Every month, Librairie Drawn & Quarterly invites a local author or artist to curate a shelf in the store. This month, we bring you recommendations from Hartley Lin!

Hartley Lin is a cartoonist based in Montreal. Young Frances, the first collection from his ongoing comic book Pope Hats, is nominated for a Doug Wright award for Best Book and an Eisner award. He has illustrated for The New Yorker, The Hollywood Reporter, Slate, Taddle Creek and HarperCollins. 

All of Hartley's picks will be 15% off throughout the month of May. 

Everything is Flammable - Gabrielle Bell

Bell has an incredible ability to relay any personal event into a strip that is both concise and intricate. Encountering this level of vulnerability is therapeutic. Hopefully not too far into the future, she will win a Nobel prize in literature. 

How to Write An Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee

Chee writes beautifully. His sentences achieve both lightness and precision. My most recent comic (Pope Hats #6, also autobiographical) unapologetically steals the look of its page titles from this essay collection.

Anti-Gone - Connor Willumsen

An experimental ride with a finely tuned relationship at its core. Totally inventive and playful. Willumsen’s choices of which aspects of society to depict paired with the book’s gorgeous design has me convinced that the act of drawing is essentially an act of love. 

I Never Liked You - Chester Brown

It’s my all time favourite graphic novel. Read it multiple times. If your grade school years were perfectly joyous and uncomplicated and stable, you might not understand this book

Dear Life - Alice Munro

I think I heard an interview before its publication where Munro described this collection as being about people who are ambivalent about sex… Whatever the case, her style and impact cannot be overstated. She sees all, bends all rules. 

Tenth of December - George Saunders

One of these stories is exactly two paragraphs long and manages to be the most personally relatable and painful image of a family history I’ve ever read. How is that possible? 

The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler

Give me some good hard-boiled detection fiction! The plot structure is interesting and mysterious, and there is a surprising amount of emotion lurking just below the surface.

Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

How many novels have perfect endings? Only a few come to mind for me. This is definitely one of them.