A dizzying, gripping, and beautiful journey into the world of medicine and mortality-not just its complex emotional universe, but the political realities that structure it too... including, most urgently, the imaginations of a younger generation still fighting for an alternative future. -- Jack Shenker, author of The Egyptians: A Radical Story I would, without hesitation, deem Lissa required reading for anyone interested in the Egyptian revolution, but also for anyone interested in the complexities of being human and being alive in the twenty-first century. -- Ganzeer, Egyptian revolutionary street artist/author ...a spectacular way to inaugurate the breakthrough ethnoGRAPHIC series. Lissa offers a compelling entry into how issues of illness, mortality, and decisions around them are always shaped in the particulars of history and politics. Bravo! -- Faye Ginsburg, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Media, Culture, and History at New York University ...brilliant storytelling and stunning scholarship. -- Anne Fausto-Sterling, Ph.D., author of Sexing the Body Filled with vivid characters who cry, bleed, and hope, Lissa offers an intimate and powerful understanding of contemporary medicine and politics. -- Emmanuel Guibert, author of The Photographer Lissa, a brilliant fictional account of organ failure, genetic testing, and organ transplantation, is portrayed in manga-like images. Human encounters, political events, and, above all, memories explode in time and space across the pages. A must-read for our alarming times. -- Margaret Lock, Ph.D., author of Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death ...a tangled and controversial journey through injustice and disease, infused with a healthy dose of revolutionary spirit along the way. -- Mohamed and Haitham Raafat El-seht, Twins Cartoon A visually compelling and sensitively presented work that demonstrates how juxtaposing sequential art with narrative can render extremely complex global processes and phenomena into a gripping human story. -- Benjamin Dix, SOAS, University of London, Director, PositiveNegatives (positivenegatives.org) So accessible is the image/text language of comics that it frequently manages to cross all sorts of borders: national, cultural, and generational. Lissa utilizes the medium to the fullest, weaving the complexities of friendship, illness, and faith together in a way that bridges cultures and dispels misconceptions, while offering a narrative that engages readers to the very end. -- Lina Ghaibeh, Professor of Animation and Comics, American University of Beirut

As young girls in Cairo, Anna and Layla strike up an unlikely friendship that crosses class, cultural, and religious divides. Years later, Anna learns that she may carry the hereditary cancer gene responsible for her mother's death. Meanwhile, Layla's family is faced with a difficult decision about kidney transplantation. Their friendship is put to the test when these medical crises reveal stark differences in their perspectives...until revolutionary unrest in Egypt changes their lives forever.

The first book in a new series, Lissa brings anthropological research to life in comic form, combining scholarly insights and accessible, visually-rich storytelling to foster greater understanding of global politics, inequalities, and solidarity.

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"Through its story of intercultural friendship and its backstory of international and interdisciplinary collaboration, Lissa invites us to take an unusual – fictional, graphic- and highly original path to the heart of the ethnographic encounter. It is a journey I am excited to take with my students, and I look forward to seeing the next titles in the ethnographic series."

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"As the debut of a new editorial series (ethnoGRAPHIC) that aims at promoting long-form ethnographic accounts into comic form, Lissa is without a doubt an editorial break-through that helps to bring balance to an otherwise dominantly textual field."

"“Lissa intertwines academic knowledge and storytelling, Egypt and the United States, as well as the private sphere in which individuals/families make medical decisions and the public sphere in which health care systems operate, governments govern (or fail to do so), and citizens rebel against governments. The outcome, as academic and non-academic reviewers unanimously attest, is a highly informative yet readable and engrossing book.”" - Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature