Alison Bechdel, acclaimed author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy, is wrapping up a tour promoting her new collection, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), chronicling the lives, loves, and politics of cult fave characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and so many others.

Catch her at the dates below:

Tuesday, November 18th, Cambridge MA - she’ll be at Lesley College doing a reading for the Center for New Words, at 7pm. Follow that link for details.

Wednesday, November 19th, Northampton, MA, Broadside Bookshop, at 7pm.

Tuesday, December 2nd, Montpelier VT, Bear Pond Books, at 7pm.

Wednesday, December 3, Shelburne VT, The Flying Pig Bookstore, at 7pm.

For twenty-five years, Bechdel’s path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a “rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down” (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form.

Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis. Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends—academics, social workers, bookstore clerks—fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents.

Bechdel fuses high and low culture—from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory—in a serial graphic narrative “suitable for humanists of all persuasions.”

Savor this collection now, since Bechdel announced in May 2008 that she was putting the strip on indefinite hiatus in order to complete her graphic novel memoir Love Life, due in late 2009.

She introduced the last episode produced, DTOF #527, with this “Okay, here it is. The last episode for who knows how long. Nuthin’ fancy. No loose ends tied up. Just another strip.” It posted on May 13, 2008.

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