![]() ![]() Ready Player One meets Cyberpunk 2077 in this eerily familiar future. ![]() One young woman faces down an all-powerful corporation in this all-too-near future science fiction debut that reads like a refreshing take on Ready Player One, with a heavy dose of Black Mirror. Is it possible to escape murder charges, charm her ex back into her life, and pull off a stunning wedding all in one weekend? But things go from inconvenient to downright torturous when Meddy's great college love-and biggest heartbreak-makes a surprise appearance amid the wedding chaos. It's the biggest job yet for the family wedding business-"Don't leave your big day to chance, leave it to the Chans!"-and nothing, not even an unsavory corpse, will get in the way of her auntie's perfect buttercream flowers. Unfortunately, a dead body proves to be a lot more challenging to dispose of than one might anticipate, especially when it is inadvertently shipped in a cake cooler to the over-the-top billionaire wedding Meddy, her Ma, and aunties are working at an island resort on the California coastline. What happens when you mix 1 (accidental) murder with 2 thousand wedding guests, and then toss in a possible curse on 3 generations of an immigrant Chinese-Indonesian family? You get 4 meddling Asian aunties coming to the rescue! When Meddelin Chan ends up accidentally killing her blind date, her meddlesome mother calls for her even more meddlesome aunties to help get rid of the body. Remembering the boy Stewart was and investigating the man he became, Wren finds herself wondering, did she even know this person who she once considered an extension of herself? Can you ever actually know anyone? How well does she really know herself? Through laughter and tears, Nora Zelevansky's Competitive Grieving shines a light on the universal struggle to grieve amidst the noise, to love with a broken heart, and to truly know someone who is gone forever. When his icy mother assigns Wren the task of disseminating his possessions alongside George (Stewart's maddening, but oddly charming lawyer), she finds herself at the epicenter of a world in which she wants no part, where everyone is competing to own a piece of Stewart's memory (sometimes literally). Stewart was a rising TV star, who-for reasons Wren struggles to understand-often surrounded himself with sycophants, amusing in his life, but intolerable in his death. Instead of weeping or facing reality, Wren has been dreaming up the perfect funeral plans, memorial buffets, and processional songs for everyone from the corner bodega owner to her parents (none of whom show signs of imminent demise). She can't quite believe it and she definitely can't bring herself to google what causes an aneurysm. Wren's closest friend, her anchor since childhood, is dead. Gonick and Kasser's pointed and profound cartoon narratives provide a deep exploration of the global economy and the movements seeking to change it, all rendered in clear, graphic-and sometimes hilarious-terms. A primer for the post-Occupy generation, Hypercapitalism draws from contemporary research on values, well-being, and consumerism to describe concepts (corporate power, free trade, privatization, deregulation) that are critical for understanding the world we live in, and movements (voluntary simplicity, sharing, alternatives to GDP, protests) that have developed in response to the system. But Gonick and Kasser don't stop at an analysis of how the economic system got out of whack-they also point the way to a healthier future. Now Gonick teams up with psychologist and scholar Tim Kasser to create an accessible and pointed cartoon guide to how global, privatizing, market-worshiping hypercapitalism threatens human well-being, social justice, and the planet. ![]() Bestselling "overeducated cartoonist" Larry Gonick has delighted readers for years with sharp, digestible, and funny accounts of everything from the history of the universe to the intricacies of calculus. ![]()
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