In a recent newsletter, the Montreal-based publisher Drawn & Quarterly have begun to tease next year’s slate with two new book announcements: Walk Me to the Corner by Swedish cartoonist Anneli Furmark for March 2022; and Rave by Canadian Jessica Campbell for April 2022.
Here’s D&Q’s details on each book:
Walk Me To The Corner, by Anneli Furmark [March 2022]
STABILITY WITHERS WHERE PASSION BLOSSOMS IN THIS COOL-TONED MEDITATION ON MID-LIFE RELATIONSHIPS
A loving home and husband; two grown sons; a lakeside cabin with a picnic table where their initials are carved; and the chance encounter at a party that destabilizes it all. Elise is in her mid-fifties and is satisfied with life. But the moment she sees Dagmar, she’s entranced. What begins as eye contact transitions to harmless texting, and quickly swells into the type of lust and yearning Elise did not know her life was lacking. Both happily married, there’s trepidation, but they can’t resist. The two arrange to meet, changing the course of Elise’s stable and consistent life forever.
Though Elise’s husband attempts to support her exploration, he also begins an affair with a much younger woman—a postgraduate student in her thirties. The cliché of it all is too much for Elise to bear. As their marriage unravels, her love for Dagmar grows stronger. But with Dagmar content to stay in her marriage, Elise is stranded, adrift, completely alone for the first time in her adult life, and searching for someone to blame—the other woman. In the blur of a breakdown, she’s left facing the reality that, after all, she started it.
In lush watercolour washes and pencil crayons, Anneli Furmark’s Walk Me to the Corner is a gorgeous portrait of desire and heartbreak, and the painful gamble the heart sometimes choses in spite of the mind.
Translated by Hanna Stromberg
Rave, by Jessica Campbell [April 2022]
A QUEER COMING OF AGE STORY, COMPLETE WITH SECRET CIGARETTES, GROSS GYM TEACHERS, AND A LOT OF CHURCH
It’s the early 2000s. Lauren is fifteen, soft-spoken, and ashamed of her body. She’s a devout member of an evangelical church but when her bible-thumping parents forbid Lauren to bring evolution textbooks home, she opts to study at her schoolmate Mariah’s house. Mariah has dial-up internet, an absentee mom, and a Wiccan altar—the perfect setting for a study session and sleepover to remember. That evening Mariah gives Lauren a makeover and the two melt into each other, in what becomes Lauren’s first queer encounter. Afterwards, a potent blend of Christian guilt and internalized homophobia causes Lauren to question the experience.
Author Jessica Campbell (XTC69) uses frankness and dark humour to articulate Lauren’s burgeoning crisis of faith and sexuality. She captures teenage antics and banter with astute comedic style, simultaneously skewering bullies, a culture of slut-shaming, and the devastating impact of religious zealotry. Rave is an instant classic, a coming of age story about the secret spaces young women create and the wider social structures that fail them.
Anneli Furmark’s Walk Me to the Corner is their second English-translated book, following 2018’s Red Winter, also from Drawn & Quarterly. Furmark has produced nine books in their native Sweden. The original Swedish edition of Walk Me to the Corner (Gå med mig till hörnet) was published in 2020.
Jessica Campbell has two previously published books – 2016’s Hot or Not: 20th-Century Male Artists and 2018’s XTC69; both from Koyama Press. Rave will be their first book from D&Q.
Look for Walk Me to the Corner and Rave to arrive from D&Q in early 2022.