Red Rock Baby Candy

Red Rock Baby Candy
Author: Shira Spector
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2021-03-23
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1683964047

Shira Spector, whose drawing is visceral, symbolic and naturalistic, literally paints a vivid portrait of the most eventful 10 years of her life, encompassing her tenacious struggle to get pregnant, the emotional turmoil of her father’s cancer diagnosis and eventual death, and her recollections of past relationships with her parents and her partner. Set in a kaleidoscope of Montreal and Toronto, Red Rock Baby Candy begins in subtle, tonal shades of black ink and introduces color slowly over the next 50 pages until it explodes into a glorious full color palette. The visual storytelling eschews traditional comics panels in favor of a series of unique page compositions that convey both a stream of consciousness and the tactile reality of life, both the subjective impressions of the author at each moment of the life she depicts and the objective series of events that shape her narrative.

Stone Fruit

Stone Fruit
Author: Lee Lai
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1683964268

Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray’s niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seeded personal stumbling blocks. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron isolate from each other and attempt to repair their broken family ties ― Ray with her overworked, resentful single-mother sister and Bron with her religious teenage sister who doesn’t fully grasp the complexities of gender identity. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up and learns they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew. At turns joyful and heartbreaking, Stone Fruit reveals through intimately naturalistic dialog and blue-hued watercolor how painful it can be to truly become vulnerable to your loved ones ― and how fulfilling it is to be finally understood for who you are. Lee Lai is one of the most exciting new voices to break into the comics medium and she has created one of the truly sophisticated graphic novel debuts in recent memory.

Letting It Go

Letting It Go
Author: Miriam (Maria) Katim
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2020-11-12
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1770461965

A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR STRUGGLES TO LET GO OF THE PAST Miriam Katin has the light hand of a master storyteller in this flowing, expressive, full-color masterpiece. A Holocaust survivor and mother, Katin’s world is turned upside down by the news that her adult son is moving to Berlin, a city she’s villainized for the past forty years. As she struggles to accept her son’s decision, she visits the city twice, first to see her son and then to attend a museum gala featuring her own artwork. What she witnesses firsthand is a city coming to terms with its traumatic past, much as Katin is herself. Letting It Go is a deft and careful balance: wry, self-deprecating anecdotes counterpoint a serious account of the myriad ways trauma inflects daily existence, both for survivors and for their families. Katin’s first book, We Are On Our Own, was a memoir of her childhood, detailing how she and her mother hid in the Hungarian countryside, disguising themselves as a peasant woman and her illegitimate child in order to escape the Nazis. The stunning story, along with Katin’s gorgeous pencil work, immediately garnered acclaim in the comics world and beyond. With Letting It Go, Katin’s storytelling and artistic skills allow her to explore a voice and perspective like no other found in the medium.

I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors

I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors
Author: Bernice Eisenstein
Publisher:
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

In a truly innovative memoir, the author combines her skills as a writer and illustrator to recount her early childhood in the 1950s and fragmented stories of family members lost in the war.

Arm Candy

Arm Candy
Author: T.C. Littles
Publisher: Urban Books
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2018-11-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1945855649

King is an underground record producer in Detroit who’s finally getting shine and being recognized for his talent. Everything would be perfect if he didn’t have an addiction to arm candy. King loves beautiful women. He flaunts them at parties, kicks it with them during studio sessions, and has his way with them—all while his woman is busy working to help support his dream. Samira is King’s girlfriend, the person who has been his monetary backbone. From music equipment to clothes, to a roof over his head, she has provided everything for King in the hopes becoming his wife. She wants to live the Hollywood dream, complete with a mainstream record deal. When Samira finds out King’s main groupie chick, Rayna, is pregnant and has been plotting to steal her man, all hell breaks loose. With a chaotic love life, a newborn, and two chicks fighting over him, King can’t focus. His career takes a big stumble that he’s not sure he can recover from.

Waltz with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir
Author: Ari Folman
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2009
Genre: Graphic novels
ISBN: 9780805086737

Tangles

Tangles
Author: Sarah Leavitt
Publisher: Skyhorse
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2012-05-01
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9781616086398

In this powerful memoir the the LA Times calls “moving, rigorous, and heartbreaking," Sarah Leavitt reveals how Alzheimer’s disease transformed her mother, Midge, and her family forever. In spare blackand- white drawings and clear, candid prose, Sarah shares her family’s journey through a harrowing range of emotions—shock, denial, hope, anger, frustration—all the while learning to cope, and managing to find moments of happiness. Midge, a Harvard educated intellectual, struggles to comprehend the simplest words; Sarah’s father, Rob, slowly adapts to his new role as full-time caretaker, but still finds time for wordplay and poetry with his wife; Sarah and her sister Hannah argue, laugh, and grieve together as they join forces to help Midge. Tangles confronts the complexity of Alzheimer’s disease, and ultimately releases a knot of memories and dreams to reveal a bond between a mother and a daughter that will never come apart.

Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman

Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman
Author: Matilda Rabinowitz
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2017-10-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1501712128

Matilda Rabinowitz’s illustrated memoir challenges assumptions about the lives of early twentieth-century women. In Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman, Rabinowitz describes the ways in which she and her contemporaries rejected the intellectual and social restrictions imposed on women as they sought political and economic equality in the first half of the twentieth century. Rabinowitz devoted her labor and commitment to the notion that women should feel entitled to independence, equal rights, equal pay, and sexual and personal autonomy. Rabinowitz (1887–1963) immigrated to the United States from Ukraine at the age of thirteen. Radicalized by her experience in sweatshops, she became an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World from 1912 to 1917 before choosing single motherhood in 1918. "Big Bill" Haywood once wrote, "a book could be written about Matilda," but her memoir was intended as a private story for her grandchildren, Robbin Légère Henderson among them. Henderson’s black-and white-scratchboard drawings illustrate Rabinowitz’s life in the Pale of Settlement, the journey to America, political awakening and work as an organizer for the IWW, a turbulent romance, and her struggle to support herself and her child.

Stop Forgetting to Remember

Stop Forgetting to Remember
Author: Peter Kuper
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2007
Genre: Autobiography
ISBN: 9780307339508

Based (very loosely) on cartoonist Peter Kupers real life, this novel tells the story of his alter ego Walter Kurtz, who is struggling through what hes been ominously warned will change your life: the arrival of his first child.

Flying Couch

Flying Couch
Author:
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1936787334

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2016 • A Junior Library Guild Fall 2016 Selection Flying Couch, Amy Kurzweil’s debut, tells the stories of three unforgettable women. Amy weaves her own coming–of–age as a young Jewish artist into the narrative of her mother, a psychologist, and Bubbe, her grandmother, a World War II survivor who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto by disguising herself as a gentile. Captivated by Bubbe’s story, Amy turns to her sketchbooks, teaching herself to draw as a way to cope with what she discovers. Entwining the voices and histories of these three wise, hilarious, and very different women, Amy creates a portrait not only of what it means to be part of a family, but also of how each generation bears the imprint of the past. A retelling of the inherited Holocaust narrative now two generations removed, Flying Couch uses Bubbe’s real testimony to investigate the legacy of trauma, the magic of family stories, and the meaning of home. With her playful, idiosyncratic sensibility, Amy traces the way our memories and our families shape who we become. The result is this bold illustrated memoir, both an original coming–of–age story and an important entry into the literature of the Holocaust.