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The Prince and the Dressmaker

We’re very excited to share with you some sneak peek art from Jen Wang’s new graphic novel, The Prince and the Dressmaker, out with First Second Books in 2017!

The Prince and the Dressmaker is about a young 19th Century prince named Sebastian who secretly loves to wear dresses. He hires an ambitious young seamstress named Frances to make dresses for him and as their collaboration grows, so do their feelings for one another. Sebastian and Frances must find a way to balance their inner desires with the strict expectations of the royal family – or risk exposing Sebastian’s secret to the world.

“This book is really special to me because I basically wrote it for my teenage self, which is something I haven’t done before. I wanted a story that explored questions about gender and self-identity in a way that was also really colorful and fun and positive. The personal themes are there, but also lots of dresses and princesses. The idea was to create my ideal Disney movie, and writing this has genuinely been one of the most fun, liberating, experiences I’ve had making comics. My awkward confused fourteen year-old self would’ve really connected with this book and I hope it does the same for other young readers,” says Jen Wang.

Jen Wang is a cartoonist, writer and illustrator living in Los Angeles. Her young adult graphic novels Koko Be Good and In Real Life (co-written by Cory Doctorow) are published by First Second Books. She recently wrote the mini-series Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake Card Wars for BOOM Comics, illustrated by Britt Wilson.  Her upcoming graphic novel The Prince and the Dressmaker will be published by First Second Books in 2017.

Correction: An earlier version of this post included an incorrect publication date for The Prince and the Dressmaker; it will be published in 2017, not 2016.

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Doomsday Clock is still kind of a hot mess but I really enjoyed this ridiculous page.

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Ursula K. Le Guin passed away yesterday, she was and remains my favorite author. I don’t know what else I can say except that I cherish her beautiful words, she changed the way I think about writing. Here are some pieces I’ve been working on as a tribute to her book, The Left Hand of Darkness. It’s a book I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I read it, it holds a place in my heart.

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This is worth a listen for the staggeringly beautiful poem Ursula reads about halfway through alone, but the entire interview is just the most charming.

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Never 4get

In which Ursula K. Le Guin declines to blurb a book by Brian Aldiss because it is “so self-contentedly, exclusively male”

(Source: Hugh D'Andrade via YA Highway)

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"Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art -- the art of words."

Good night, Ursula.

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Today’s a pretty good day for video essays.

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Really good re-examination of the criticism surrounding Twilight by the incomparable Lindsay Ellis.

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Magical thinking might seem like nonsense to some people, but he had danced with skeletons by the light of a marigold moon, he had kissed the glimmering skull of a girl with no lips and loved her as he had never loved anything or anyone in his life, and he thought he’d earned a certain amount of nonsense, as long as it helped him get by.

Seanan McGuire, Beneath the Sugar Sky

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A lovely mini-doc from Vox.

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Of course the invasion of literature by politics was bound to happen. It must have happened, even if the special problem of totalitarianism had never arisen, because we have developed a sort of compunction which our grandfathers did not have, an awareness of the enormous injustice and misery of the world. And a guilt-stricken feeling that one ought to be doing something about it, which makes a purely aesthetic attitude towards life impossible.

George Orwell, “Writers and Leviathan”

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One's real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually ‘I like this book’ or ‘I don't like it’, and what follows is a rationalization. But ‘I like this book’ is not, I think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is ‘This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.’

George Orwell, “Writers and Leviathan”

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This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc. are what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships.

George Orwell, “Writers and Leviathan”

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Anyway here’s Michael Sheen reading for the La Belle Sauvage audiobook.

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All of you do this. Every organic sapient I’ve ever talked to, every book I’ve read, every piece of art I’ve studied. You are all desperate for purpose, even though you don’t have one. You’re animals, and animals don’t have a purpose. Animals just are. And there are a lot of intelligent – sentient, maybe – animals out there who don’t have a problem with that. They just go on breathing and mating and eating each other without a second thought. But the animals like you – the ones who make tools and build cities and itch to explore, you all share a need for purpose. For reason. That thinking worked well for you, once. When you climbed down out of the trees, up out of the ocean – knowing what things were for was what kept you alive. Fruit is for eating. Fire is for warmth. Water is for drinking. And then you made tools, which were for certain kinds of fruit, for making fire, cleaning water. Everything was for something, so obviously, you had to be for something too, right? All of your histories are the same, in essence. They’re all stories of animals warring and clashing because you can’t agree on what you’re for, or why you exist.

Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

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Everything was too much. Too much. The planet was beautiful. The planet was horrible. The planet was full of people, and they were beautiful and horrible, too.

Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit