Harvey Pekar Libros

Es otro día más en la vida de Harvey Pekar... Pero, para Pekar, ningún día es solo "otro día más".

It was they year of Desert Storm that Harvey Pekar and his wife, Joyce Brabner, discovered Harvey had cancer. Pekar, a man who has made a profession of chronicling the Kafkaesque absurdities of an ordinary life - if any life is ordinary - suddenly found himself incapacitated. But he had a better-than-average chance to beat cancer and he took it - kicking, screaming and complaining all the way. The Pekar/Brabner coalition draws upon this and other trials to paint a portrait of a man beset with fears real and imagined - who survives.

In Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, one of the final graphic memoirs from the man who defined the genre, Harvey Pekar explores what it means to be Jewish and what Israel means to the Jews. Pekar’s mother was a Zionist by way of politics, his father by way of faith, and he inevitably grew up a staunch supporter of Israel. But as he became attuned to the wider world, Pekar began to question his parents’ most fundamental beliefs. This book is the full account of that questioning. Over the course of a single day in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, Pekar and the illustrator JT Waldman wrestle with the mythologies passed down to them, weaving a personal and historical odyssey of uncommon wit and power. With an epilogue written by Joyce Brabner, Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me is an es- sential book for fans of Harvey Pekar and anyone interested in the past and future of the Jewish state.

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs would write their own masterpieces but taken together, as the Beats, they would also become a focal point for a literary explosion and a generation of revolution.

« La vie ordinaire, c’est un truc assez complexe », voilà la devise de Harvey Pekar, auteur de la mythique série American Splendor. Au début des années 60, Pekar, critique de jazz et collectionneur de vieux disques, rencontre Robert Crumb et découvre la bande dessinée underground. Fasciné par les possibilités offertes par ce medium, il développe un projet de série autobiographique et, incapable de dessiner, il convainc Crumb et un dessinateur local, Garry Dumm, d’illustrer les premières histoires. En 1976 il décide d’auto-éditer la série, à laquelle la fine fleur de la scène indépendante américaine va participer. L’anthologie American Splendor rassemblera en trois volumes les meilleures histoires réalisées entre 1976 et 2006 et toute inédites en France. Le premier volume regroupe des histoires publiées entre 1976 et 1982, écrites par Harvey Pekar et dessinées par Gary Dumm, Robert Crumb, Gerry Shamray, Greg Budgett et Kevin Brown.