“Maus” a Pulitzer Prize wining graphic novel about the Holocaust, has become an Amazon bestseller after a Tennessee county school board banned it last week.
“The Complete Maus,” which includes all volumes of the graphic novel, was number two on Amazon bestsellers list on Monday. Individual copies of Volume I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History and Volume II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began were at number three and nine on the list.
All three editions of the book occupies the top three spots in the sub-categories ‘History‘, and ‘Comics & Graphic novels’ and dominating the ‘Biographies & Memoirs‘ and ‘Fiction & Fantasy‘ sub-categories as well.
The book surged to the top of the Amazon charts after the McMinn County board in Tennessee unanimously voted to remove it from the eighth-grade curriculum because of a handful of curse words and other aspects that it found upsetting, including “its depiction of violence and suicide.”
The book tells the story of the author Art Spiegelman’s parents’ imprisonment at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. In “Maus,” groups of people are depicted as animals. Nazi Germans are depicted as cats and Jews as mice.
The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
“I’m heartened by reader responses, and the local responses you mentioned,” Spiegelman told CNBC in an email. “The schoolboard could’ve checked with their book-banning predecessor, [Russia President] Vladimir Putin: he made the Russian edition of Maus illegal in 2015 (also with good intentions—banning swastikas) and the small publisher sold out immediately and has had to reprint repeatedly,” he added.
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