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Valentine's Book Pack

Hardback & Paperback, 0 pp, £35.00

This Valentine's Book Pack includes:

Chico and Rita by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal
Cuba, 1948. Chico is a young piano player with big dreams. Rita is a beautiful singer with an extraordinary voice. Music and romantic desire unite them, but their journey - in the tradition of the Latin ballad, the bolero - brings heartache and torment. From Havana to New York, Paris, Hollywood and Las Vegas, two passionate individuals battle impossible odds to unite in music and love. Adapted from the animated feature film by multi-award-winning Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba.

Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet by Richard Appignanesi and Sonia Leong
"My only love sprung from my only hate," laments Juliet, the heroine of Romeo and Juliet, the world's most famous love story. A fusion of classic Shakespeare with manga visuals, this is a cutting-edge adaptation that will impassion and grip its readers. Set in modern-day Japan, two young lovers are caught up in a bitter vendetta between their rival Yakuza families – the Montagues and the Capulets. Can their forbidden love survive as violence, betrayal and tragedy explode on the streets of Tokyo? Romeo and Juliet is part of Manga Shakespeare, a series of graphic novel adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays. Drawing inspiration from trend-setting Japan and using Shakespeare's original texts, this series – adapted by Richard Appignanesi and illustrated by leading manga artists – brings to life the great Bard's words for students, Shakespeare enthusiasts and manga fans.

The Smell of Starving Boys by Loo Hui Phang and Frederik Peeters
Texas, 1872. With the Civil War over, exploration has resumed in the territories to the west of the Mississippi, and geologist Stingley is looking to capitalise. Together with photographer Oscar Forrest, who catalogues the terrain, and their young assistant Milton, Stingley strikes out into territory that might one day support a new civilisation. But this is no virgin land. As the frontiersmen move west, it becomes clear that the expedition won't go unchallenged. Stingley has led them into a hostile region: the native Comanches' last bastion of resistance. In a spectacular landscape, under the looming threat of attack, the boundaries between the civilised and natural worlds dissolve. As social conventions disappear and personal inhibitions go into retreat, an intimate relationship develops between Oscar and Milton. An intense Western, The Smell of Starving Boys explores the clash between two worlds: one defined by rationality and technology, the other by shamanism and nature.

Follow the link here below to purchase the pack! 


Richard Appignanesi


Richard Appignanesi is a PhD graduate in classical art history. He was a founder and co-director of the Writers & Readers Publishing Cooperative, and later of Icon Books Ltd, where he served as originating editor of the internationally acclaimed illustrated Beginners and Introducing series, to which he contributed his own bestselling titles, Freud, Postmodernism, Existentialism and others. A former executive editor of the art journal Third Text, reviews editor of Futures and exhibition curator, Richard is the author of the fiction trilogy Italia Perversa, the novel Yukio Mishima’s Report to the Emperor and the Granta title What do Existentialists Believe? For SelfMadeHero, he adapted the texts for the Manga Shakespeare series, as well as The Wolf Man and Hysteria in the Graphic Freud series.

Fernando Trueba


Fernando Trueba is a multi-award-winning writer, director and producer, with a career spanning more than three decades in film, television, documentaries, theatre and music. Belle Epoque, starring Penelope Cruz, won both the Oscar and BAFTA for Foreign Language Film. Trueba's Latin jazz documentary Calle 54 saw the birth of his collaboration and friendship with Javier Mariscal. In the concert film Blanco Y Negro, he brought together Cuban-born musician Bebo Valdes and Spanish flamenco star Diego 'El Cigala', winning the Latin Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video. His documentary filmed in Brazil, El Milagro De Candeal, won two Goya awards. El Ano de Las Luces also won a Goya, as well as the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival. Trueba's published works include a dictionary of cinema. He began his career as the film critic at leading Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Sonia Leong


Sonia Leong won Tokyopop's Rising Stars of Manga competition in 2005 and went on to illustrate Domo: The Manga (Tokyopop), Bravest Warriors: The Search For Catbug (VIZ/Perfect Square) and the Eisner Award-winning Comic Book Tattoo (Image). Leong is also the author of a number of how-to-draw titles, including Draw Manga: 101 Top Tips from Professional Manga Artists and Manga Your World. As a freelancer, she has worked on projects for Toyota, CNN, the BBC and Marie Claire, among many others.

Loo Hui Phang


Loo Hui Phang is the author of comics including Panorama (with Cédric Manche) and Prestige de l'uniforme (with Hugues Micol), and has also written plays, books, films, performances and installations, for which she has collaborated with renowned illustrators like Blexbolex and Ludovic Debeurme. Born in Laos, she grew up in Normandy. 

Javier Mariscal


Javier Mariscal is an artist and designer who works in multiple fields, including illustration, graphics, comic books, paintings, animation, interiors, product design, furniture and web design. In 1979, he created the Bar Cel Ona (bar, sky, wave) logo for his adoptive city of Barcelona, a powerful and accessible piece of graphic communication that won him instant acclaim. He is the creator of Cobi, the merchandise-friendly mascot of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and Twipsy, a character designed for the Hanover 2000 Expo that later starred in his own animated TV series. The Valencia-born designer opened Estudio Mariscal in Barcelona in 1989, winning multiple commissions across a range of disciplines. Javier Mariscal was the subject of a major retrospective at London's Design Museum in 2009. An exhibition of his work, Mariscal A La Pedrera, opened in September 2010 at the Pedrera, one of Gaudi's most famous buildings, in Barcelona.

Frederik Peeters


Frederik Peeters is an award-winning Swiss comic book artist best known for his autobiographical graphic novel Blue Pills. He has received five nominations in the Best Book category at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. In 2013, he won the Best Series prize at the same event for the first two volumes of his science fiction series Aama. Peeters is also the author of Pachyderme, Sandcastle (with Pierre-Oscar Lévy) and The Smell of Starving Boys

Reviews

"Peeters’s stunning clear-line art remains as unflinchingly crisp and honest as a photograph. Peeters is already well known to European comics followers, but this richly drawn epic will appeal to broader readers, too."
— Publishers Weekly on "The Smell of Starving Boys"
"A work of art in its own right: exuberant, passionate and melancholy… For all that this book will have you tapping your toes, I defy anyone to reach the end of it without a tear in their eye."
— The Observer on "Chico and Rita"
"This series does in book form what film director Baz Luhrmann did on screen – make Shakespeare cool and accessible to a younger generation… [the] artists use the dynamic flow of manga to give Shakespeare's plots an addictive page-turning energy."
— Independent on Sunday on "Romeo and Juliet"