Since the start of the pandemic, booksellers from around the country have experienced significant issues with Seattle-based virtual box office company Brown Paper Tickets. Some stores have not received payment for events that took place almost a year ago, while others are faced with complaints from frustrated customers waiting on refunds that are the responsibility of Brown Paper Tickets. Communication from the company became sporadic and vague, with booksellers unable to get clear answers on the status of their refunds.

As a result of a lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Washington State in September 2020, Brown Paper Tickets entered into an agreement yesterday to fully refund all event organizers, as well as customers who purchased tickets to canceled events. The company will have seven months to refund a total of roughly $9 million, and as part of the resolution Brown Paper Tickets will have to provide monthly updates on its progress.

Ticket purchasers or event organizers do not have to file a claim to receive the money they are owed. Brown Paper Tickets will reach out directly to arrange refunds, and recipients who live in Washington State will receive a letter or e-mail from the Attorney General's Office. About 90% of the people who are eligible for refunds are ticket holders who are owed less than $50 on average. Event organizers, meanwhile, are owed substantially larger amounts.

Valerie Koehler, owner of Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, Tex., reported that she is still owed $13,000 for two large events the store hosted just before the initial wave of Covid-19 shutdowns in March 2020.

Jason Reynolds at Blue Willow's event last year.

The events featured Jason Reynolds and Cassandra Clare, and Koehler and events coordinator Cathy Berner used Brown Paper Tickets to handle ticket sales. They'd had a working relationship with the company for more than two years and preferred them to other ticketing companies like Eventbrite, but after the city and state shutdowns began, communication went from "regular e-mails to nothing" and payments had still not arrived.

She and Berner realized that the company must have been "having some serious issues," and let the issue "stew" for a couple of weeks. But, after a long delay and still no response from Brown Paper Tickets other than a single "rather vague return e-mail," Koehler eventually contacted the office of the Washington State Attorney General. In addition to the lawsuit mentioned above, a number of other legal actions were filed against Brown Paper Tickets over the ensuing months, including a class-action lawsuit, of which Blue Willow Bookshop is a part.

Earlier this year Koehler reached out to the American Booksellers Association, wondering if they'd heard similar complaints from  other bookstores. The ABA put her in touch with a group of indies who reported similar problems, and after an initial meeting in early March, Koehler hopes to find more booksellers who have experienced the same issues and see if "we have the collective mass" to do something.

While she is unsure yet exactly what the options are, "we just want to make it right for people." (Booksellers who have had similar issues with Brown Paper Tickets can reach Koehler at girlboss@bluewillowbookshop.com.)

Last March, Boswell Book Company, in Milwaukee, Wis., canceled its upcoming events because of the pandemic, and store owner Daniel Goldin recalled that most of those events were relatively small, free events, with customers able to purchase a book in advance if they wished. Two of the canceled events, however, were large-scale events requiring purchases in advance.

One was a sold-out author event with Elizabeth Gilbert, while the other was a "huge event" with Madeleine Albright that was a fundraiser luncheon for the League of Women Voters. The cost of a ticket for that event, Goldin continued, included a book and a "pretty substantial donation" to the League of Women Voters.

When those events were canceled, it became the responsibility of Brown Paper Tickets, not Boswell Book Company, to refund customers, and while some customers have been able to get refunds on an individual basis, many have not. This has put the bookstore in an uncomfortable position where a large number of customers believe that Goldin and his team owe them their refunds.

For the smaller canceled events, he noted, many of those ticket buyers were regular customers and in general have been more understanding. The Elizabeth Gilbert and Madeleine Albright events, however, drew many first-time customers who have not been so understanding. Goldin has done his best to smooth things over with those customers, and although the Gilbert tickets were eventually refunded in October, the Albright event continues to hang over the store.

He hears from a number of those customers regularly, and some have said that they will not buy anything from the bookstore until the issue is resolved. In other circumstances, he added, he might consider covering the cost of refunds for the sake of customer goodwill, but the cost of the Albright tickets was so high that that simply isn't possible.

