Maus Now

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. 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. 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.