Hillary Chute's Top Book Recommendations
Want to know what books Hillary Chute recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Hillary Chute's favorite book recommendations of all time.
Recommended by Hillary Chute, and 1 others. Hillary ChuteOne Hundred Demons, yes, I suppose. Though it’s still reflecting on history. Joe calls his work ‘comics journalism’. Lynda Barry calls hers ‘autobifictionalography’. Which I think is brilliant and hilarious. So on the table of contents page, which is this beautiful, dense, colourful collage, she draws two check boxes after the question: ‘Are these stories true or false?’ She ticks both. She’s... (Source)
This book opens with Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, creating vignettes of the people, events, and comics that shaped Art Spiegelman. It traces the artist's evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son.
The second part presents a facsimile of Breakdowns, the long-sought after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s, the book... more
Recommended by Hillary Chute, and 1 others. Hillary ChuteI would say that Art Spiegelman is the most famous and influential cartoonist alive. And I would also argue that he’s the most important figure in the literature of the boomer generation. Paul Auster and Art are friends, and Art nominated Paul when I suggested this to him. The publication of the first volume of Maus in 1986 was absolutely a terrain-shifting moment. It was nominated for a National... (Source)
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. less
Recommended by Hillary Chute, and 1 others. Hillary ChuteAlison has a strip that’s been running for a long time called Dykes to Watch Out For, but this is an autobiographical book. ‘Fun Home’ is short for the funeral home Alison’s dad ran when she was a child. It’s a book that blew me away and continues to blow me away every time I read it – and I must have read it five or six times by now: probably the best book I’ve read in the past ten years in any... (Source)
These frank, irreverent, and honest comics revel in the uncomfortable—occasionally... more
Recommended by Hillary Chute, and 1 others. Hillary ChuteThis book has an ingenious structure. It flows, year-by-year through her young life, through collected chronologically-ordered stories from her life that each are labelled with a title, a year and an age. (Source)
Aline Kominsky-Crumb immediately made her mark in the Bay Area’s underground comix scene with unabashedly raw, dirty, unfiltered comics chronicling the thoughts and desires of a woman coming of age in the 1960s. Kominsky-Crumb didn’t worry about self-flattery. In fact, her darkest secrets and deepest insecurities were all the more fodder for groundbreaking stories. Her exaggerated comix alter ego, Bunch, is self-destructive and grotesque but crackles with the self-deprecating... more
Recommended by Hillary Chute, and 1 others. Hillary ChuteAline Kominsky-Crumb has a totally nutty style that I find unbelievably charming. She has called it scratchy and raw and ugly; I’ve always loved it. (Source)
When Sabrina disappears, an airman in the U.S. Air Force is drawn into a web of suppositions, wild theories, and outright lies. He reports to work every night in a bare, sterile fortress that serves as no protection from a situation that threatens the sanity of Teddy, his childhood friend and the... more
Recommended by Hillary Chute, and 1 others. Hillary ChuteSabrina has a really startling story and a really startling style. It’s an amazing economical example of comics fiction today and was appropriately embraced by the world of fiction. (Source)
Julie Doucet arrived in comics in the 1990s as a fully formed cartoonist. Her comic book series Dirty Plotte was visionary both for the medium and for storytelling. Her stories are candid, funny and intimate, plumbing the depths of the female psyche while charting the fragility of the men around her. Her artwork is dense and confident, never wavering in the wit and humour of its owner. Doucet was active in comics for fifteen years before she moved on to other... more
Amanda PalmerI only read one comic when I was young. It was this. It changed everything. (Source)
Hillary ChuteJulie is widely revered by all sorts of people, so the publication of the Complete Julie Doucet in a box set composed of two hardcover volumes was a huge event in the world of comics. (Source)
The Arab of the Future is the widely acclaimed, internationally bestselling graphic memoir that tells the story of Riad Sattouf's peripatetic childhood in the Middle East. In the first volume, which covers the years 1978-1984, his family moves between rural France, Libya, and Syria, where they eventually settle in his father's native village of Ter Maaleh, near Homs. The second volume recounts young Riad's first... more
Recommended by Hillary Chute, and 1 others. Hillary ChuteThis book shows how political the personal is, if it makes any sense to invert that idiom. It balances attention to the world historical stage with attention to what is happening within this family. (Source)
The long strange trip of Doug in all its mind-bending, heartbreaking totality. The fragments of the past collide with the reality of the present, nightmarish dreams evolve into an even more dreadful reality, and when you finally find out where all of this has been going, and what it means . . . it will make you go right back to the first page and read it all again with new eyes. Just like Doug.
(With... more
Recommended by Hillary Chute, and 1 others. Hillary ChuteCharles Burns, in my view, is a real master of the creepy. (Source)
In The Arab of the Future: Volume 1, cartoonist Riad Sattouf tells of the first years of his childhood as his family shuttles back and forth between France and the Middle East. In Libya and Syria, young Riad is exposed to the dismal reality of a life where food is scarce, children kill dogs for sport, and his cousins, virulently anti-Semitic and convinced he is Jewish because of his... more
Recommended by Hillary Chute, and 1 others. Hillary ChuteIt’s similar in some ways—and radically different in others—to Persepolis. (Source)
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In the fifth volume of Anouk Ricard's hilarious modern kids’ classic, Anna, Froga, Ron, Christopher, and Bubu continue their non-adventures with bickering, needling, cajoling, and honest friendship. No white lie goes unexposed, no small embarrassment goes unrevealed, no secret is kept. For Christmas, the gang decides to forego shopping malls and make their own gifts for one another; Bubu goes on a retreat to shed a... more
Recommended by Hillary Chute, and 1 others. Hillary ChuteIt really caught on in audiences of all ages. (Source)
Recommended by Hillary Chute, and 1 others. Hillary ChuteI love this book. (Source)
A group of teenagers pick up trash on the side of the highway--flirting, preening, and ignoring a potentially violent loner in their midst. A college student brings her sort-of boyfriend to a disastrous house party with her high-school acquaintances. A young woman experiences a traumatic incident at the... more
Recommended by Hillary Chute, and 1 others. Hillary ChuteThis book is about really dark things. (Source)
Rafah, a town at the bottommost tip of the Gaza Strip, is a squalid place. Raw concrete buildings front trash-strewn alleys. The narrow streets are crowded with young children and unemployed men. On the border with Egypt, swaths of Rafah have been bulldozed to rubble. Rafah is today and has always been a notorious flashpoint in this bitterest of conflicts.
Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident in 1956, that left 111 Palestinians dead, shot by...
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Raja ShehadehThis is an amazing, graphic and emotional book about the massacres carried out by the Israelis in the Gaza Strip in 1956. (Source)
Hillary ChuteJoe Sacco is the foremost figure in what he calls ‘comics journalism’ – he really established this category. (Source)
Don't have time to read Hillary Chute's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.