By Hana Zittel Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen (2024) On an autumn Sunday in 2017, Olivier Schrauwen’s cousin, Thibault Schrauwen, lived an absolutely normal — sometimes boring — day. He woke up, he tried to make plans, he lingered in bed. He worried about not getting a text back from his girlfriend, who was due back from vacation that day. He got high, he drank, he got James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” stuck in his head. He fantasized about being back with his ex and watched The Da Vinci Code. Thibault had an absolutely normal(ish) day. Olivier documents this day in immense detail in his 2024 graphic novel. Coming in at almost 500 hundred pages, this work captures the complexity of our brains on any given day, but also their propensity to constantly wander, jump about, and skip from memory to the present. A candid and vulnerable portrait, Sunday is a visual representation of how our mundane experiences add up to a full existence. Though our memories are marked by the days when something big happened or was felt, most of our time spent on earth is made up of our inner thoughts. Documenting all the streaming thoughts and tiny moments in just one day adds up to pages and pages, yet our experience of a single day can move so quickly. Olivier spent years working on all the individual drawings and writing in Sunday, weaving in the stories of those who interacted with his cousin on this day to create an original graphic novel chronicling the heart of everyday existence. Sunday was named a best graphic novel of 2024 by The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. Ghostroots by 'Pemi Aguda (2024) “This is the first pimple of your life. Question the foreign object with all your fingers.” 'Pemi Aguda begins her debut collection of short stories with this sentence as we enter a haunting tale of a young woman in the beginnings of a spiritual possession by her grandmother. Told that her grandmother Agnes was a truly evil person, evil for no reason at all, she begins to have urges to destroy, to harm and to kill, all while the evil seems to seep through her skin as growing acne. In the even more surreal Contributions, members of a community group create a loan system to avoid working with banks and formal loaning organizations. They have strict rules of repayment, and when a member does not make good on their debts, they take whatever is something of value to secure the debt. That may be a generator used at their business or even their family member. When a new member joins and cannot pay, and taking her husband for payment does not satisfy the debt, they start to seize parts of her body. The stories in Ghostroots are set in Lagos, Nigeria, and each are haunting and inspired, coalescing in a remarkable collection. Aguda expertly and eerily dives into stories of motherhood, ancestry, and the roots and ties of family, while simultaneously creating complete and vibrant characters. One of the most exciting short story collections of 2024, Ghostroots was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. No. 137
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