http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/18/business/media/new-genius-grant-winner-alison-bechdel-to-write-new-graphic-memoir.html 2014-09-17 23:18:06 New ‘Genius Grant’ Winner Alison Bechdel to Write New Graphic Memoir “The Secret to Superhuman Strength” by Ms. Bechdel, a new MacArthur fellow, has been sold to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which plans to publish it in 2017. === The cartoonist and graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel was in a castle in Umbria as part of an artist’s residency in Italy when she learned that she had been selected as one of Ms. Bechdel, 54, has even more to celebrate these days. Her 2006 memoir, “Fun Home,” which detailed her coming-out story and her life growing up with a closeted gay father, inspired a musical that is headed to Broadway in the spring. And she recently sold her next book, “The Secret to Superhuman Strength,” to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for publication in 2017. “The Secret to Superhuman Strength” is Ms. Bechdel’s third graphic memoir and chronicles her decades long obsession with various fitness and exercise fads, including downhill skiing, uphill skiing, rollerblading, martial arts, running, hiking, weight lifting and home workout videos and currently, yoga. The book will also explore the history of American fitness fads, and Ms. Bechdel’s efforts to rekindle her creativity through exercise, and it is shot through with her signature darkness. “Alison Bechdel’s sheer talent — now I guess we can say ‘genius’ — built on her once-strange pursuit of cartooning about lesbian subculture has changed the world just a little bit,” Deanne Urmy, a senior executive editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said in a statement announcing the acquisition. “Or at least the world has changed enough to recognize just how much of the universal there is in Alison’s fierce, close looks at her own family and greater culture and at her own becoming.”