Ginny Wehrli-Hemmeter, events coordinator for Anderson's Bookshops in Naperville and Downer's Grove, Ill., said that prior to the pandemic, the store had worked with Brown Paper Tickets for around five years and "really loved" working with them, yet that relationship deteriorated very quickly after the pandemic began.

The last big in-person event the store did was with Erik Larson in the first week of March. Normally, the store would receive a check from Brown Paper Tickets a week or two after hosting an event, but the check for the Larson event did not arrive until the end of the month, and then it bounced. 

There was also an event with Glennon Doyle scheduled for March 13 that was canceled on March 11, and while that event didn't take place, the bookstore did eventually get the books from that event out to everyone who purchased tickets with the help of the book's publisher. By June, the store got paid for that event, though it took "almost constant" communication with Brown Paper Tickets on the part of Wehrli-Hemmeter and Anderson's comptroller, and there has been no regular communication from Brown Paper Tickets since June.

Anderson's has still not been paid for the Erik Larson event, and the majority of customers who purchased tickets to a canceled event with Jim Carrey have not received refunds. Those big celebrity events, Wehrli-Hemmeter pointed out, often attract people who are not regular customers, and they "were not exactly understanding."

Another layer of frustration has been the loss of the store's working relationship with Brown Paper Tickets. Anderson's Bookshops has had to find a new ticketing partner for events, and the store is now accepting payments only under stringent guidelines. Said Wehrli-Hemmeter: "We can't get burned again, and we can't let our customers get burned again." --Alex Mutter

When Grandma's Place Toy and Book store in Harlem in New York City had to close between March and August because of the pandemic, it fell behind in rent and other obligations. But a GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $46,000, nearly triple the $17,000 originally sought, so successful that owner Dawn Harris-Martine, a retired second grade teacher who is 81 and known in the neighborhood as Grandma Dawn, wants to "put a bookmobile on the streets of New York" in the spring and summer, she told NY1.

Dawn Harris-Martine

Harris-Martine founded Grandma's Place 21 years ago as a literacy center. It evolved into a bookstore, and then added educational toys and games. As her granddaughter Chelsea Grant, v-p of Grandma's Place, noted on the GoFundMe page, "Grandma Dawn spends her time running her business and handpicking toys and books to support and teach the Harlem community where she has raised her children and grandchildren."

Already, "the store has doubled up on its online presence and has added educational materials for kids who are doing school remotely," NY1 wrote. As has been the case for the past two decades, Harris-Martine said that it's important that kids in Harlem succeed, and that's why staying open is imperative.

"I live right next door, and I would be outside putting the garbage out and there would be a kid standing in front of the door crying, and I would go get the keys and open the door and let him come and pick something," she said. "As long as I'm alive and drawing breath, it's going to be here."

The Frankfurt Book Fair plans to return this year as an in-person event, scheduled for October 20-24. With the theme "re:connect," the fair will have some digital elements, and the format can be easily changed, depending on pandemic-related developments. The focus will be on the international rights business and public events. Under the slogan "Singular Plurality," Canada is guest of honor.

"In 2021, Frankfurter Buchmesse will again be an important meeting place--for the book industry, for authors and readers," said director Juergen Boos. "The industry needs an exchange and visibility more than ever. In recent months we've held in-depth discussions with our customers and created a plan tailored to the needs of our exhibitors. With our updated conditions for participating in the fair, and our generous cancellation policy and flexible program, we want to make it easy for our exhibitors in Germany and around the world to decide in favor of coming to Frankfurt. As always, protecting the health of our exhibitors and visitors has top priority. Our planning processes are therefore flexible, allowing us to quickly adapt to changing requirements."

The Frankfurt Book Fair is being supported by funds from the German government's Neustart Kultur program. This assistance will be passed along to exhibitors, which means they will benefit from lower fees for exhibition stands. Exhibitor registration has opened.

In addition to the on-site fair, Frankfurter Buchmesse is further developing its digital offerings.

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More than 110,000 people in the U.K. tuned into World Book Day's Share a Story Live digital events program over three days, far exceeding the 10,000-person attendance recorded for live events in previous years, the Bookseller reported, adding that #WorldBookDay trended on Twitter March 4, with 1.1 million impressions that day and 2.5 million impressions over the week.

