Books by Alison Bechdel

“It’s based on Alison Bechdel’s comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran for a long time. The audiobook is adapted from that comic strip—so it has the same characters in some of the same situations, but it was written specifically for audio. It’s so much fun! Graphic novel adaptations are some of my favorite books to listen to. They’re just so creative and interesting—the way that a lot of these productions use a big cast and sound effects. In this one, there are clips of protest speeches from the 1980s. It’s very immersive. It’s a really cool way to listen to a graphic novel.” Read more...

The Best Audiobooks of 2023

Laura Sackton, Journalist

“‘Fun Home’ is short for the funeral home Alison’s dad ran when she was a child. It’s a book that blew me away and continues to blow me away every time I read it – and I must have read it five or six times by now: probably the best book I’ve read in the past ten years in any genre or form. It’s an incredibly crafted book in which the chapters are not chronological but thematic, and each chapter is keyed to a book that her father loved. So it’s not a book about what happened to her father, a closeted gay man who committed suicide a few months after Alison herself came out when she was 19. It’s about looking through a family archive to try and get a sense of her father’s particularity.” Read more...

The Best Graphic Narratives

Hillary Chute, Literary Scholar