- by Elie Wiesel
Wiesel’s concise memoir offers a direct, deeply personal account of persecution and survival during the Holocaust.
- by Primo Levi
Levi’s measured testimony examines the struggle to retain dignity and humanity in Auschwitz.
- by Anne Frank
Anne Frank’s diary brings the history of Nazi persecution into intimate focus through a young person’s daily observations and hopes.
- The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
O’Brien’s linked stories blur memory and invention to explore how people carry the emotional weight of war.
- by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott
Takei’s graphic memoir combines childhood recollection and family history to confront state persecution and its lasting effects.
- by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell
This first volume of Lewis’s graphic memoir uses personal recollection to make a major chapter of political history vivid and accessible.
- by Thi Bui
Bui investigates how war and migration shaped her parents’ lives and her own, using comics to explore inherited memory.
- by W. G. Sebald
Sebald’s novel follows a man piecing together a history shaped by displacement and the lingering traces of the Holocaust.
- by Miriam Katin
Katin recounts her childhood escape from Nazi persecution in a graphic memoir centered on a mother-daughter bond.
- by Joe Sacco
Sacco’s comics reportage draws on interviews and firsthand observation to portray civilians living through the Bosnian War.
- by Emmanuel Guibert
This hybrid of photography and comics follows a Médecins Sans Frontières mission in Afghanistan, connecting individual experience with history.
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
Chabon’s novel connects the history of comics with friendship, Jewish identity, and the shadow of Nazi persecution.
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Set in Nazi Germany, this novel explores ordinary lives, moral choices, and the power of stories under an oppressive regime.
- by Joe Sacco
Sacco’s pioneering comics reportage foregrounds the voices and daily experiences of Palestinians under occupation.
- by Will Eisner
Eisner’s linked stories use comics to portray immigrant life, hardship, and community in a New York tenement.
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
This spare novel offers a stark, emotionally focused portrait of a father and son trying to preserve their bond amid catastrophe.
- by Mark Long
Drawing on Long’s childhood in 1960s Houston, this graphic memoir examines racial injustice through family and community relationships.
- by Colson Whitehead
Whitehead’s reimagining of American slavery connects personal survival with the inherited violence and memory of a historical atrocity.