Lee Lai's much anticipated follow up to Stone Fruit has at last arrived! Cannon's 300 pages of expertly nuanced comics communicate a wealth of personal insight into the relationship dynamics that pertain to and manifest in family, friendship, workplace and romance – and how all of these are in turn inextricably entangled. Lee Lai successfully navigates the complex terrain of 21st century living: gay/straight/bi sexuality; Asian-American (or Asian-Canadian, if you prefer) identity in a multicultural society; workplace hierarchies and power structures, including the potential for abuse inherent in ownership, as well as the corollary importance of worker solidarity. At the center of it all is a tour de force representation of repressed anger and its effects which is likely to be very cathartic for some readers, and illuminating to all.
"It’s rare, and precious, when a moment in a movie, in a poem, in a comic surges up at you as being True. And in Cannon, Lee Lai does it again and again." – Eleanor Davis, The Hard Tomorrow
We've posted a gallery of a few sequences from the book, HERE.
Here's what publisher D&Q has to say:
"A LAMBDA Award winner and breakout fiction sensation returns with a darkly funny slice of friendship strife
We arrive to wreckage—a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heat-wave, this is where we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in little beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, well, she destroyed it. The mess feels a bit like a horror-scape—not unlike the horror films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror films on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their rote relationship. In high school, they were each other’s lifeline—two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down.
Yet, when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself—very uncharacteristically—surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her the hell outta there.
In Cannon, Lee Lai’s much anticipated follow-up to the critically-acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a slice of what Lai has on offer. As Cannon’s shoulders bend under the weight of an aging Gung-gung and an avoidant mother, Lai’s sharp sense of humor and sensitive eye produce a story that will hit readers with a smash."
AND, they've also posted a a very generous preview of it online, so go check it out now, HERE.