WBD recorded more than 4,500 classrooms tuning in to events Wednesday and Thursday, with the website getting 2.2 million views on March 4. Its free online resource packs for teachers reached 400,000 views this week, while WBD audiobooks had almost 200,000 free downloads.

WBD CEO Cassie Chadderton commented: "In the context of the difficulties families have faced this year, and the educational and economic gaps now widened by the pandemic, we wanted this year's World Book Day to celebrate the benefits of reading more clearly than ever, and to bring a moment of joy and hope to families across the country. We have been overwhelmed by the huge response and it's been wonderful to see all the creative ways children, families and schools have been getting involved."

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Canadian bookseller Stephen Welch, who has run S.W. Welch Bookseller for the past 15 years on Saint-Viateur Street in Montreal's Mile End, was facing a significant commercial rent hike and said last month that he was being forced out of his space when his current lease ends in August. He had attempted to negotiate with the building's owner but wasn't able to reach an agreement.

The community has rallied behind Welch, however, as bestselling author Louise Penny noted in a Facebook post on Friday: "When I lived in Montreal, before meeting Michael, I had a home in the Plateau quartier. It's right beside a wonderful neighborhood called Mile End. On February 28th, landlord Danny Lavy defended the 150% rent increase on S.W. Welch independent bookstore in the Mile End neighborhood of Montreal by asking 'Does anybody buy books today?'

"On March 13, Montrealers will answer that question. A socially-distanced demonstration is being organized for that day. People are being asked to bring a book and to stand in line reading while they wait their turn to enter the store to buy a book (if they have the means), and to gather in support of Mile End's history, culture and small business owners. The event is organized by @MileEndEnsemble. We need to support, and stand up for, our bookstores. They are not just another door, they are a vital part of any vibrant community. As are all small, family run, businesses."

Yesterday, Welch posted an optimistic update on the bookshop's Facebook page: "My landlord has had a change of heart and we have negotiated the lease for two more years at which point I will retire. I went up a little and he went down a lot. The outpouring of love and concern by so many people to our plight has been amazing and in the end effective achieving this result, thank you!! I will endeavor to stock the store with unexpected titles, great reads and unusual finds and to this end I am actively buying, so sell me some wouldja! See you in the store. Love SWW!" --Robert Gray

Marc Visnick

Marc Visnick has joined graphic novel publisher TKO Studios in the newly created position of v-p of sales and business development. He will head up global sales, distribution, rights, and e-commerce for the company, which was founded in 2018 by Salvatore Simeone and Tze Chun.

Visnick was formerly senior business development manager at Ingram Content Group. He also co-founded Callisto Media, a publisher that emphasizes identifying and publishing topics of consumer interest through big data. Before that, he was sales director for Lonely Planet.

"TKO is redefining comics publishing," said Visnick. "I'm honored to be leading our talented global team as we support our shops, libraries, partners and loyal followers worldwide in both print and digital."

CEO Salvatore Simeone said, "Marc's track record of growing media companies will help us expand distribution of our content and further our brand awareness. He's a top notch professional who'll help take TKO to the next level as a publisher."

At the same time, Colleen Lindsay has been named senior manager, marketing and social media at TKO Studios. She was most recently publicity lead at Amazon Publishing.

Co-founder Tze Chun said that Lindsay's "vast experience in publishing and pop culture entertainment is a great fit for TKO Studios as we continue to expand our product offerings."

Jack Whyte

Jack Whyte, a Scottish Canadian author of historical fiction, died February 22. He was 80. The Daily Courier reported that his 17 books, which have been translated into more than 20 languages, include the series A Dream of Eagles, the Templar trilogy and the Guardians of Scotland. He was also an actor, poet, singer and orator.

In a 2018 interview with the Daily Courier (a publication for which he also contributed a regular column), Whyte reflected on his passion for research and what he believed were the reasons for his worldwide success as a writer of historical fiction: "I've gone looking for legends and tried to strip away all the accumulated crap of the centuries and uncover what it was originally that made this story and these people so great," he said.

