Palestine Hardcover by Joe Sacco

Product Details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics (2024-09-03)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 300 pages
• ISBN-13: 9798875000003
• Item Weight: 1128.33 grams
• Dimensions: 28.07 x 19.05 x 2.92 cm

The landmark work of comics journalism by Joe Sacco, in a new hardcover edition with a new afterword by Israeli journalist Amira Hass and an introduction by Palestinian American author and critic Edward W. Said.

Joe Sacco's breakthrough work of graphic journalism — a now-established genre almost single handedly invented by Sacco — won the American Book Award upon its initial release in 1996, and has remained a perennial, essential work for understanding the Palestinian Israeli conflict in the Middle East. This new hardcover edition includes a new afterword by Israeli journalist Amira Hass and also features Palestinian academic and critic Edward W. Said’s timeless 2001 introduction to the work.

Based on several years of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s, where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews, Palestine was the first major comics work of political and historical nonfiction by Sacco, whose name has since become synonymous with this graphic form of New Journalism. Like Safe Area Gorazde, Palestine has been favorably compared to Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus for its ability to brilliantly navigate such socially and politically sensitive subject matter through the immersive lens of the comic book medium. Sacco has often been called the first comic book journalist, and he is certainly the best.

About the Author

Joe Sacco is a Maltese-born cartoonist and journalist based in Portland. He is a seminal figure in comics journalism, establishing the form’s seriousness and legitimacy in the 1990s with his groundbreaking investigative graphic novel Palestine. He has since become the most prominent figure in the genre he virtually created, and has published numerous investigative works of graphic journalism, including Safe Area Goražde, Footnotes in Gaza, Paying the Land, and his most recent book, The Once and Future Riot.  He is also the co-author with Chris Hedges of Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. Sacco is the recipient of the American Book Award, multiple Eisner and Harvey awards, and in 2023 was awarded a Doctor of Literature degree (Honoris Causa) by the University of Malta.

Edward W. Said was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature and of Kings College Cambridge, his celebrated works include Orientalism, The End of the Peace Process, Power, Politics and Culture, and the memoir Out of Place. He is also the editor, with Christopher Hitchens, of Blaming the Victims, published by Verso. He died in September 2003. 

Amira Hass is an Israeli journalist and author, known for her columns in the daily newspaper Haaretz covering Palestinian affairs in Gaza and the West Bank, where she has lived for almost thirty years.