Nina Bunjevac

A remarkable autobiographical graphic novel by a Serbian living in Canada, Fatherland is the story of her family -- especially her father, a Serbian nationalist who died in mysterious circumstances -- and through them of the whole Balkan conflict. In 1975 Nina Bunjevac's mother fled her marriage and her adopted country of Canada and took Nina back to Yugoslavia to live with their grandparents. Peter, her husband, was a fanatical Serbian nationalist who had been forced to leave his country at the end of World War II and migrate to Canada. But even there he continued his activities, joining a terrorist group that planned to set off bombs at the homes of Tito sympathisers and at Yugoslav missions in Canada and the USA. Then in 1977, while his family were still in Yugoslavia, a telegram arrives to say that a bomb has gone off prematurely and Peter and two of his comrades have been killed. Nina Bunjevac tells her family's story in superb black-and-white artwork. Fatherland will be recognized as a masterpiece of non-fiction comics, worthy to stand beside Persepolis and Palestine.

Fatherland

Bezimena

The author’s jumping-off point is the myth of Artemis and Siproites, in which a young man is turned into a woman as a punishment for the attempted rape of one of Artemis’s virgin cohorts. Bunjevac’s retelling follows Benny, a sexually deviant man who, coming across an alluring former classmate, concocts an elaborate, disturbing rape fantasy. Inked in her lush, stippled, illustrative style, Bunjevac crafts a gripping, noirish, Nabokovian tale, by turns surreal and harrowing, that turns the male gaze inside-out. Bezimena is both a radical examination of the misconceptions surrounding rape culture and an artistic and psychological tour de force.

La réparation

Goran Vojnović

Očetnjava

Elisa Hategan

RACE TRAITOR is the visceral true story of a teenage girl who becomes entangled in Canada's most powerful white supremacist group, the Heritage Front - a domestic terrorist group later revealed to have been created and funded with the assistance of Canada's spy agency, CSIS. To sixteen-year old runaway Elisse, the new friends she encounters in the secretive Heritage Front are the family she's never had. They feed her when she's hungry, watch her back, and Wolfgang Droege, one of the group's charismatic leaders, introduces her to a trusted friend, notorious Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel, who provides her with shelter and work. In less than a year, Elisse evolves into an extremist groomed for a leadership role in the far-right movement. Her loyalty earns her the attention of Grant Bristow, co-founder of the Heritage Front, who is training a secret faction of skinheads and neo-Nazis in information-gathering and terror tactics targeting political opponents. Rapidly drawn into their web of hatred, Elisse witnesses an escalating campaign of terror from which there seems no way out. Forced to confront her sexual orientation and secret heritage, Elisse realizes that she must fight back. But when she attempts to shut down the vicious organization that had brainwashed her and terrorized innocent Canadians, she learns that a darker force is behind the façade of the Heritage Front: Canada's own spy agency, backed by the government that was supposed to protect her. At only eighteen, Elisse's testimony will lead to the criminal convictions of prominent white supremacists including Wolfgang Droege. Within months, Grant Bristow would be exposed as an undercover CSIS agent. Although Operation Governor never led to the arrest of a single Canadian racist, Bristow will be placed into the Witness Protection Program and given a package worth hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, while the teenage girl who had named him as a criminal will be denied police protection and forced to go on the run for her life.

The True Story of Canadian Intelligence's Greatest Cover-Up

Race Traitor

Benny lavora come guardiano in uno zoo. Un giorno, tra i visitatori nota una donna che gli ricorda qualcuno. La osserva dalla finestra del rettilario: è candida come neve e ha con sé un taccuino da disegno che tiene stretto fino a quando, un attimo prima di andare via, lo dimentica davanti alla vasca degli orsi polari. Per Benny la donna non l'ha lasciato lì per caso: quel taccuino è un'esca, il segnale che dà il via a un gioco di seduzione in cui lui è la vittima designata. O forse è solo il primo passo verso il buio che ha sempre cercato. Con il suo segno denso e corporeo, Nina Bunjevac ha creato una parabola moderna che illustra senza ipocrisie la brutalità della violenza sessuale. Un'opera che ritrae la spaventosa normalità di chi giustifica l'orrore delle proprie azioni.

Nina Bunjevac's brilliant debut graphic novel returns in this expanded 10th Anniversary edition. "Powered by an expressive black and white drawing style, reminiscent of Robert Crumb and the meticulous pointillist technique of Drew Friedman, the dark undertone of Bunjevac's humour brings into light the range of socio-political issues her comics deal with, such as gender, nationalism or urban alienation, always from an ironic feminist perspective. Her chain-smoking, slightly alcoholic and manically depressed character Zorka may just be today's ultimate antiheroine. A Balkan immigrant in the Brave New World, working in that same meat factory for the last twenty years, tormented by family constraints and her own secret desires... we simply can't get enough of her." -- BTurn For mature audiences

Heartless

In 1975 Nina Bunjevac’s mother fled her marriage and her adopted country of Canada and took Nina back to Yugoslavia to live with her parents. Peter, her husband, was a fanatical Serbian nationalist who had been forced to leave his country at the end of World War II and migrate to Canada. But even there he continued his activities, joining a terrorist group that planned to set off bombs at the homes of Tito sympathisers and at Yugoslav missions in Canada and the USA. Then in 1977, while his family were still in Yugoslavia, a telegram arrived to say that a bomb had gone off prematurely and Peter and two of his comrades had been killed. Nina Bunjevac tells her family’s story in superb black-and-white artwork. Fatherland will be recognised as a masterpiece of non-fiction comics, worthy to stand beside Persepolis and Palestine.

Nina Bunjevac

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