears on the back, with suggestions made as to appropriate places to set down, forget or completely lose any number of its contents within the walls of an average well-appointed home. As seen in the pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Building Stories collects a decade’s worth of work, with dozens of “never-before-published” pages (i.e., those deemed too obtuse, filthy or just plain incoherent to offer to a respectable periodical).
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Ware has been consistently pushing the boundaries for what the comics format can look like and accomplish as a storytelling medium. Here he does away with the book format—a thing between two covers that has a story that begins and ends—entirely in favor of a huge box containing 14 differently sized, formatted, and bound pieces: books, pamphlets, broadsheets, scraps, and even a unfoldable board that would be at home in a Monopoly box. The pieces, some previously published in various places and others new for this set, swarm around a Chicago three-flat occupied by an elderly landlady, a spiteful married couple, and a lonely amputee (there’s also a bee bumbling around in a rare display of levity). The emotional tenor remains as soul-crushing and painfully insightful as any of Ware’s work, but it’s really insufficient to talk about what happens in anything he does. It’s all about the grind and folly of everyday life but presented in an exhilarating fashion, each composition an obsessively perfect alignment of line, shape, color, and perspective. More than anything, though, this graphic novel (if it can even be called that) mimics the kaleidoscopic nature of memory itself—fleeting, contradictory, anchored to a few significant moments, and a heavier burden by the day. In terms of pure artistic innovation, Ware is in a stratosphere all his own. --Ian Chipman
Review
“I have now spent a week in sloppy communion with Building Stories and am ready to declare it one of the most important pieces of art I have ever experienced. I also sort of want to kill myself...What makes Building Stories monumental isn’t its unorthodox format. It’s Ware’s ruthless and tender pursuit of undisguised emotion. His work is brutal in the way all great art is. I can’t wait to experience it again.” –Steve Almond, The New Republic
“Stunning…As usual, Mr. Ware’s style is a model of compression in both word and picture. Less usual, for the genre as a whole, is the vividness with which he limns his heroine’s intense, if fairly ordinary, inner life…The lack of clear structure, much less traditional linearity, turns reading into an unusually active process. This is a great, easily ownable work of art.” –The New York Times
“In the end, the process Ware recreates here is universal, which is what gives Building Stories its resonance. The woman's dream, after all, is everyone's: the dream of making sense of ourselves, of having things add up. That they don't, that they can never, is the paradox, and yet what else can we do but try? Here we have the essential question Ware wants us to consider, and his answer—brave, beautiful and brilliant—is the story we build out of this box.” –David Ulin, The Los Angeles Times
“This book is a masterpiece….Building Stories is a masterpiece, above all, because it cares about human beings, many of them women. It cares enough to observe human beings closely, both when they are behaving themselves, and when they are engaging in their manifold selfishnesses. It cares enough about them to depict them when they are attractive and when they are singularly unattractive. The contemporary novel, it bears mentioning, does not care this much, because the contemporary novel is so preoccupied with affirmation that it will not risk what Ware is willing to risk. Perhaps Ware risks in this way because, as a person who began by illustrating, he is willing to see exactly what’s taking place around him, all of it. But by building up his stories from the fragments, from the discontinuous moments, episodes of glancing contact, and the disconnections as well as the connections, he has made something that, if possible, is more literary than most contemporary literature. The American novel, that is, has a lot to learn from this very convincing and masterful work.” –Rick Moody, Los Angeles Review of Books
“There’s no writer alive whose work I love more than Chris Ware. The only problem is it takes him ten years to draw these things and then I read them in a day and have to wait another ten years for the next one.”—Zadie Smith
“Ware provides one of the year’s best arguments for the survival of print…the spectacular, breathtaking visual splendor make this one of the year’s standout graphic novels.” –Publisher Weekly, starred review
"Chris Ware's Building Stories is the rarest kind of brilliance; it is simultaneously heartbreaking, hilarious, shockingly intimate and deeply insightful. There isn't a graphic artist alive or dead who has used the form this wonderfully to convey the passage of time, loneliness, longing, frustration or bliss. It is the reader's choice where and how to begin this monumental work—the only regret you will have in starting it is knowing that it will end." –J. J. Abrams
“You could call Stories a game-changer, except so few besides Ware could ever construct such a retro-aesthetic feat.” –Washington Post, “Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2012”
“A treasure trove of graphic artworks—they’re too complex to be called comics—from Ware, master of angst, alienation, sci-fi and the crowded street . . . A dazzling document.” —Kirkus, starred review
“Ware has been consistently pushing the boundaries for what the comics format can look like and accomplish as a storytelling medium…More than anything, though, this graphic novel mimics the kaleidoscopic nature of memory itself—fleeting, contradictory, anchored to a few significant moments, and a heavier burden by the day. In terms of pure artistic innovation, Ware is in a stratosphere all his own.”
