Richly illustrated with images from Art Spiegelman's Maus ("the most
affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust" --The
Wall Street Journal), Maus Now includes work from twenty-one leading
critics, authors, and academics--including Philip Pullman, Robert Storr,
Ruth Franklin, and Adam Gopnik--on the radical achievement and
innovation of Maus, more than forty years since the original
publication of "the first masterpiece in comic book history" (The New
Yorker).
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman is one of our most
influential contemporary artists; it's hard to overstate his effect on
postwar American culture. Maus shaped the fields of literature,
history, and art, and has enlivened our collective sense of
possibilities for expression. A timeless work in more ways than one,
Maus has also often been at the center of debates, as its recent ban
by the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board from the district's
English language-arts curriculum demonstrates.
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Maus Now: Selected Writing* collects responses to Spiegelman's
monumental work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status. The
writers approach Maus from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions,
inspired by the material's complexity across four decades, from 1985 to
2018. The book is organized into three loosely chronological sections--
"Contexts," "Problems of Representation," and "Legacy"--and offers for
the first time translations of important French, Hebrew, and German
essays on Maus.
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Maus* is revelatory and generative in profound and long-lasting ways.
With this collection, American literary scholar Hillary Chute, an expert
on comics and graphic narratives, assembles the world's best writing on
this classic work of graphic testimony.
