92nd St. Y Unterberg Poetry Center
1395 Lexington Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday, October 6, $27, 8:00
212-415-5500
www.92y.org
Twenty-five years ago, Art Spiegelman revolutionized the comic book industry, as well as Holocaust literature, with the first volume of his epic Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, My Father Bleeds History, followed six years later by And Here My Troubles Began, earning him a special Pulitzer Prize. In celebration of the book’s silver anniversary, the cofounder of the heavily influential Raw magazine (which he edited with his wife, Françoise Mouly) has released the spectacular MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus (Pantheon, October 4, 2011, $35), which consists of pages from notebooks, sketches, grids, research paraphernalia, photos, letters, family trees, a lengthy transcript of the 1972 interview with his father that formed the basis of Maus’s tale of Vladek’s struggle to survive in Auschwitz during WWII, and much more, filled with fascinating personal insight. “It was hard to revisit Maus, the book that both ‘made’ me and has haunted me ever since; hard to revisit the ghosts of my family, the death-stench of history, and my own past,” Spiegelman writes in the book’s acknowledgment to editor Hillary Chute, whose interviews with Spiegelman are found throughout such chapters as “Why the Holocaust?,” “Why Mice?,” and “Why Comics?” Chute also talks to Mouly and their children, Nadja and Dash, examining the Maus phenomenon from every angle. In addition, the full-color hardcover is accompanied by a CD that contains rough drafts, videos, interviews, the complete Maus strips, a tour of Auschwitz, and other odds and ends relating to the unforgettable story. “I didn’t know that I did want to do a book about the Holocaust,” Spiegelman explains early on. “If anything, I was in allergic reaction to my own Jewishness. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to talk about it as self-hating (even though some people were angry at Maus for my lack of Zionist zeal), but when I was a kid I wasn’t sure being Jewish was such a great idea — I’d heard they killed people for that. Maus somehow involved coming out of the closet as a Jew.” Spiegelman will discuss all that and more at the 92nd St. Y on October 6 when he sits down with Chute for a conversation about the history of Maus, one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century.