Heads or Tails

Lilli Carré's masterful collection Heads or Tails is many things:  a paradoxically sweet and joyous gallery of melancholic tales, a quietly sad monument to exuberance and invention, an enticing museum of visual poetry. Each story is exquisitely crafted, demonstrating both a compelling literary style and a rich, engaging design sense that can seem deceptively naïve or childlike on first glance but in context reveals striking sophistication and complexity. The tales are often bright and cheery visually, but they invariably demonstrate profound care, even affection, for the ephemeral nature of lives and longing. Carré's precise but playful art jumps off the page, both within individual stories and in the context of the larger work, which manifests an impressive variety of aesthetics and color schemes, from the faded and monochrome to the richly prismatic.  In isolation, each story is a painstakingly crafted gem, shining charismatically without necessarily yielding up its mysteries; in succession, the tales are charmingly and consistently unpredictable, resonating in unexpected ways and giving the impression of an artist who has not only mastered her craft but who maintains a constant sense of joy for that craft and for its practice from page to page. That joy is contagious, and it is what makes Heads or Tails such a wonderful enigma of a book—quite literally, full of wonders.