In the remotest reaches of Central Asia, a minor god is chained to a mountainside. Tongues follows his friendship with the eagle who comes every day to eat his liver, a young girl on an errand of murder and a young man with a teddy bear strapped to his back lost in a wilderness and heading to a crossroads.  

Set in a version of modern Central Asia, Tongues is a retelling of the Greek myth of Prometheus. It follows the captive god’s friendship with the eagle who carries out his daily sentence of torture, and chronicles his pursuit of revenge on the god that has imprisoned him. Prometheus’ story is entwined with that of an East African orphan on an errand of murder, and a young man with a teddy bear strapped to his back, wandering aimlessly into catastrophe (a character readers may recognize from Nilsen’s Dogs and Water). The story is set against the backdrop of tensions between rival groups in an oil-rich wilderness.

Tongues is loosely based on a trilogy by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, of which two plays are lost and only dimly reconstructed by historians. Key to the story of Tongues is Prometheus’ role as creator and protector of humanity. In flashbacks and in Prometheus’ conversations with the eagle and others, the book will touch on humanity’s deep evolutionary past and its complicated prospects for a future. Tongues is both adventure story and meditation on human nature in our present fraught historical moment.

Anders Nilsen is the artist and author of ten books including Big Questions, The End, Poetry is Useless and Tongues. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Kramer's Ergot, Pitchfork, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His comics have been translated widely overseas, and his painting and drawing have been exhibited internationally. Nilsen's work has received three Ignatz awards as well as the Lynd Ward Prize for the Graphic Novel and Big Questions was listed as a New York Times Notable Book in 2011. Nilsen grew up splitting his time between Minneapolis and the mountains of Northern New Hampshire. He studied art in New Mexico and lived on the west side of Chicago for over a decade where he worked for a while as both cook and curator at James Beard recognized Lula Cafe in Logan Square. He has been a participant and occasional organizer of the French experimantal collaborative comics residency Pierre Feuille Ciseaux, and became a Civitella Ranieri fellow in 2024. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and their two cats.