Posted in: Comics | Tagged: graphic novel, Maus

Writing About Maus Now Also Rocketing Up The Charts

Published Fri, 25 Feb 2022 09:27:09 -0600

This is probably a well times publication. Later this year, Pantheon is to publish Maus Now: Selected Writing edited by comic book critic, curator, lecturer and editor Professor Hillary Chute. As Maus by Art Spiegelman became the best selling graphic novel in the USA forty years after release, even one of the best-selling books overall, after one small school board decided to take it off the literature curriculum over concerns expressed by parents, so media and public interest in the book has soared. The first and only comic book to win a Pulitzer Prize, it had become part of the comic book canon, but is now being more widely appreciated again. And, as a result of all the fuss, Maus Now has become the best-selling book of post-modern literary criticism on Amazon for the last few weeks. It's only out in November and 500 pages full of Maus-relevant discourse, it may well go higher in all sorts of charts before then.

Richly illustrated with images from Art Spiegelman's work, Maus Now gathers together many of contemporary culture's leading critics, authors, and academics on the radical achievement and innovation of Maus more than forty years since its first publication. 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. Maus has shaped the fields of literature, history, and art, and enlivened our collective sense of what these practices can accomplish. Maus Now: Selected Writings collects responses to the work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status. Here, writers such as Philip Pullman, Robert Storr, Ruth Franklin, and others approach Maus from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions, inspired by the material's complexity. The book is organized into three very loosely chronological sections: "Contexts," "Problems of Representation," and "Legacy," and 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.

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