Allegoria

Returning with a spellbinding series of topical fables, Canadian treasure and illustrator Anita Kunz's latest offering, Allegoria, is a menagerie of spellbinding fantasy art paired with flash fiction fairy tales.

Dog-faced girls riding Sphynx cat steeds, babies cradled in antlers, towers of animals, portraits of women with mislaid features. Flipping through the pages of Allegoria is akin to discovering a lost bestiary from a sunken city replete with galleries of fallen nobles.

Each striking image is complemented by a micro fable that gives you the straight forward narrative backstory behind the corresponding illustration—or else turns it on its head entirely. Kunz's stories reach elbow-deep into the mire of contemporary issues, from pandemics to sexism, gender identity, animal rights, and ecological collapse, adding an amusing or edgy metaphorical dimension to her images. Kunz's paintings in Allegoria are appropriately lustrous, charming, and perverse.

Writing and painting for a morally topsy-turvy world, Kunz holds up a funhouse mirror to society and in doing so, finds a truth that goes deeper than the surface. Allegoria will make readers ascend, just before asking them to gaze back at their own vertiginous depths.