Author Diana Gabaldon tweeted that Whyte was "a wonderful writer, fantastic singer, a generous, funny Scotsman with a lot of love for the world."

Whyte lived for 25 years in Kelowna, B.C., where he was a frequent visitor to Mosaic Books for his book launches, the CBC noted. Co-owners Michele and Michael Neill remembered him as a fun-loving man dedicated to excellence in creative writing.

"We'd go upstairs to the office and have a bottle of wine sitting there... we'd have a smoke [cigarettes] up there and have a few words," Michael Neill said. "He was just full of energy and what a storyteller.... You could hear a pin drop in the room (of more than 200 people) while he read from his book."

Michele Neill added that Whyte collected an incredible amount of historical details and went to great lengths to embellish them in his stories, not hesitating to toss his imperfect drafts. "He once wrote 600 pages of a book and then realized it was all wrong and threw it out and started again." 

Independent booksellers across the U.S. celebrated International Women's Day yesterday. Here's a sampling from their social media pages:

Copperfish Books, Punta Gorda, Fla.: "Happy International Women's Day, and Women's History Month! This month, we're proud to highlight a diverse collection of stories written by women and about women which honors the vast contributions that women have made in virtually every nook and cranny of history. We hope that our selections will inspire you to look at our shared history, and the people in it, from a new perspective."

Bookmiser, Marietta, Ga.: "Today is International Women's Day! Celebrated each year on March 8, International Women's Day commemorates the movement for women's rights and celebrates the political, cultural, social, and economic achievements of women. It is also a day to continue fighting for gender equality: for equal pay and work opportunities for women, and for equality in access to education and healthcare worldwide. It is also a day to work to eradicate violence against women. It is celebrated around the world and supported by various groups. Small and large gatherings and conferences take place. It is a day of celebration, but also a day of taking new initiatives and action."

The Bookstore Plus, Lake Placid, N.Y.: "Happy International Women's Day! Today, and everyday, we are proud to amplify the voices and stories of inspiring women such as these. As you walk by our window display, we hope you too will #ChooseToChallenge the status quo."

The Bookshop, East Nashville, Tenn.: "Dream big, y'all. #internationalwomensday #womanowned."

Birchbark Books and Native Arts, Minneapolis, Minn.: "Miigwech to our friend who chalked our walk for #internationalwomensday2021!! Come by for curbside pickup and reflect on what this day means to you."

Pages Bookshop, Detroit, Mich.: "Happy #internationalwomensday! You can celebrate with us and other women who run Detroit bookshops tonight at 7 p.m. with the @Detroit Writing Room's Speaker Series!"

Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, Wash.: "What better day to read a book by a woman than International Women's Day? These are just a few of our fiction recommendations, but the shelves are filled with amazing reads!"

Bards Alley Bookshop, Vienna, Va.: "Lynne is celebrating #InternationalWomensDay and #WomensHistoryMonth with Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Immigrant Women Who Saved the World! This book is as inspiring as it is educational, a must for any budding feminist's library."

Harriett's Bookshop, Philadelphia, Pa.: "Happy International Womens Day #IWD2021.... Wouldnt it be dope if there was a business district in EVERY major city dedicated to Black women owned businesses? How is it that this doesn't already exist?"

Wild Geese Bookshop, Franklin, Ind.: "Happy #InternationalWomensDay from this woman-owned indie bookshop. Thank you for helping me not fall flat on my face after making this giant leap from litigation in 2016. Women telling their stories keeps wind in my sails.... I sell books because books and words have rescued me again and again. I hope you find something here or in your visits with us that helps you feel better and stronger."

Bridgeside Books, Waterbury, Vt.: "In the U.S., about 40% of businesses are women-owned... but here in Waterbury, I believe our percentage is higher. I raise a virtual glass to all the amazing women business owners in our community...."

Orinda Books, Orinda, Calif.: "Happy International Women's Day! Come see our new table and pick up your favorite female author or read a biography about incredible women in history."

Itinerant Literate Books, Charleston, S.C.: "Hey, all, Danielle here. It's March 8, which means it's time for my annual post celebrating these two badass, hardworking, crazy-intelligent women: our co-owners, Christen and Julia. (I never warn them, I just do it.) Happy #internationalwomensday2021 to all of our fellow women-owned-and-operated businesses out there!"

