Books about Bechdel from Amazon.com

In this groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father. In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.

Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve..
Price: $5.93 [Notify me when price goes down.]

From the author of Fun Home -- the lives, loves, and politics
of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger,
Stuart, Clarice, and others

For twenty-five years Bechdel's path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For
strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of
a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and
translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch
Out For gathers a "rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down" (Publishers
Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty
of the newest strips, never before published in book form.

Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it "half
op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel") of the lives,
loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a
midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis.
Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends -- academics,
social workers, bookstore clerks -- fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents.

Bechdel fuses high and low culture -- from foreign policy to domestic routine,
hot sex to postmodern theory -- in a serial graphic narrative "suitable
for humanists of all persuasions.".
Price: $16.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Book 11 in the Dykes to Watch Out For series finds Alison Bechdel's beloved cast of characters discovering that nothing but change is constant in our multihued terror alert system world. Mo is working her way through library school by shelving bestsellers at Bounders Books and Muzak, Sparrow and Stuart face parenthood with a mixture of ambivalence and zeal, Clarice and Toni clash over the gay marriage debate while their 10-year-old son Raffi jacks cars and slaps hos on his best friend's computer, Sydney's mammogram yields very bad news, Ginger's love life is finally looking up, and is a Hello Kitty thong really the best gift Lois can give 13-year-old Jonas when s/he becomes Janis? Alison Bechdel is legendary for her ability to examine global politics through the prism of dinner conversations, and this book is no exception. Sydney's doctor insists in likening her malignant cells to terrorists, Stuart's home improvement project develops disturbing parallels to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Ginger's best student turns out to be her most conservative, resulting in an ideology-busting clash of red- and blue-state values.

Alison Bechdel has been writing and illustrating Dykes to Watch Out For since 1982. Her books have won multiple awards, and she was most recently a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award and two Eisner awards. She lives in Vermont and is working on a graphic memoir about her queer father.

.
Price: $8.85 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Will Alison Bechdel ever put a foot wrong? Will she ever lose her sense of humor about the goofy vicissitudes of the lesbian community? If this seventh book of her serial cartoon collection about Mo, the feminist bookseller everywoman and her cohorts, is any indication, I'd have to say no. Bechdel here sets her wry and wonderful sights on the explosion of lesbian erotica..
Price: $8.85 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The further adventures of Mo, her tenure-bound girlfriend, Sydney, and their much-loved friends unfold against a shifting gender landscape: lesbians sleeping with men, lesbians becoming men, Ginger sleeping with lesbians who've become men. As with her eight previous collections, Alison Bechdel covers a host of pressing issues, from the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the decline of the independent bookstore, and pauses to consider whether an online affair qualifies as cheating. "Of course it's cheating!" says Mo, "It would be a diversion of emotional energy." Sydney demurs: "It's more like remote, interactive masturbation." True love survives the gender wars, but monogamy may be on the wane. Don't miss the thrilling details, in the last volume of Bechdel's work to be published by the now-defunct Firebrand Press. --Regina Marler.
Price: $8.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Change is afoot as the best-selling Dykes to Watch Out For series moves to Alyson. Alison Bechdel continues to illuminate the way we live through the comic strip serial that has become a national treasure. In the tenth book in the series, Mo, the curmudgeonly women's bookstore clerk, blithely rants about Dr. Laura, Donald Rumsfeld, gay Enron execs, and the pernicious effects of Frogger, while her cozy counterculture community is shifting beneath her feet. Her job is in jeopardy as Madwimmin Books's customer base defects to the chains. Her ex, Clarice, is displaying symptoms of soccer mom-itis. Her best friend, Lois, has announced her new name is Louis. And her old pal Sparrow considers whether having a baby with her boyfriend will compromise her identity as a radical lesbian feminist. Meanwhile, Toni doesn't know what do when Clarice's George W. Bush-induced depression lasts long after the inauguration and, in the wake of 9-11, her friends square off on questions of idealism, violence, compassion, patriotism, and dissent. As they hash out their ideological differences, a black-and-white world takes on surprisingly variegated shades of gray.

Alison Bechdel is the author of nine previous Dykes to Watch Out For books, three of which have been Lambda Literary Award winners, as was also her autobiography, The Indelible Alison Bechdel. She lives in Vermont.

.
Price: $8.13 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The thousands of devoted readers who follow the weekly chronicles of Bechdel's cartoon heroines--Lois, Sparrow, Ginger, Jezanna, and Mo, among others--probably already know that the strips read best in book form, where Bechdel's sly observations of lesbian life in the 1990s can blend with her ongoing narrative into something like a sketchy but provocative novel. Split-Level Dykes, the eighth collection in the series, is no exception. Its two dominant story lines--politically correct Mo commits herself to the brainy and self-absorbed Sydney, while Clarice and Toni, lesbian moms of color, nearly break up over their move to the great white suburbs--keep the reader enthralled and anxious, easy prey to the comic relief of Sparrow's heterosexual panic and the dating foibles of the swashbuckling Lois. With an anthropologist's eye for social detail, Bechdel fleshes out her two-dimensional world into something you could consider either the best kind of beach reading or the stuff of doctoral dissertations. --Regina Marler.
Price: $8.69 [Notify me when price goes down.]