Dear Media Folk,

This past April, at the London Book Fair, I was handed a copy of a skinny brochure and promptly let loose a string of impressed profanities . . .
This is not the first, and it won't be the last, but it perhaps might be an incarnation of Oz that best expresses the provocative and gorgeous weirdness of it. The story is the same, and yet it's entirely different: in this interpretation, artist Graham Rawle has stripped the epic story of Dorothy's journey to Oz of all remnants of Hollywood iconography. Gone are the Judy Garland braids, the Technicolor ruby slippers, the ethereal Glinda the Good Witch. In their place, Rawle has fashioned characters and scenery that are at once relentlessly modern and also devoutly loyal to Baum's original text: the Wicked Witch of the West "has but one good eye" and it is "as powerful as a telescope," while Emerald City only appears to be green because the inhabitants are made to wear tinted glasses. 



Then I saw how Graham made the images--a wee bit of Photoshop, yes, but he built most everything! Here's Oz: And here's wardrobe!


We've made the entire PDF available for you to check out right away. If you need a hardcopy, fire us an email.

(Some of you might recall Graham Rawle is the guy behind the cross-dressing, laid-out-like-a-ransom-note novel Woman's World.)

And let me know what you think!

All best,

Richard Nash
Executive Editor, Counterpoint
Editorial Director, Soft Skull Press
718.643.1599
richard@softskull.com


About the Author

Writer and collage artist Graham Rawle is a lecturer on Sequential Design and Illustration at the University of Brighton. He lives in London.  For more information, please visit: www.grahamrawle.com

Praise for Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World

"Graham Rawle’s new novel . . . [is] like nothing else I’ve ever read. Woman’s World is an absorbing, unsettling story that uses the niceties of found material to spell out darker themes. It’s an amazing mash-up, a beautifully bizarre accomplishment that might inspire copycats if it didn’t require such staggering discipline to pull off."--Bookslut

"Amazing . . . It has to be seen to be believed."--Jezebel.com

". . . A page-turning thriller that’s utterly original yet retains the sensibility of its source material. Even without Rawle’s amazing facsimile presentation, Woman’s World stands on its own as a delightfully dark suspense novel about a family with a horrible secret."--Mark Frauenfelder, on BoingBoing and on The Very Short List

"British paper artist Rawle has pulled off something remarkable with Woman’s World . . . Rawle marshals the technique to deliver a compelling commentary on the peril of keeping ourselves hidden."--OUT

". . . [A] wily commentary on how woman’s magazines have honed their hard sell over the years."--BITCH

"Composing a novel by cutting words out of magazines and then pasting them on a page—it seems like madness.  But British collage artist Graham Rawle has done just this, and the result is a compellingly eccentric (and typographically jolting) book . . . Woman’s World, which both embraces and reinvents the old magazines it draws from, is too tongue-in-cheek to offend much, building instead a clever hybrid of cultural critique and domestic farce."--Time Out New York

"Author Graham Rawle sprinkles brand names and product taglines throughout to create fabulous imagery and a charming, sensational narrative.  As Norma would say, this captivating, subversive tale is ‘all a woman needs, and it’s so munchably, crunchably different."--BUST

"The concept for the book sounds, if ambitious, a bit gimmicky: an entire novel constructed from words cut out of woman’s magazines from the early 1960s.  But Woman’s World is no gimmick.  An addictive, zigzagging narrative as beautiful as it is demented, it succeeds on the truism that the more confining an artist’s limitations, the more brilliant the resulting work."--Nerve.com