From the iconic, award-winning artist and designer, a graphic memoir of leaving Cuba, becoming American, and fighting for freedom, here and there.
‘Exhilarating, immensely powerful, gorgeous’ PHILIPPE SANDS
‘Belongs in the pantheon that MAUS built’ PRINT MAGAZINE
‘Shocking, brilliant, soul-shattering . . . this book is so good’ CHIP KIDD
When Fidel Castro opened the Mariel harbour to let Cubans sail for America, Edel Rodriguez and his family took their chance. From the town of El Gabriel to the Mariel port to a rickety shrimping boat bound for Florida, they joined the 1980 boatlift, becoming ‘worms’, as Castro called the departing Cubans.
Years later, Edel Rodriguez has become one of the most prominent political artists of our age, hailed for his iconic work on the cover of Time and on jumbotrons around the world. In stunning visual detail, Worm tells his story – of a boyhood in Cold War Cuba, of a family’s courage and displacement and of coming of age as an artist, activist, and American.
‘Exhilarating, immensely powerful, gorgeous’ PHILIPPE SANDS
‘Belongs in the pantheon that MAUS built’ PRINT MAGAZINE
‘Shocking, brilliant, soul-shattering . . . this book is so good’ CHIP KIDD
When Fidel Castro opened the Mariel harbour to let Cubans sail for America, Edel Rodriguez and his family took their chance. From the town of El Gabriel to the Mariel port to a rickety shrimping boat bound for Florida, they joined the 1980 boatlift, becoming ‘worms’, as Castro called the departing Cubans.
Years later, Edel Rodriguez has become one of the most prominent political artists of our age, hailed for his iconic work on the cover of Time and on jumbotrons around the world. In stunning visual detail, Worm tells his story – of a boyhood in Cold War Cuba, of a family’s courage and displacement and of coming of age as an artist, activist, and American.
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Reviews
WORM is a long and brilliant read, its artwork immediate and dramatic in its reduced palette of red, green, white and black, its writing tense and touched with a great talent for telling detail . . . A wise and life-stuffed memoir
A sharply observed document of totalitarianism and its discontents
Shocking. Brilliant. Soul-shattering in its terrible beauty. In WORM, Edel Rodriguez rips open a heart-shaped window onto a hate-shaped world. I can't believe he survived it, but am deeply glad he did and was able to tell the tale. This book is so good it will likely be banned in Florida
Fascinating and complex . . . A passionate firsthand account of historical events and a compelling coming-of-age tale in one
Exhilarating, immensely powerful, gorgeous, it really does open the imagination and sweep you up
WORM has consumed me more than any memoir I've read before, and that is saying a lot. It belongs in the pantheon that Maus built
WORM is testament to the power of political art
Uniquely positioned to comment on autocracies and authoritarianism, Rodriguez reveals his personal fears about the future of the United States, particularly after the Jan. 6 insurrection. He portrays the crowd on the Capitol much like the one in Havana in January 1959 that starts the novel, bringing it full-circle in a striking visual comparison