Dominique Goblet was born in Brussels, Belgium, and studied illustration at St. Luke's Institute. Involved from the start in the creation of the experimental-comics publisher Fremok, she published several books with them. At the same time she worked with the Parisian publishing house L'Association and published two books with them, including Pretending Is Lying. Artist, comics author, and professor of comics and illustration, she is also certified as an electrician, plumber, and welder. Sophie Yanow is a cartoonist and translator. She is the author of the autobiographical comic books War of Streets and Houses and What Is a Glacier? and of the Eisner Award-winning graphic novel The Contradictions.
"It is a rare gift to come across a book as tender, affecting and
complete as Pretending is Lying." -Sheila Heti, The New
York Times Book Review
"This beautifully rendered, emotionally intense, and
chronologically scattered reminiscence essentially questions the
veracity of all autobiography." -Publishers Weekly
"Here's a terrific example of the current wave of great comics from
Europe. Dominique Goblet's approach is postmodern, with a scruffy,
anything-goes mix of styles and moods, but it's marked everywhere
by her forays into photography. She intersperses her tale-an
autobiographical account of family, a lover, truth, lies and
brutality-with images that look like photos." -Etelka Lehoczky,
NPR's Book Concierge, "2017's Great Reads"
"Primarily pencil-sketched, Goblet's art is unbridled and
alternately busy and peaceful. She uses lettering to great effect,
too, expressing mood, feeling, and, in her father's case,
drunkenness with the appearance of the text. Some pages feature
only vague, dimly lit shapes, as if there are ghosts hovering on
the periphery of Goblet's relationships, her memoir's primary
subject. This is an imaginative, nonlinear rendering of an artist's
life so far." -Booklist
"A touchstone work of comics autobiography, from one of the genre's
key innovators, is finally translated, complete with expressive
lettering newly handcrafted by the artist." -Sean Rogers, The
Globe and Mail
"Pretending Is Lying is a perceptive and poignant
contribution to the fields of both experimental comics and graphic
autobiography, and well worth the read." -Hans Rollman, Pop
Matters
"Combining paint, ink, charcoal, and pencil, Goblet's mixed-media
pages feel wet, textured, bleeding. . . . [Pretending is
Lying is] part of a rich tradition of international graphic
memoirs from Art Spiegelman's Maus to Marjane Satrapi's
Persepolis to Riad Sattouf's The Arab of the Future.
. . . We're invited to peer into the artist's mind. . . . It is a
privilege to serve as [her] confidante, if only for a while."
-Chantal McStay, BOMB
"Dominique Goblet spent twelve years putting parts of her life to
rest-explicit snippets and fragments that condense her entire
childhood and sketch a tender portrait of the adult she is today. .
. . Goblet hides nothing. And she forgives, weaving together, in
gray and black and on yellowing paper, with strokes of her brush, a
shocking kind of autobiography." -L'Express
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