The Cardboard Valise Hardcover by Ben Katchor

Product Details

• Publisher: Pantheon (2011-03-15)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 128 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780375421143
• Item Weight: 816.48 grams
• Dimensions: 8.78 x 11.0 x 0.76 cm

The first book in more than ten years from “the creator of the last great American comic strip” (Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author): the story of the fantastical nation of Outer Canthus and the three people who, in some way or another, in­habit its shores.

Emile Delilah is a young xenophile (lover of foreign nations) so addicted to traveling to the exotic regions of Outer Canthus that the government pays him a monthly stipend just so he can continue his visits. Liv­ing in the same tenement as Emile are Boreal Rince, the exiled king of Outer Canthus, and Elijah Salamis, a supranationalist determined to erase the cultural and geographic boundaries that separate the citizens of the Earth. Although they rarely meet, their lives in­tertwine through the elaborate fictions they construct and inhabit: a vast panorama of humane hamburger stands, exquisitely ethereal ethnic restaurants, ancient restroom ruins, and wild tracts of land that fit neatly next to high-rise hotels. The Cardboard Valise is a graphic novel as travelogue; a canvas of semi-surrealism; and a poetic, whimsical, beguiling work of Ben Katchor’s dazzling imagination.

About the Author

BEN KATCHOR is the author of The Jew of New York; Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District; and several works of musical theater in collabora­tion with the composer Mark Mulcahy. He teaches at Par­sons The New School for Design and has contributed to The New Yorker, The Forward, and Metropolis. The first car­toonist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, he is the subject of a documentary titled The Pleasures of Urban Decay. He lives in New York.