Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life

by Ulli Lust, Kim Thompson (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781606995570
Publisher:	Fantagraphics Books
Publication date:	06/15/2013
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Ulli Lust was born in 1967 in Vienna, Austria. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

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.

Editorial Reviews

…the book ripples with exuberance: [Lust] convincingly evokes her teenage feelings of fury and joy, and the small details of the way she experienced unfamiliar places for the first time. Lust's pen-and-ink work…depicts the stretched and crimped features of the people from whom she bummed change, the architecture of St. Peter's Basilica and the chaos of a Clash concert with equally manic panache, and her line is as seemingly unkempt but as deliberately molded as her younger self's punk-rock shock of hair.

The New York Times Book Review - Douglas Wolk

With the punk phenomenon so often romanticized in popular culture, it can be easy to skew or forget the realities of the time. Not for Lust, though, who chronicles even the most unsavory details of a road trip she and unstable companion Enid took along the fringes of European society in 1984. Originally released almost a decade ago in German to international acclaim, this sprawling bildungsroman follows the duo on their haphazard trek from the streets of Vienna to the Italian sea. Along the way they panhandle, hitch rides, and crash with total strangers, many of whom expect their hospitality to be reciprocated with sexual favors. Rendered with lithe and spontaneous forms washed in appropriately sickly green, Lust surveys issues of personal identity and sexuality through her various encounters with the local demimonde, as well as her frustration with a faceless and indifferent public. Her recollections willfully expose the dark side of an anarchic lifestyle, yet are void of any didactic embellishment, and instead form a genuine and nonjudgmental look at aimless youth and rebellion. And what’s truer to punk than that? (June)

Publishers Weekly

"A testament not only to how boldly Lust traveled, but also how far she's come as an artist."

PRI

"There is a rejection of the organization of the world, from organized faith to organized crime. It is about the pursuit of nihilism as a route to integrity. Ulli Lust has the intelligence to look at her life and make a book of it."

(From Hell, Alec) - Eddie Campbell

"A youthful-looking 40-something now living in Berlin, Ulli Lust claims to have learned ‘more on the streets than in the books’… varying the rhythm and framing of her panels, populating them with her subtly stylized characters, she provides an unvarnished vision of male-female relations in which violence, drugs and sex perform a diabolical dance. And even though there are flashes of humor, this relentless story remains focused on the frustration of men and the pain of women."

Le Monde

"...[A] sprawling, meditative graphic novel... [that] ripples with exuberance: [Lust] convincingly evokes her teenage feelings of fury and joy, and the small details of the way she experienced unfamiliar places for the first time."

The New York Times - Douglas Wolk

"Lust takes readers inside her experiences, letting them feel how high hopes can devolve into raw survival."

The A.V. Club - Noel Murray

"Told with great confidence and uncomfortable frankness across a sprawling 450 pages, it is a coming-of-age narrative that inevitably places itself in the tradition of German travel literature, perhaps unwittingly joining the company of such august figures as Goethe and Hesse."

The Metabunker - Matthias Wivel

"Great cartooning."

(Ganges, Gloriana) - Kevin Huizenga