A frame from Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,         © Alison Bechdel

Each summer, Vassar College sends members of the incoming class a book, with the purpose of introducing new students to significant ideas or issues, and welcoming them to engage in academic discussion of the work. This year’s “common reading” is Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a provocative and beautiful graphic novel that is likely to elicit a sense of connection with the work itself as well as with its writer. In anticipation of Bechdel’s William Starr Lecture on Tuesday (October 7th), we offer a video blog as well as a list of sources that was created earlier this year by Research Librarian Gretchen Lieb. The blog puts Bechdel’s work in context and suggests a number of possibilities for further reading.

For further reading
(Links may not work for non-Vassar users):

Ann Cvetkovich’s “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home”  in Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36(1/2):111-128

Judith Thurman’s profile of Alison Bechdel in the New Yorker, 23 Apr 2012

Special issue of Critical Inquiry, Spring 2014

Helen E. Hokinson cartoon from the New Yorker, ca. 1930-1939

P.S. If you’re unsure about how to say Alison Bechdel’s name, the author has provided an assist.