I have decided to keep my library loot to a minimum this week as the books are beginning to build up. I have also gone with another heavily illustrated novel despite the likelihood that it won’t display well on my reader or my laptop.
This week's loot
I was listening to the Coode Street Podcast where they were discussing Australian author, artist and film maker, Shaun Tan. Tan has received an Oscar nomination for his adaptation of The Lost Thing. A book that he wrote and illustrated.
Unfortunately I was unable to find a eBook version of The Lost Thing
or The Arrival
, another of Shaun's works I have heard good things about.
I was, however, able to borrow Tan’s Tale’s from Outer Suburbia
and I was pleasantly surprised. Here's a description of the book, his latest, taken from Shaun's Website:Tales from Outer Suburbia is an anthology of fifteen very short illustrated stories. Each one is about a strange situation or event that occurs in an otherwise familiar suburban world; a visit from a nut-sized foreign exchange student, a sea creature on someone’s front lawn, a new room discovered in a family home, a sinister machine installed in a park, a wise buffalo that lives in a vacant lot. The real subject of each story is how ordinary people react to these incidents, and how their significance is discovered, ignored or simply misunderstood.
The stories are quirky and I am reminded in some ways of Michael Leunig, both he and Tan have ways of directing you to look at the ordinary from a different perspective.
Tan's artwork is magnificent even reading it on adobe digital editions.
Am I about the last person to discover Shaun Tan's work? What other visual story tellers am I missing out on?
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