Blue Willow Bookshop, Houston, Tex.: "Happy International Women's Day from your local, woman-owned, independent bookstore! (In-person photo taken pre-quarantine! One day we'll get an updated staff photo...)"

"Meet Room's newest employee, Romy! She reads picture books and abolitionist texts only," A Room of One's Own Bookstore, Madison, Wis., tweeted. "She can't wait until vaccines are available to everyone and you can all come in and pet her."

The two most popular books in February at Reading Group Choices were Writers & Lovers by Lily King (Grove Press) and Oliver: The True Story of a Stolen Dog and the Humans He Brought Together by Steven J. Carino (Thomas Nelson).

At Tom Doherty Associates:

Laura Etzkorn is being promoted to senior publicist.

Libby Collins is being promoted to senior publicist.

Giselle Gonzalez is being promoted to assistant publicist.

Nöthin' but a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion by Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock (St. Martin's Press).

Tomorrow:
Drew Barrymore Show: Luvvie Ajayi Jones, author of Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual (Penguin Life, $26, 9781984881908).

Level Forward will adapt The Queen's Gambit, the 1983 novel by Walter Tevis that last year became an award-winning hit Netflix series, for the stage as a musical. The Guardian reported that it is unclear where the company, "which has produced films on sexual harassment and assault including the feature and documentary On the Record, will adapt the musical. But given its recent history of Broadway productions, including a musical based on Alanis Morissette's album Jagged Little Pill and the provocative Slave Play, by Jeremy O Harris, all signs point to New York."

"It is a privilege for Level Forward to lead the charge of bringing The Queen's Gambit to the stage through the beloved and enduring craft of musical theater," said Level Forward CEO Adrienne Becker and producer Julia Dunetz in a statement. "Audiences are already sharing in the friendship and fortitude of the story's inspiring women who energize and sustain Beth Harmon's journey and ultimate triumph. The story is a siren call amidst our contemporary struggles for gender and racial equity, and we're looking forward to moving the project forward."

Yaniv Iczkovits won the £4,000 (about $5,580) Wingate Literary Prize, which recognizes "the best book, fiction or nonfiction, to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader," for his historical novel The Slaughterman's Daughter.

Chair of judges Rabbi Janner-Klausner commented: "We were unanimous in our decision as judges that we loved this wonderful book, The Slaughterman's Daughter. It is epic literature with an excellent translation. At the same time, it is also a fantastic, surprising romp through a really important part of Jewish history, with an amazingly unpredictable storyline. In a post-Holocaust world, reading a book about Jewish shtetl life which is at the same time, funny, shocking and entrancing, enables someone who is not Jewish to understand so much of what makes us tick. The Slaughterman's Daughter is like your closest friend that you want to show off to everyone because you want people to see how special they are."

Helen Oyeyemi's command of magical realism is practically mind altering in her unforgettable seventh novel. Under a somewhat twee pretense, freshly committed partners Otto and Xavier, accompanied by their faithful mongoose, travel by boutique train carriage for their "non-honeymoon." But from there, Peaces sprawls into astonishing, and even frightful, territories of the interior, more so than new horizons abroad.

Self-described "lazy hypnotist" Otto Shin (née Montague) is a jittery narrator. His altogether unpredictable journey begins four years after an "almost offensively easy breakup" with a man whose only trace nowadays is a set of Czech boxers that happened to fit Otto perfectly. Xavier Shin has "offered to share his surname," and Otto "managed to accept with sedate joy," belying the fact that Otto had "been putting my first name and his surname together over and over and over on various pieces of scrap paper" for three years. Otto's most trusted companion until that point had been his mongoose Árpád, 30th in the succession of domestic guardians for the British Montagues.

The couple's peculiar accommodations aboard The Lucky Day's Clock Carriage are a gift from Do Yeon-ssi, the aunt who raised Xavier during "strange times for the Shins of Sangju." The train is owned by the mysterious theremin savant Ava Kapoor, and is managed by the hilariously blunt Allegra Yu. The only other consistent occupant seems to be the "neither hostile nor curious, but quite French" Laura De Souza, "a black [Catherine] Deneuve" (circa 1968) with unsettling ties to both Xavier and Ava's pasts.

