Episode 58: Tessa Hulls, Pulitzer Prize Winning Graphic Artist & Memoirist

Maus is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, published in two parts in 1986 and 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor. Maus employs postmodernist techniques and represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and non-Jewish Poles as pigs. It explores themes of memory, trauma, and the complex relationship between father and son. The book has received widespread critical acclaim for its innovative storytelling and powerful portrayal of the Holocaust.

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood is Marjane Satrapi's acclaimed graphic memoir that tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen. The book chronicles her experiences growing up during the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and the subsequent changes in Iranian society. It depicts her childhood, her family's Westernized lifestyle, and her struggles with the new fundamentalist regime. The narrative is presented through powerful black-and-white comic strip images, blending the format of a graphic novel with a prose-only memoir. The book provides a child's-eye view of the historical events, highlighting the contradictions between home life and public life in Iran during that period.

In this book, Isabel Wilkerson argues that racism in the United States is part of a broader caste system—a society-wide system of social stratification characterized by hierarchy, inclusion, and exclusion. She defines eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, heredity, and dehumanization. Wilkerson uses historical documentation, insightful analogies, and powerful anecdotes to illustrate how this caste system permeates American society, affecting people's lives and behavior. The book also explores the consequences of caste and the possibility of a world without it, emphasizing the need for collective effort to dismantle such systems.