[Deserted Isle Books is our new series in which our contributors discuss the one book they would choose if they were, well, stranded alone on a deserted isle forever. Read other installments of the series here, get your own copies at Powell's, and explore other series like this on our Special Features page.]

For many years I would not read it.  A comic book about the Holocaust?  Nationalities reduced to animal species?  Auschwitz renamed Mauschwitz, like some sadistic Disneyworld attraction?  Even its Pulitzer Prize was not enough to convince me.

Then I met the man who would become my husband.   I accepted his enthusiasm for the graphic novel format grudgingly, as one often accepts the quirks of one’s mate.  Having never cracked the spine of a single graphic work, I believed the genre was the exclusive domain of men with marginal personal hygiene.  My someday-to-be-husband’s all-time favorite of the graphic genre?  Maus, the very book I swore I’d never read. …
Continue reading »