Home / Store / Books / Observed While Falling Bill Burroughs Ah Pook and Me
Observed While Falling Bill Burroughs Ah Pook and Me
by Malcolm McNeill
Published by Fantagraphics Books
192p, b&w, hardcover, 6.75"x10.5"
$29.99
Out of Stock
"
Observed While Falling is an account of the personal and creative interaction
that defined the collaboration between the writer William S. Burroughs and
the artist Malcolm McNeill on the graphic novel Ah Pook Is Here.
The memoir
chronicles the events that surrounded it, the reasons it was abandoned
and the
unusual circumstances that brought it back to life. McNeill describes
his growing friendship with Burroughs and how their personal
relationship affected their
creative partnership. The book is written with insight and humor, and
is liberally sprinkled with the kind of outré anecdotes one would
expect working
with a writer as original and eccentric as Burroughs. It confirms
Burroughs’
and McNeill’s prescience, the place of Ah Pook in relation to the contemporary
graphic novel, and its anticipation of the events surrounding 2012. The book
offers new insights into Burroughs’ working methods as well as how the two
explored the possibilities of words and images working together to form the
ambitious literary hybrid that they didn’t know, at the time, was a harbinger of the 21st century “graphic novel.” McNeill
expounds on the lessons of that experience to bring Ah Pook into present time. In light of current events, Ah Pook is
unquestionably Here now.
Observed While Falling presents a unique view of the creative process that will be of interest to artists, writers and
general readers alike. A perspective evoked by a literary experiment that has endured for forty years and still continues
to “happen.”"