MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Navigating fatphobia
ROSIE NELSON applauds a graphic novel that asks what does it mean to exist as a fat person in a fatphobic society?
[Courtesy of Graphic Mundi] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Shrink
Rachel M Thomas, Graphic Mundi, £20.95
WHAT is it like to move through the world when everyone tries to change who and what you are? This is the fundamental experience that the graphic novel Shrink explores in its stylistic depiction of the author’s autobiographical experience of being fat.
The book opens with the author hospitalised. Even while lying in bed with oxygen tubes, Rachel M Thomas’s mind is racing — will people think that she’s there because she’s fat? How are others judging her? This sense of claustrophobic, understandable paranoia persists through the novel.
As Thomas shows, to be fat is to be judged. Herein lies the most interesting contribution of this book: what does it mean to exist as a fat person in a hugely fatphobic society?
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