Oyeyemi (Boy, Snow, Bird; Gingerbread; Mr. Fox) may appear to direct this beguiling novel off the rails at times, but its manic twists never spin out. They instead serve to reorient the gravity of the situation. The Shins' getaway becomes hitched to the rising stakes surrounding a sizable inheritance promised to Ava by a former employer. The only catch is that she must prove her sanity on the final day of a train ride riddled with apparitions: phantom whistling, disappearing mongoose catchers, perplexing incidents of "bespoke vandalism" and mystifying "canvases... bathed in white."

To that end, Oyeyemi trains her irresistible prose and considerable powers of perception on the uncanny valley that forms between one person's experience and another's interpretation, divergences that cast eerie shadows on the course of relationships past, present and future. A superbly fun Rorschach test of staggering creativity, Peaces asks how much attention one person can spare another in an increasingly chaotic world. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

Shelf Talker: The acclaimed British novelist transforms a romantic getaway for two into a high-stakes, and supremely absorbing, test of human perception.

Guantánamo Voices: An Anthology: True Accounts from the World's Most Infamous Prison, edited by Sarah Mirk, various illustrators (Abrams ComicArts, $24.99, 9781419746901)

In a 2016 public forum, President Obama was asked: What advice would you give yourself if you could go back to the start of your presidency? His answer was "I think I would have closed Guantánamo on the first day." Under Trump's presidency, the institutional will to keep the facility open only strengthened. Today it still stands, with an alarming record of only 16 detainees prosecuted or even charged out of the 799 held in its 20-year history. In an anthology of interviews from lawyers, military officials, and former detainees, journalist Sarah Mirk confronts a part of our recent history many prefer to forget.

Guantánamo Voices opens with the text of the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the rights of a fair trial and clear charges to suspects, and Article 103 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits prolonged confinement of war prisoners. These principles hang over Mirk's Guantánamo narratives like specters as prisoners relate their stories of torture, and as lawyers try to navigate the Bush administration's legal gauntlet. What Mirk's interviews make clear is that in the wake of 9/11, Guantánamo was allowed to exist as an exception to U.S. law not unlike the internment of Japanese-Americans. High-dollar bounties in Afghanistan created incentives for opportunists to turn innocent farmers over to U.S. authorities. Torture generated even more bad intelligence that prevented prosecutors from bringing clear charges in the vast majority of cases.

How to Handsell: The influences of Chris Ware, the Hernandez brothers and Moebius can be seen in Guantánamo Voices, a narrative report on the complex legal maneuvering, bureaucratic banality and patriotic equivocation that helped to justify a wartime prison that still exists today.

Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug (Scribner, $20, 9781476796635)

"As she speaks, the past reveals itself as if through a block of ice" says Nora Krug, describing a conversation with a distant relative she tracked down in Germany for Belonging. Krug's project is to chip away at that block of ice that is her family history, once thought of as an impenetrable barrier. Through amateur archives, state records, family photographs and heirlooms, items she finds on eBay, gossip of Germanophile chatrooms and conversations with local historians, Nora Krug traces her lineage to find that both sides of her family were involved with the Nazi Party.

What drives Krug's reconstruction of her family tree is the weight of both an inherited guilt and an absence of belonging, or the framing concept for this book, the German concept of Heimat. Heimat is the intangible anchoring force to a place, a culture and a people. In attempting to reconcile the intangible German Heimat with the crimes of her family and country, Krug produces a graphic novel that synthesizes, reproduces and artistically retells her family's history during World War II. The sections of Belonging that are drawn in a traditional comics format are the moments of history she reimagines. Alongside these panels are scanned documents with the English translations and Krug's commentary layered on top. Photographs of family members and the businesses they patronized are inserted at rhetorically effective moments in the narrative. Separating the chapters are the tangible parts of Krug's Heimat, bits of nostalgia "from a homesick émigré" like the Leitz binder, Gallseife soap, hot water bottles and German bread.

