Welcome to Litsy!

This is not a book with a story but a collection a drawings produced over the last 25 yrs organized according to themes. So in a way it‘s like entering into an art exhibition in your own living room. I love Tan‘s illustrations and I loved this collection showing his development and sometimes where some of his book characters started from.

Titled “Our Tuesday Afternoon Reading Group”

As a book lover, how could I not post this?

This is stunning 🤩

Titled “Diego”

How cute isn‘t this?

One drawing of many titled “Emoticons”

Titled “A Memory of Light”

I love this.

And for those of us who is old enough to remember, a VHS cassette

These endpapers is amazing 🤩

Jaw-dropping. As in, multiple times, I realized my mouth was hanging open. I thought this would be charming, I did not expect to be absolutely blown away. I found this by accident looking for sci fi art in my library catalogue. What a glorious discovery. I will end up owning a copy. The reflections in book and the artwork notes in back discussing each images, were a great read. Just swept away by this view into a creative mind. ♥️

Title: “Self-Portrait With a Pencil“
☺️

Title: “Empire“
Stunning.

Title: “All We Ever Wanted“
Absolutely gorgeous.

Title: Reader. 😍

Tan's theory of mutual strange creature-hood. Relatable.

Got this book for the art, who knew the writing would get me too?

I‘m a huge fan of Shaun Tan‘s work and I expected this to be my favorite yet since glimpses into the artists‘ mind is usually my jam, but for me this was #goodnotgreat The good was it was unexpected, I found a few unique insights, I got to see a new side of his painting style, I learned a few things about the man behind the work, but I felt less drawn in by the drawings when they weren‘t connected by a narrative and a lot of the writing felt flat.

#MarchMagic Day 12: #EscapeToANewWorld whenever you open a Shaun Tan book. Such is this man‘s heart that he allowed us use of his book cover for our month-long Reading Festival pubmats.
His latest collection surfaces Shaun Tan‘s genius: the genuine, raw, untouched profundity that is wide-eyed in all its tentative explorations and joyful feeling-through of the unfamiliar, the discordant, the ineffable. My review: https://wp.me/pDlzr-p99

The hybrid session with Shaun Tan was nothing short of spectacular. What an awesome gift of a human being this person is. My heart. My heart. So happy to have students from Ajman Academy and American School Dubai join our University students.

Super excited about our upcoming month-long reading festival in our college that I am co-convening. Naturally, Shaun Tan is our invited keynote speaker. Happening on March 08, Wednesday, 10 am UAE time, happening at the Mohammed Bin Rashid library - you can join us online and register: https://bit.ly/CEDU_ReadingFestival_ShaunTan
I will be conducting the interview along with my PhD student from Kuwait. 💕💕💕

A collection of essays and narrative artwork from a prodigiously talented Australian artist, Shaun Tan. There‘s something for every reader of every age when you open one of his books, including this one. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

A world obsessed with prescriptive notions of belonging is not such a great place to be.

The words creature and monster are often synonymous in Western culture. This dark, dangerous take on otherness lies heavy in the human imagination, if several thousand years of storytelling are anything to go by. […]
I have always been attracted to an empathic reading of otherness, quite far from the usual notion of a monster: something more like a companion.

#JanuaryJazz Day 16: Not really a #Shelfie but a Selfie with the unparalleled Shaun Tan himself back in 2016 for the AFCC. Sharing this now because he has said yes to my invitation for him to serve as Keynote for an upcoming reading festival I am organizing here in the UAE this March. Wheeeeee!

… and this one brings back memories of one of my jobs in the talking books department at the public library: rewinding and repairing audio cassette tapes, and making sure they were all back in their case in correct order, ready for the next blind person who wanted to borrow it.

Shaun Tan‘s art stirs my imagination and I find myself making weird connections. This drawing, for example, brings back the feelings I had while reading Klara and the Sun.

My review of this book can be found on my YouTube Vlog at:

https://youtu.be/oRclEGN3V48

Enjoy!