Richard Poplak

John Porcellino

Jason Gilmore

Paul Peterson

Alex Jansen

The Next Day is a ground-breaking graphic novel, constructed from interviews with survivors of near-fatal suicide attempts. In this poetic and profound philosophical exploration, illustrated by acclaimed small-press legend John Porcellino ("A master at miniature poignance," Entertainment Weekly), four diverse participants each answer the same key questions about life, the decision to end it, and what comes after...The Next Day is being simultaneously developed and released as a separate interactive animated on-line experience, co-produced by the prestigious National Film Board of Canada (recipient of 70 Academy Award nominations). It is an exciting new hybrid of documentary film, animation, comic book and interactive storytelling to release in May 2011.Praise for John Porcellino:"Porcellino creates some of the most thoughtful, intelligent, sympathetic & beautiful comix in America" (TIME)"A master at miniature poignance." (Entertainment Weekly)Praise for The Next Day:"The Next Day project doesn?t sugarcoat the difficulties required to face and overcome to get to those years; instead, it shows that others -- who may be very much like you -- have managed to get there." (School Library Journal's Adult Books 4 Teens blog)"As a rule, Open Book doesn?t post reviews or recommendations, but I am going to break that rule. If you are someone who is prone to moodiness, if you sometimes feel like life has kicked your ass so hard there?s no possible way you could ever recuperate, if you?ve ever felt so profoundly alone that, even for a moment, you questioned your own tangible existence -- in other words, if you're a human being -- I urge you to buy a copy of The Next Day. It is a sublimely beautiful, haunting and viscerally moving book." (Open Book Toronto)"The Next Day is intimate and accessible; it is compassionate, but unsentimental: the authors wisely don't try to suggest that everything will somehow be better in the morning. Most importantly, it may help those afflicted by mental illness realize they're not alone." (Quill and Quire)

A Graphic Novella

The Next Day

Kevin Bloom

A Journey Into Africa's Changing Fortunes

Continental Shift

The story of disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong isn’t just about the greatest doping conspiracy in sports history—it's about the nature of corruption, whether in athletics, business, politics or society at large. Blending memoir that recounts his own family’s struggles with cancer and reportage from Europe's elite racing circuit (including access to riders such as Carlos Sastre and Ryder Hesjedel), journalist Richard Poplak draws out the parallels between the elaborate, cult-like regime constructed around Armstrong and the sort of corruption he's witnessed first-hand in the developing world. This book is not a definitive account of the Lance Armstrong era. It does not divulge any new information on his many years as a doper and cyclist. Rather, Braking Bad is an incisive, eloquent, and thought-provoking meditation on the most human of foibles, corruption, and how it preys so auspiciously on the most human of virtues, idealism and hope.

Chasing Lance Armstrong and the Cancer of Corruption

Braking Bad

What happens to our pop culture when it meets another culture head-on—especially one that according to some is completely at odds with our own? In The Sheikh's Batmobile, pop-cultural commentator Richard Poplak sets out on an unusual two-year odyssey. His mission is to see what becomes of his, and North America's, obsessions—pop songs and sitcoms, Hollywood movies and shoot-em-up video games, muscle cars and punk music—when they make their way into the Muslim world. Over the course of his journey, Poplak is body slammed by WWE fans in Afghanistan, hangs out with hip-hop artists in Palestine, head bangs to heavy metal in Cairo, discovers a world of extreme makeovers in Beirut, bowls with the chief of police in small-town Kazakhstan, and encounters a mysterious Texan building rocket-propelled batmobiles for a clientele of sheikhs. With uproarious humour and keen cultural insight, Poplak asks some vital questions: How is American pop culture consumed and reinterpreted in the Islamic world? What does that say about how we are viewed by young Muslims? And can Homer Simpson bridge the differences that are tearing our world apart?

In Pursuit Of American Pop Culture In The Muslim World

Sheikhs Batmobile

Ja, No, Man is an eerily familiar portrayal of the life of an ordinary white South African growing up during Apartheid-era South Africa. Told with extraordinary humour and self-awareness, Poplak's story brings his gradual understanding of the difference between his country and the rest of the world vividly to life. A startlingly original memoir that veers sharply from the quotidian to the bizarre and back again, Ja, No, Man is an enlightening, darkly hilarious, and, at times, disturbing read.

A memoir of pop culture, girls...and apartheid

Ja, No Man

Nick Marinkovich

Kenk: A Graphic Portrait&nbspis a groundbreaking 304-page journalistic comic book detailing the life and times of Igor Kenk, "the world's most prolific bicycle thief" (The New York Times&nbspand&nbspThe Guardian). In Summer 2008, Kenk was arrested and nearly 3,000 bicycles were seized in one of the biggest news stories of the year. Built from more than 30 hours of never-before-seen intimate footage taken over the year leading up to his arrest,&nbspKenk&nbspis a thought-provoking and surprisingly funny portrait of an outsize neighbourhood figure and a city in flux, both wracked by the forces of gentrification and by a burgeoning global environmental and economic crisis that promises to define our generation.

A Graphic Portrait

Kenk

AFRICA IS FAILING. AFRICA IS SUCCEEDING. Africa is betraying its citizens. Africa is a place of starvation, corruption, disease. African economies are soaring faster than any on earth. Africa is squandering its bountiful resources. Africa is a roadmap for global development. Africa is turbulent. Africa is stabilising. Africa is doomed. Africa is the future. All of these pronouncements prove equally true and false, as South African journalists Richard Poplak and Kevin Bloom discover on their 9-year roadtrip through the paradoxical continent they call home. From pillaged mines in Zimbabwe to the creation of an economic marketplace in Ethiopia; from Namibia's middle class to the technological challenges facing Nollywood in the 21st Century; from China's investment in Botswana to the rush for resources in the Congo; and from the birth of Africa's newest country, South Sudan, to the worsening conflict in CAR, here are eight adventures on the trail of a new Africa. Part detective story, part report from this economic frontier, Continental Shift follows the money as it flows through Chinese coffers to international conglomerates, to heads of state, to ordinary African citizens, all of whom are intent on defining a metamorphosing continent.

A Journey Into Africa’s Changing Fortunes

Ross Anthony

Thaddeus Metz

Daouda Cissé

Martyn Davies

Maxime Lauzon-Lacroix

Garth le Pere

Gauhar Raza

Yongjun Zhao

Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA)

Running like a red thread through this book are the manifestations of Sino-African relations dating back many centuries. In this way, The Rise and Decline and Rise of China: Searching for an Organising Philosophy takes forward the work MISTRA conducted on the Mapungubwe society, one of the advanced states that existed in southern Africa some 800 years ago. What makes this research report unique, though, is that the treatment of these issues has been undertaken primarily from an African perspective.

Searching for an Organising Philosophy

Rise and Decline and Rise of China

Richard Poplak

About

Books

Join the club