Open your mind at this year’s festival and step outside your comfort zone, whether that means looking into a different genre, a new perspective or a topic that’s foreign to you. We will use the hashtag #READdifferent to celebrate that challenge at the AJC DBF. The festival provides a breadth of content to give nearly everyone an opportunity to #READdifferent.
Not sure where to start on your journey of literary exploration and discovery? We’re here to help! Each week we will be featuring a new theme or genre that you can use to READdifferent at the 2016 AJC Decatur Book Festival.
At Little Shop of Stories, the booksellers frequently say that graphic novels are the perfect bridge between picture books and chapter books. They provide children access to reading in a unique way that is creative and fun. At this year’s DBF, the programming team has brought super stars from the comics and graphic novel realm, for adults and children, highlighting this artful genre of literature.
When Eisner-nominated cartoonist Tom Hart lost his young daughter Rosalie to an untimely death, his instinct was to turn to art. Rosalie Lightning is his memoir of her, using the graphic form to articulate his and his wife’s on-going search for meaning in the aftermath of Rosalie’s death, exploring themes of grief, hopelessness, rebirth, and eventually finding hope again. Hart creatively portrays the solace he discovers in nature, philosophy, great works of literature, and art across all mediums in this expressively honest and loving tribute to his baby girl. Rosalie Lighting is a graphic masterpiece chronicling a father’s undying love.
Ben Katchor is regarded as a modern day cartooning genius. Cheap Novelties, out from Drawn & Quarterly in a deluxe 25th anniversary addition, is an early testament to his extraordinary prescience as a gifted cartoonist and an astute urban chronicler. Rumpled, middle-aged Julius Knipl photographs a vanishing city–an urban landscape of low-rent apartment buildings, obsolete industries, monuments to forgotten people and events, and countless sources of inexpensive food. In Katchor’s signature pen and ink wash style, Cheap Novelties is a portrait of what we have lost to gentrification, globalization, and the malling of America that is as moving today as it was 25 years ago.
In March: Book Three, American icon and key civil rights movement figure Congressman John Lewis shares his remarkable story with new generations, joining talents Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell. Nate Powell, illustrator of the series, will appear at the AJC Decatur Book Festival. March: Book Three portrays the surpassing courage, sacrifice, and revolutionary nonviolence that transformed American society in the 1960s, guided by principles and tactics that remain vitally relevant in the modern age.
From Nathan Hale, #1 New York Times bestselling author and Texas Bluebonnet Award Master List maker, comes the definitive graphic novel about the Alamo in Alamo All-Stars. In the early 1800s, Texas was a wild and dangerous land fought over by the Mexican government, Native Americans, and settlers from the United States. Beginning with the expeditions of the so-called “Land Pirates,” through the doomed stand at the Alamo, and ending with the victory over Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto, the entire Texas saga is on display. Nathan Hale brings new insight for students, teachers, and historians into one of the most iconic structures in the United States.
From the creator of Captain Underpants, Dav Pilkey comes to the DBF as the 2016 Kidnote speaker for his new series, Dog Man, featuring a crime-biting canine who is part dog, part man, and ALL HERO! When Greg the police dog and his cop companion are injured on the job, a life-saving surgery changes the course of history, and Dog Man is born. With the head of a dog and the body of a human, this heroic hound has a real nose for justice. But can he resist the call of the wild to answer the call of duty?