Graphic Novel Book Club: Bye Bye Babylon

Each month we host a Graphic Novel Book Club meeting, open to all, during which we hang out and informally discuss a featured graphic novel. Our pick for this July is Bye Bye Babylon by Lamia Ziade. We will meet at La Petite Librairie Drawn & Quarterly (176 Rue Bernard O.) on Wednesday, July 18th at 7 p.m. The discussion will be hosted by Librairie Drawn & Quarterly staff member Eli Tareq Lynch. Join us for refreshments and collective insights!

***We are offering a 20% discount on Bye Bye Babylon from now until the meeting date!***

Beirut in the 1970s is a paradise. Wealthy families ride escalators and fill shopping carts with imported food and luxury products from Paris and New York. Lamia Ziadé, seven years old, dreams of banana splits, American candy, flying on Pan Am Airways, and visiting the local cinema. Considered by the elite the “Paris, Las Vegas or Monaco of the Middle East,” Beirut was in reality a powder keg, waiting for a spark. On April 13, 1975 Lamia and her family returned from lunch in the countryside to find a city in flames. Looking back on the golden days before the war, and its immediate, devastating effects, Bye Bye Babylon positions an elegiac and shocking narrative next to a child’s perspective of the years 1975–79: of consumer icons next to burning buildings, scenes of violence and sparkling new weapons painted in vivid Technicolor—war as pop. It is a unique graphic memoir, and an important visual record of a terrible war.

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