The Cosmobiography of Sun Ra: the sound of joy is enlightening

This book isn’t a straight biography. It’s more like a riff — short bursts of words and pictures that try to catch the feeling of Sun Ra and his music. Raschka shows him as both a boy from Alabama and a man who claimed he came from Saturn, carrying sounds no one had heard before.

The language is playful, the drawings are loose and glowing, as if the pages themselves were vibrating with music. Instead of telling you “who Sun Ra was,” the book invites you to listen, to imagine, and to believe that joy can be its own kind of truth.