Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life Paperback by Ulli Lust

Product Details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics (2013-06-15)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 464 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781606995570
• Item Weight: 368.55 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

A powerful debut graphic memoir.

Back in 1984, a rebellious,17-year-old, punked-out Ulli Lust set out for a wild hitchhiking trip across Italy, from Naples through Verona and Rome and ending up in Sicily. Twenty-five years later, this talented Austrian cartoonist has looked back at that tumultuous summer and delivered a long, dense, sensitive,and minutely observed autobiographical masterpiece.

Miraculously combining a perfect memory for both emotional and physical detail with the sometimes painful lucidity two and half decades’ distance have brought to her understanding of the events, Lust meticulously shows the who, where, when, and how (specifically, how an often penniless young girl can survive for months on the road) of a sometimes dangerous and sometimes exhilarating journey. Particularly haunting is her portrait of her fellow traveler, the gangly, promiscuous devil-may-care Edi who veers from being her spunky, funny best friend in the world to an out-of-control lunatic with no consideration for anything but her own whims and desires.

Universally considered one of the very finest examples of the new breed of graphic novels coming from Europe, Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life won the 2011 Angoulême “Revelation” prize, and Fantagraphics is proud to bring it to English speaking readers.

About the Author

Ulli Lust, born in Vienna in 1967, is an award-winning comic artist and illustrator. The German edition of this book, published in 2025, won that year’s €25,000 German Nonfiction Prize, awarded by Germany’s publishers and booksellers association—the first time a graphic-format book was awarded the prize.

Ulli Lust’s graphic memoir Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life garnered international acclaim and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Ignatz Award. Her subsequent books include How I Tried to Be a Good Person and Voices in the Dark, based on the novel by Marcel Beyer.

She teaches drawing and comics at the Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts.

Kim Thompson (1956-2013) was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was the co-publisher of Fantagraphics Books and a champion of alternative and global comics. He lived in Seattle, WA, with his wife, Lynn, and their dog.