Maus Now: Selected Writing

Description

A richly illustrated book in which leading cultural critics, authors, and academics reflect on the radical achievement and innovation of Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Maus Pulitzer Prize-winning author Art Spiegelman is one of our most influential contemporary artists, and it is hard to overstate his effect on postwar American culture and the world of comics. Maus has shaped the fields of literature, history, and art, and enlivened our collective sense of what these practices can accomplish. Collecting responses to the work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status, Maus Now sees writers such as Philip Pullman, Adam Gopnik, Ruth Franklin, and others approaching the complexity of Maus from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions. Organized into three loosely chronological sections ("Contexts", "Problems of Representation" and "Legacy"), the book offers translations of important French, Hebrew, and German essays on Maus for the first time. Maus is revelatory, and generative, in profound and long-lasting ways. With this collection, American literary scholar (and expert on comics and graphic narratives) Hillary Chute assembles the best work around the globe exploring this classic graphic biography.

ART SPIEGELMAN is a contributing editor and artist for the New Yorker. His drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus, which was also nominated for the National Book Critics Award. He lives in New York. HILLARY CHUTE is an American literary scholar and an expert on comics and graphic narratives. She is Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University and the author or editor of seven titles on comics, including, most recently, her book, Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. She is a comics and graphic novels columnist for The New York Times Book Review.

Chute has been leading the charge with some of the most sophisticated comics criticism to date * TLS * The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust * Wall Street Journal on MAUS * The first masterpiece in comic book history * New Yorker on MAUS * Wonderful . . . Chute's often lovely, sensitive discussions of individual expression in independent comics seem so right and true * New York Times Book Review on Why Comics? *