Beverly - Paperback

by Nick Drnaso (Author)

Nick Drnaso's comics mercilessly reveal the sterile sameness of the suburbs.

Connected by a series of gossipy teens, the modern lost souls of Beverly struggle with sexual anxieties that are just barely repressed and social insecurities that undermine every word they speak.

A group of teenagers pick up trash on the side of the highway--flirting, preening, and ignoring a potentially violent loner in their midst. A college student brings her sort-of boyfriend to a disastrous house party with her high-school acquaintances. A young woman experiences a traumatic incident at the pizza shop where she works and the fallout reveals the racial tensions simmering below the surface. Again and again, the civilized façade of Drnaso's pitch-perfect surburban sprawl and pasty Midwestern protagonists cracks in the face of violence and quiet brutality.

Drnaso's bleak social satire in Beverly reveals a brilliant command of the social milieu of twenty-first-century existence, echoing the black comic work of Todd Solondz, Sam Lipsyte, and Daniel Clowes. Precisely and hauntingly recounted, each chapter of Beverly reveals something new--and yet familiar--about the world in which we live.

Author Biography

Nick Drnaso was born in 1989 in Palos Hills, Illinois. His debut, Beverly, received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Graphic Novel. His followup, the graphic novel Sabrina, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and received nominations for the Booker Prize, the Eisner Award, the LD and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award. Sabrina has been published in fifteen countries. Drnaso lives in Chicago with his wife and their two cats.