Night Bus

"Chinese comic artist Zuo Ma’s collection of 11 lushly drawn stories are eye-opening trips that embody Proust’s yearning in Remembrance of Things Past: “The only true voyage of discovery would be to behold the universe through the eyes of another … [and] the hundred universes that each of them beholds.” Exploring the porous boundary between fiction and autobiography, familiar and otherness, human and animal, untamed nature and rampant development, the stories are elegies for the author’s past as well as China’s rural past. In using the comic medium to re-create his beloved grandmother’s memory and his childhood’s bucolic landscape, Zuo Ma also acknowledges his conflicted modern self as both artist and consumer, peasant and city-dweller, nature lover and callous hunter."