Emil Ferris
Emil Ferris was born in Chicago and has an MFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book One (2017). Emil is the winner of the Lambda Literary Award, the Lynd Ward Prize, the Ignatz, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the recipient of four Eisner Awards, including the 2018 award for Best Writer/Artist, as well as France’s 2019 Fauve d’or Award in Angoulême. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book Two was published by Fantagraphics in 2024. Emil’s forthcoming titles include Records of the Damned, a prequel to My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, and A. Rosenbloom and the Marionette Murders. Emil received the Chevalier de l’order des Arts et seas Lettres from the French government in 2024.
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My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book One
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book One- Print Books
- Bookshop
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My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book One
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book One- Print Books
- Bookshop
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My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book One
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book One- Print Books
- Bookshop
"Drawn with Bic pen on lined notebook paper, this moody and ravishing graphic novel takes the form of a sketchbook diary. Growing up in Chicago in the 1960s, 10-year-old Karen Reyes investigates the suspicious death of her glamorous neighbor and finds troubling clues lurking close to her own home. . . . An eerie masterpiece of the monsters around and within us." —The New York Times [on My Favorite Thing Is Monsters]
"My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is not only Ferris's first graphic novel but also her first published work. . . . Yet her mastery of comics, her pyrotechnic drawings, and her nested narratives are already placing her among the greatest practitioners of the form." —The New Yorker
"This extraordinary book has instantly rocketed Ferris into the graphic novel elite alongside Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel and Chris Ware. You see, she's produced something rare, a page-turning story whose pages are so brilliantly drawn you don't want to turn them." —Terry Gross, NPR: Fresh Air [on My Favorite Thing Is Monsters]
The graphic novels of Emil Ferris explode expectations of genre and form and alter the way readers understand their experience of family, memory, and art. She opens her actual notebook to us; each page contains a universe that is entirely her own, but also showcases a wild engagement with shared history. Her city of Chicago has never been looked at so closely and with such love. From the cracks and shadows, Ferris makes something new that reorders the way we see the old.