David Small discusses and signs his memoir Stitches September 22, 2009

The prize-winning children's author depicts a childhood from hell in this searing, yet redemptive, graphic novel.

Moderator: Walter Mayes

One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had throat cancer and was expected to die. Small, a prize-winning children’s author, re-creates a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. Readers will be riveted by his journey from speechless victim, subjected to X-rays by his radiologist father and scolded by his withholding and tormented mother, to his decision to flee his home at sixteen with nothing more than dreams of becoming an artist.

Stitches is one of the most compelling books I've read in a long time—totally original in style, seemingly simplistic while psychologically complex and totally absorbing. There's no doubt that David Small, with his ground-breaking work, has elevated the art of the graphic novel and brought it to new creative heights. (Stan Lee, co-creator of Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, and The X-Men )

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