Martha Moody — Susan Stinson

An unexpected story of a woman's life and love living in the old American west.

At once, an unexpected love story and a lush comic masterpiece, Martha Moody is a speculative western embracing the ordinary and gritty details — as well as the magic — of women’s lives in the old west.

Alison Bechdel spotlighted the first line of Martha Moody in an interview with

This “speculative western” first came out in 1995 but was just reissued. The first sentence is magnificent in the way it’s a microcosm of the whole book, as well as a glimpse at the way Stinson writes so beautifully about fat bodies: “I was crouched next to the creek baiting my hook with a hunk of fat when I heard a rustling on the bank upstream.”