Lynda Barry

"[Lynda] Barry . . . portrays the capricious nature of teen friendships, adolescent peer-pressure, and the kill or be killed nature of a middle school's social scene in her signature style. In an authentic teen voice full of diffidence and melodrama, the bespectacled and freckled Maybonne relates all of life's indignities on equal measure. Heartbreaking stories of a broken home, child molestation, an alcoholic absentee father and a bitter mom emerge...

"Young Edna Arkins lives in a neighborhood that is rapidly changing, thanks to white flight from urban Seattle in the late 1960s. As the world changes around her, Edna is exposed to the callous racism of adults; sometimes subtle and other times blatant, but always stinging. At the heart of The Good Times Are Killing Me is the forbidden friendship between Edna who is white and Bonna Willis who is black, and how the world around them forces them to...

"For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged. Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry's bestselling...

Offers selected pages from the author's illustrated notebooks kept during a three year period when she was figuring out how to teach a course on keeping creative notebooks.

"The Freddie Stories traces a year in the life of Freddie, the youngest member of the dysfunctional Mullen family. These four-panel entries-- each representing an episode in the life of Freddie-- bring to life adolescence, pimples and all. No matter what happens, it all seems to go wrong for Freddie-- he's set up as an arsonist, mercilessly teased in school, and bossed around by classmates. With consummate skill, Lynda Barry writes about the cruelty...

"This collection continues to spotlight the life of teenager Maybonne Mullen. She suffers through the utterly relatable insults of junior high and the excruciating embarrassment caused by her little sister, Marlys. Hovering in the background, however, is a broken home, parents struggling with addiction, a grandmother who takes her granddaughters from the diverse big city to a bewilderingly bland small town."--