Blurry [Hardcover]

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST GRAPHIC NOVELS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, LITERARY HUB, AND FORBES

A warm and quietly inventive new graphic novel about a group of characters whose lives interconnect in subtle, often unseen ways—and the seemingly mundane choices that bring them together or draw them apart.

A man can’t decide between two dress shirts for a wedding.
A woman questions the style of her new glasses.
A teacher considers quitting teaching.
A figure-drawing model considers quitting modeling.
A man drives into a fog bank and is unsure how to get home.

From Dash Shaw, cartoonist of one of the New York Times Best Comics of 2021, comes a new graphic novel, Blurry.

In Blurry, Shaw renders doubts around everyday decisions as startling cliffhangers, presenting us with the kinds of choices that can make a life expand or contract in equal measure. Drawn in clear lines and washes, Shaw captures the humor and anxiety of life in a one-of-a-kind structure that bends back to a thrilling, lyrical finish. Blurry is more evidence that Shaw is one of our greatest contemporary cartoonists. Few graphic novels pursue the “novel” part of the construction so successfully. “Blurry” uses a story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure, something less common in comics than in the prose of, say, David Mitchell or Italo Calvino. — Sam Thielman, The New York Times


Shaw is in control of all the elements of this book, which could have been created as a prose novel but gains something via the funky, unpredictable turns of his illustrations. Not one moment seems wasted in its 480 pages.lÃd