Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life by Ulli Lust

Lacking the proper documents, the girls make their way to Italy surreptitiously.

What she wants is to escape the boredom of bourgeois Austrian life and do as she pleases, “not what someone is telling to do.” And so, in the winter of 1984, she takes off for Italy with a girl named Edi, a nymphomaniac with no intuition or discernment. When Ulli, a punked-out and disaffected seventeen-year-old from a middle-class Viennese family, sets off on her trip, she doesn’t have a particular destination in mind. Ulli Lust’s graphic memoir of the time she spent hitchhiking and otherwise relying on the kindness of strangers in Austria and Italy makes little pretense of caring about the locales. A travelogue is ultimately a coming-of-age story with its thumb stuck out. The real story being told has to with the self and its tentative steps into some great unknown. Universally considered one of the very finest examples of the new breed of graphic novels coming from Europe, Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life won the 2011 Angoulême “Revelation” prize, and Fantagraphics is proud to bring it to English speaking readers.Call it the travelogue paradox: In books that purport to be about the perils and pleasures of life on the road, travel itself is typically no more than pretext. Particularly haunting is her portrait of her fellow traveler, the gangly, promiscuous devil-may-care Edi who veers from being her spunky, funny best friend in the world to an out-of-control lunatic with no consideration for anything but her own whims and desires.

Miraculously combining a perfect memory for both emotional and physical detail with the sometimes painful lucidity two and half decades’ distance have brought to her understanding of the events, Lust meticulously shows the who, where, when, and how (specifically, how an often penniless young girl can survive for months on the road) of a sometimes dangerous and sometimes exhilarating journey.

Twenty-five years later, this talented Austrian cartoonist has looked back at that tumultuous summer and delivered a long, dense, sensitive, and minutely observed autobiographical masterpiece. Ships in: May 2013 (subject to change) - Pre-Order Nowīack in 1984, a rebellious, 17-year-old, punked-out Ulli Lust set out for a wild hitchhiking trip across Italy, from Naples through Verona and Rome and ending up in Sicily. Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Lifeīy Ulli Lust (translated by Kim Thompson)

Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life by Ulli Lust