In The Sea Cloak and Other Stories, Nayrouz Qarmout's deft, descriptive prose offers beautiful vignettes of Palestinians struggling to build lives and hope.
Director Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's House?, And Life Goes On, and Through the Olive Trees, packaged in Criterion's "The Koker Trilogy", offer profound life lessons from a modest Iranian village.
In graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy, iconic Star Trek star George Takei draws from his family's experience of Japanese-American internment camps to warn of a potentially dark future.
Starting as a personal look at the damages wrought by decades of China's one-child policy, One Child Nation exposes a deeper, baser level of national corruption.
For Sama urges the preservation of basic human rights — including the right to parent a child in her birthplace — at all costs, not only for this particular Syrian family's future, but for the survival of the human race.
John Hersey covered Hiroshima and America's race riots with empathy, courage, and profound humility. Jeremy Treglown's biography, Mr. Straight Arrow, should bring a new generation of readers to Hersey's work.
Scholar Qiana Whitted's EC Comics: Race, Shock & Social Protest explores a different path in EC Comic's history: their work with social justice stories and the resulting censorship in 1950s America.
Designated Survivor Season Three effectively criticizes the Trump administration and poses complex questions in our time of the rise of the extreme right.
Naoko Abe's The Sakura Obsession chronicles the struggle to preserve diversity in a world of compulsive uniformity.
Culture and media critic Kate Eichhorn's The End of Forgetting explores how relentlessly documenting young lives allows little room for the unfettered joys of imaginative freedom and perpetuates a seemingly endless state of childhood.
Director Ari Aster's uncompromising artistic vision in Midsommar creates a singular viewing experience of horror, beauty, and bafflement.
While the art world is full of excellent artists, few have the comics savvy to construct the sort of complex narratives and image-text relationships that Sarah Lightman achieves in her memoir, The Book of Sarah.
Like a match made in Purgatory, Edgar Ulmer's Detour and John Farrow's The Big Clock are ingenious films with different but self-aware approaches to noir.
Authors Rosa Liksom and Luce D'Eramo brilliantly convey the seduction and willful disbelief associated with fascism; how one brushes off their misgivings, thinking that it will be different for them.
The lure of beautiful beaches might make the Dominican Republic among the most popular tourist destinations in the Caribbean, but the ghosts of its troubled history, as captured in Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, stalk the living.
As cannabis legalization spreads, Box Brown's graphic novel, Cannabis, examines the sordid and racist history of how it became demonized in the first place.
© 1999-2018 Popmatters.com. All rights reserved.
Popmatters is wholly independently owned and operated.
