One of the Top Graphic Non-Fiction Books of the Year from the American Library Association and The New York Public Library. Shortlisted as for the Graphic Medicine Award, and selected by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the Top 10 Anticipated Graphic Novels for 2023.
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“Going Remote is the perfect book for an imperfect moment. This is comics at the highest level: beautiful, profound, and full of heart.” —Justin Hall, Chair MFA in Comics at California College of the Arts, and editor of No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics
STARRED REVIEW at PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY!
“Bessie’s debut graphic memoir of teaching at a community college during the pandemic while undergoing treatment for cancer swells with a determined optimism even while being threaded with dystopian references…”
PRAISE FOR GOING REMOTE
“Going Remote is the perfect book for an imperfect moment. Bessie and Glanting deftly weave personal stakes and larger concepts together, illustrating how the reaction to the pandemic impacts an individual life, a profession, and a community. It’s a love letter to teaching, a grappling with life-threatening illness, and a rumination on the nature of connection and isolation in the computer age, all brought together cohesively by Bessie’s thoughtful narrative and Glanting’s complex, textured art. This is comics at the highest level: beautiful, profound, and full of heart.” —Justin Hall, Chair MFA in Comics at California College of the Arts, and editor of No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics
“I love this riveting graphic memoir about teaching, living with brain cancer, and navigating the pandemic lockdowns. Bessie, a community college English professor, goes from teaching dystopian literature to being submerged in a present-day sci-fi landscape, and skillfully weaves together the stories of his life as a patient with cancer, a teacher and parent during the pandemic. Glanting’s illustrations shine in the science fiction elements and in his careful depictions of quotidian life. Bessie and Glanting’s collaboration is a beautiful example of the possibilities of graphic memoir: a luminous examination of teaching, science and survival.” — Grace Farris, M.D. Associate Professor of Internal Medicine at Dell Medical Center and author of Mom Milestones: The True Story of the First 7 Years
“In Going Remote, Adam Bessie is a both wise philosopher and humble guide, inviting us into his world while illuminating the complexity of our own. His is a tale of shut down, transformation, and reopening. His thoughtful, lovely prose and richly textured drawings make the challenging conditions and events of Bessie’s pandemic shut-down both engaging and accessible. Going Remote offers hope, reflection, and a sense of possibility, even in the face of struggle, isolation, and loss.” –Ajuan Mance, Author of 1001 Black Men and Living While Black.
“A poignant and most timely essay on what the pandemic has done to education. Bessie and Glanting capture perfectly the smallness of the individual in the cogs of a larger machine, but undeniable is the bigness of one community college professor’s heart as he persists against the illness isolating us all and the cancer threatening him.” –Thi Bui, Author of The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir
“Adam Bessie’s engaging personal reflection on teaching in Zoom times is made palpable by Peter Glanting’s smart use of the comics form and strikingly rendered metaphorical imagery. Together they capture the human energy in a classroom, the profound loss from its disruption, and ask readers to consider the promise of education in a new light.” —Nick Sousanis, Associate Professor in Comics Studies at San Francisco State University, author of Unflattening
“Framed as Bessie’s personal odyssey through the pandemic, Going Remote is a paean to the necessity of public education, gorgeously brought to life by Glanting’s hyper-detailed black-and-white artwork.The book touches on technology, philosophy, privilege, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the “kingdom of the ill.” It is by turns ruminative, sad, angry, and hopeful — and should be required reading for teachers and students alike.” — Josh Neufeld, author of A.D.:New Orleans After the Deluge
“Going Remote: A Teacher’s Journey is an incisive, multifaceted, and profound meditation on survival–in teaching, in learning, in illness, in family, in injustice, and in a present hurtling towards a future on which no one can depend. Sensitively and intensely illustrated, this wonderful book challenges readers concretely to visualize and think through possible futures–personal, social, technological, and educational–a foothold for anyone trying to understand not only teaching and the pandemic, but our place in the world as caring human beings.” — Jay Gillen, Author of Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty (AK Press), and The Power in The Room: Radical Education Through Youth Organizing and Employment (Beacon)
ABOUT GOING REMOTE
A searingly honest graphic memoir dispatch from a community college professor who cares deeply for his students and family while also combating personal health issues from the frontlines of public education during the pandemic. Published by SEVEN STORIES and CENSORED PRESS
Read a free chapter of the comic here (click HERE):
With Peter Glanting’s powerful illustrations, author Adam Bessie, an English professor and graphic essayist, uses the unique historical moment of the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst to explore the existing inequalities and student struggles that plague the public education system. This graphic memoir chronicles the reverberations from the onset of the pandemic in 2020 when students and educators left their physical classrooms for remote learning. As a professor at a community college, Bessie shows how despite these challenges, teachers work tirelessly to create a more equitable educational system by responding to mental health issues and student needs.
From the Black Lives Matter protests to fielding distressed emails from students to considering the future of his own career, Going Remote also tells the personal story of Bessie’s cancer diagnosis and treatment during the pandemic. A fusion of memoir, meditation, and scholarship, Going Remote is a powerful account of a crisis moment in educational history demonstrating both personal and societal changes.
Adam Bessie 