How to Handsell: Belonging's scrapbook style is both an innovative approach to comics and a warm, accessible welcome to those not acquainted with the medium. It offers readers an intimate connection to history.

Year of the Rabbit by Tian Veasna (Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95, 9781770463769)

Tian Veasna, author and illustrator of Year of the Rabbit, was born three days after the Khmer Rouge's takeover of Phnom Penh. He spent the early years of his childhood on the run and in Khmer Rouge reeducation and labor camps. Like Belonging, Year of the Rabbit traces a history that is both obscure and haunting to the author. However, this graphic novel is more straightforwardly narrative, driven by the ruthless and necessary movement that defines the refugee experience. As a result, it moves at a relentless pace, but radiates with a clarity and precision that only a witness to history possesses.

Year of the Rabbit's chapters are broken up with editorial insertions in the form of infographics about the Khmer Rouge's organizational structure, tactical maps of the occupied territories, illustrated suggestions of survival tactics for refugees, and a panoply of goods confiscated by the Angkar, the central organizational structure of the Khmer Rouge. Drawn in rich pastels and military colors, this graphic novel is a stark account of a family's experience of one of the most vicious regimes in modern history.

How to Handsell: Despite heavy themes and depictions of violence, Year of the Rabbit is a great crossover recommendation for mature teenagers interested in history, or fans of Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do.

Winter Warrior by Eve Gilbert (Fantagraphics Books, $19.99, 9781683962137)

Eve Gilbert's interest in documenting the varied experiences of a generation of Vietnam War veterans was disrupted when she encountered a video of Scott Camil. Her project then narrowed to focus on the story of this abused child from Hialeah, Fla. Brought up in a culture of brutal masculinity and anti-communist propaganda, Camil was eager eventually to enlist and do his part in eradicate the ideology he'd been warned about and to ravage communities of its followers.

Winter Warrior is told from the perspective of Camil and sewn together into a brilliant narrative by Gilbert. Through Camil's strong narrative voice, he details his willing and enthusiastic participation in war crimes, which are described with unyielding and uncensored detail. Broke, disrespected, and philosophically unmoored after returning from Vietnam, Gilbert traces Scott Camil's journey from rampaging soldier to one of the leaders of the anti-war movement.

How to Handsell: With this ingeniously told story, Eve Gilbert delivers a piece of American history through beautiful illustrations and a faithfully told story of a veteran's precarious journey to redemption.

At War with War: 5000 Years of Conquests, Invasions, and Terrorist Attacks, an Illustrated Timeline by Seymour Chwast (Seven Stories Press, $19.95, 9781609807795)

Much of contemporary graphic design and avant-garde visual art can be traced back to Seymour Chwast, a founding partner of the legendary art collective Push Pin Studios. In At War with War, however, Chwast forgoes his trademark stark designs for an aesthetic and rhetorical minimalism. This graphic novel is, quite simply, a chronological list of global wars and conflicts for the past 5,000 years. Chwast does not offer detail or comment on these conflicts, although he occasionally intersperses his scrupulous list with a historical essay, like "The Complaint of Peace" written by Desiderius Erasmus in 1521, or "War Is the Health of the State" by Randolph Bourne, written in 1918.

How to Handsell: For art history zealots, history buffs or anyone who appreciates a break with traditional panel-to-panel comics, At War with War represents a new kind of encyclopedia. --Emma Levy, freelance writer

The bestselling self-published books last week as compiled by IndieReader.com:

1. Return to Us by Corinne Michaels
2. Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki with Sharon L. Lechter
3. The Crush by Penelope Ward
4. Jonny's Redemption by Riley Edwards
5. Conjugal Visits (Souls Chapel Revenants MC Book 2) by Lani Lynn Vale
6. Escorting the Billionaire (The Escort Collection Book 2) by Leigh James
7. A New 20/20 Vision by Taylor Rochestie
8. The Last True Gentleman (True Gentlemen Book 12) by Grace Burrowes
9. Enchanted Kingdoms by Various
10. The Deep Rig by Patrick Byrne

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]