Unflattening was featured in the New York Times Book Review! Writer Douglas Wolk said, “Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening is a genuine oddity, a philosophical treatise in comics form. ‘Flatness,’ for Sousanis’s purposes, is not the quality of abstraction that Clement Greenberg lauded in modern art, but the lamentable condition of the inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s ‘Flatland’:…
Following up on my previous post, I’m sharing a second deleted scene that appeared in the dissertation but was cut from the published edition. Like that previous one, which dealt with my process of Spin/Weave/Cut, this too comes from Chapter 4: “Our Bodies in Motion,” which delves into thinking about drawing through our perception. On this page, I took up…
Unseen art – a deleted scene from Unflattening! I’ve been asked frequently how the published version of Unflattening differs from the dissertation. After I defended, I submitted the work to HUP and went up to Cambridge to work with my wonderful editor Sharmila Sen. We trimmed text throughout to tighten it up and keep a consistency of…
Some recent reflections on doing my dissertation in comics form have just been published as part of a Media Commons collection on doing alternative scholarship in the academy. Fellow contributors include Cathy Davidson, Jade Davis, Gregory Donovan, and Amanda Licastro. This is a continuation of a conversation we had together at CUNY in NYC last…
A fun week of early feedback, as people have been sending me pictures of Unflattening on bookstore shelves and arriving in their mail! I appreciate all the support and look forward to conversations to come over the work. It’s been sighted at The Strand in NYC, Tattered Covers in Denver, Quimby’s comics in Chicago, and alongside…
With thanks to the US and Canadian postal services, I was thrilled for my very own copy of Unflattening to arrive last week! It was nearly a year ago that I defended the dissertation, just after we welcomed our daughter into the world, and as she turns one and is starting to get up on her…
Unflattening has been released into the wild! Copies have surfaced – and I’m itching to see mine! Last week, it got its first review from Publishers Weekly and a Starred Review at that! A little excerpt: “Sousanis has made a profound contribution to the field of comics studies and to semiotics, epistemology, and the burgeoning study of visible thinking. Essential…
Welcome to my new site. While I’ve had this domain all along, it’s been bouncing to a blog for the past six years and it was finally time for an upgrade. This new home (courtesy of the good folks at Loudbaby.com – the architects behind the Detroit arts-mag I used to run) brings along my…
About a month to go to the release of Unflattening! While I’ve yet to see all of it bound in one piece, I was pleased to get my hands on the proof of the cover and test prints for the interior pages! More info on Harvard UP’s site here. (Preorder available at places like Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and Powells, or…
With less than two months to go, I’m eagerly counting down to March 9 and the release of my comics dissertation-turned book Unflattening – see more details on Harvard University Press’s site here! (And if you can’t wait, I see it’s up for preorder at places like Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and Powells!) In the meantime, an essay I…