Maus Now

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; 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 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 from school language arts curricula in McMinn County, Tennessee has shown.      Maus Now: Selected Writing 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 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.