—Booklist, starred review
“So far ahead of the game that it tempts you to find fault just to prove that a human made it…Ware is remarkably deft at balancing the demands of fine art, where sentimentality is an error, and those of storytelling, where emotion is everything.” –New York Times Book Review
“Ware’s innovative graphic novel deepens and enriches the form by breaking it apart…tackles universal themes including art, sex, family and existential loneliness in a way that’s simultaneously playful and profound.” –The New York Times Book Review, “The 10 Best Books of 2012”
“Building Stories is the graphic novel of the season or perhaps the year, a story that must be experienced rather than read . . . Ware takes visual storytelling to a new level of both beauty and despair in a work people will be talking about for a long time.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"This is more than a book; it's a profusion of printed paper....told in Ware's instantly recognizable style, with panels so silent and perfectly composed, they're reminiscent of stained-glass windows."—TIME
“The standout work of the year is Chris Ware’s breathtaking treasure chest.” –Boston Globe gift guide
“Building Stories is a momentous event in the world of comics—the unusual format of Ware’s book is bound to help redefine yet again what a “graphic novel” can be.” –New Yorker blog
“Surely, no comic book artist has ever created anything quite like this: a glorious treasure box of sorts containing books, pamphlets, leaflets and old-timey newspapers - all of which tell of the daily struggles of the residents of a Chicago building. Heartbreak and flashes of hope illuminate even the tiniest of panels.” –San Francisco Chronicle Gift Guide
“Pages of extraordinary inventiveness…Throughout Building Stories, Ware’s attention to the awkward physicality, the constant humiliations and cruelties of human existence is as precise and as brutally funny as it is in his previous work.” –New York Review of Books
“Ware’s Building Stories is a stunning reminder of the capabilities of print, telling a tender and crushing tale of missed opportunities.” –The Huffington Post
”Its brilliance is not debatable…The components of Building Stories can be read and combined and recombined in any order, producing chance connections and beautiful resonances—very much the way life itself does.” –TIME Top Ten in Fiction
“Chris Ware is one of the true modern masters of the sequential art medium and an absolute artisan when it comes to showing the beauty of an ugly truth…It’s truly masterful storytelling that will be a unique experience for each reader and something that would be impossible in any other medium than print…Each of us in our own way is desperately searching for our own sense of meaning, accomplishment, and self-worth, but anyone who has ever felt their creativity suppressed—or really anyone who has ever clung onto the good in their bad relationship (or the bad in their good relationship)—will see a lot of truth nestled in these almost magical pages. “ –New York Journal of Books
“Stunningly innovative… Basically a book-in-a-box, Building Stories is spread among 14 different pieces — 15 if you count the illustrated box itself — ranging in size and shape from small and booklet-size to a Little Golden Book-style hardback to a game-board-size fold-out board. All of which might just add up to a clever and daring experiment if Ware’s characters weren’t so alive, his art so precise and pleasing and his story so vital and heart-wrenching.” –Vancouver Sun
“Apparently, no one ever told Chris Ware that print is dead. Or maybe they did and this is his fantastic rebuttal. Ware, the master behind "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth," has created a batch of sad, highly detailed comics with "Building Stories." The catch is the presentation. Inside this oversized box are 14 different stories -- some are traditional books of various sizes, others are magazines, newspapers and small pamphlets. This isn't a graphic novel. It's a library ready to be explored.” –Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Ware’s latest has the makings of a modern classic…At times Ware's ‘great book’ feels like it could be about anyone's life. Other times, it doesn't feel like a book at all. It's a keepsake box full of things you won't want to forget.” –Entertainment Weekly, A+ grade
“A visionary boxed collection…a stunning triumph for graphic novels as a literature all its own.” –Publishers Weekly Comics World
“An eye-popping astonishment.” –St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“The b...
About the Author
CHRIS WARE is widely acknowledged as the most gifted and beloved cartoonist of his generation by both his mother and seven-year-old daughter. His Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth won the Guardian First Book Award and was listed as one of the "100 Best Books of the Decade" by The Times (London) in 2009. An irregular contributor to This American Life and The New Yorker (where some of the pages of this book first appeared) his original drawings have been exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and in piles behind his work table in Oak Park, Illinois.
Product Details
Hardcover
Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition edition (October 2, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375424334
Hardcover
Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition edition (October 2, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375424334
ISBN-13: 978-0375424335
Product Dimensions: 11.7 x 1.8 x 16.7 inches
