Passing for Human

Passing for Human

Summary

**LONGLISTED FOR THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT PRIZE 2020**

Melancholy and funny, personal and surreal, Passing for Human is a neurological coming-of-age story in which Liana Finck goes in search of that thing she has lost – her shadow, that part of her that has always felt as though she is living in exile from the world. On a quest for self-understanding and self-acceptance, along the way, she seeks to answer some eternal questions: What makes us whole? What parts of ourselves do we hide or ignore or chase away – because they’re embarrassing, or inconvenient – and at what cost?

Part magical odyssey, part feminist creation myth, Passing for Human is most of all an extraordinary, moving meditation on what it means to be an artist and a woman.

Reviews

  • It's impossible not to admire both [Finck’s] ambition and the beautiful economy of her line drawings… There is a resonant truth at the heart of this book, and it soars above everything else.
    Rachel Cooke, Observer

About the author

Liana Finck

Liana Finck's work appears regularly in the New Yorker and on Catapult, and on her popular Instagram feed. She also has work forthcoming or previously published in the Paris Review, Slate, Harpers, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Awl, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She has been on contract with the New Yorker since 2015. Her first graphic novel, A Bintel Brief, was published by Ecco Press in 2014. She is the recipient of a Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists; a Fulbright Fellowship; a NYFA award in fiction, and art residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo. Finck received a BA from Cooper Union. Her Instagram account currently has over 160,000 followers, a number which grows daily. Among her followers are Mark Ronson, Alanis Morissette, Ariana Grande, Dan Savage, Christoph Niemann, and Jenny Slate.
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