News From Our Local Novelists

The Ditmas Park/Kensington/Flatbush area is home to an incredible array of artists.

In recent days, we have covered news related to local filmmakers and musicians, and now two area novelists have major accomplishments to share.

Ditmas Park-based illustrator and cartoonist Marguerite Dabaie is getting ready to publish her next graphic novel, A Voyage to Panjikant. You can look at the beautiful preview book here.

Dabaie published an earlier comic, The Hookah Girl and Other True Stories, for which she won two grants. Here’s how she describes her latest project:

A Voyage to Panjikant is a graphic novel work of historical fiction set in 7th-century Central Asia and China. It follows the story of sixteen-year-old Upach, a headstrong teenage girl whose greatest desire is to follow in her father’s footsteps and travel the Silk Road in order to become a successful merchant.

The problem, however, is that women were rarely afforded the freedom to leave their hometowns. This story is about Upach’s journey to rally against the closed-minded world she must abide by — but at a great cost.

This work, while heavily historically researched for accuracy, is also a story with feminist underpinnings; its theme is to live one’s life outside of social expectations.

Dabaie says that the finished book will be 190 pages and in full color. She has launched a Kickstarter campaign to help cover printing costs for this work. Dabaie’s Kickstarter page has lots of great background information on the project, both artistic and historic.

Also of note, local author Helen Phillips is releasing a new short story collection, Some Possible Solutions, on May 31st.

Phillips’ first novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, has just become available in paperback. We interviewed Phillips last year after she released The Beautiful Bureaucrat, and she had this to say about her debut work:

The Beautiful Bureaucrat is an “existential thriller,” as my friend Elliott Holt put it, about a young wife who gets a mysterious data-entry job in an enormous windowless building. When her husband starts to disappear at night, she realizes that neither her work life nor her home life is quite what it seems.

To borrow from the jacket copy, “In order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate the inner workings of an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond.”

The Brooklyn launch party for Phillips’ next work, Some Possible Solutions, will be at Cobble Hill’s BookCourt on Friday, June 3, at 7pm.