Everything Is Flammable

From Gabrielle Bell, "one of the most sincere voices of her generation" (Chris Ware), comes her most brilliant cartoon diary yet, an examination of one of the most intense years in her life. When her mother's remote home burns to the ground, leaving her with only the clothes on her back and a favorite dog, Gabrielle and her brother have to return to Northern California to help a woman who is a stranger to them both. And when her own apartment in Brooklyn is itself damaged in a fire, Gabrielle is forced to examine a past of violence and hardship, and confront a present that is making its own challenging demands. Told over the course of a year in her signature funny, digressive style, A Mermaid in Ship’s Cabin unfolds with a brutal yet vulnerable honesty that has become the trademark of Bell's brilliant cartoon diaries.

?Bell's pen becomes a kind of laser, first illuminating the surface distractions of the world, then scorching them away to reveal a deeper reality that is almost too painful and too beautiful to bear."? Alison Bechdel, Fun Home, Are You My Mother

Gabrielle Bell’s work has been selected multiple times for Houghton-Mifflin Best American Comics and has been featured in McSweeney’s, The Believer, Bookforum, and Vice magazines. Her story, ?Cecil and Jordan In New York,” was turned into a film by Michel Gondry. The Voyeurs was named one of the best Graphic Novels of the year by Publishers Weekly.