Cheese
Author: ZUZU
Title: Cheese
Pages: 272, Color
Price: 18,00 euro
Date: April 2019
First print run of 1500 copies sold out in one week
Three Reprints
Winner of Gran Giunigi Best Debut
Winner of the Carlo Boscarato Prize for Best Debut
Winner of the Forte dei Marmi Satire Prize
Foreign sales: France (Casterman); Spain (Barbara Fiore); Switzerland (Edition Moderne).
Zuzu is a very young cartoonist, she is only 23, and this book was made under the supervision and guidance of international cartoonist superstar Gipi. It is also Coconino Press’ youngest and most successful debut to date.
Zuzu, Dario and Riccardo are dealing with the longest summer of their life: the one between highschool and university, in a town that doesn’t offer many thrills to begin with. Zuzu is also plagued by a manic crush on some boy, of the type that makes you lose all digntity; and by her secret, personal struggle to overcome bulimia. . . All three characters are looking for the courage to take risks—the kind of risks necessary to pursue their dreams in life. As a metaphor for their commitment to becoming adults, when the chance to participate in the traditional Cheese Roll competition in Brentonico (a northern village of 4000) arises, they tackle this task with the utmost seriousness and commitment, as if it were the most solemn of acts. What awaits them at the bottom of the hill?
This is a book about bulimia. It’s also a book about being young in a small town and being so alive it hurts even when around you there’s not much to do.
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« ZUZU, rebellious, unbearable, innocent, young spitfire. Seeing her early work, she seemed shy. I looked up from the printouts: "How old are you?" She replied.
I think I told her to fuck off. Too much lucidity, too much storytelling ability for that age. At the same time, the young rebel, with completely vulnerable simplicity, had opened a door for me: "Do you want to remember how it used to
be, to be alive?" she seemed to say in those pages. "So read". And I did. That’s how it went. »
Gipi
« Zuzu is the new star of graphic novels. »
Il Fatto Quotidiano
« Zuzu's drawings show the ridicule and tragic side of the everyday things and end
up revealing what her characters don't know how to say. »
Vice Italia
ZUZU was born in 1996 in Salerno, Italy. Cheese is her debut. She runs a weekly comics column on La Repubblica, one of Italy’s leading newspaper, and works in animation for TV. Her short story Red will be Featured in Fantagraphics’ NOW anthology.