this week in literature

ART SPIEGELMAN — METAMAUS: IN CONVERSATION WITH HILLARY CHUTE

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.

HILLARY JORDAN: WHEN SHE WOKE

Monday, October 3, McNally Jackson, 52 Prince St. between Lafayette & Mulberry Sts., free, 7:00
Wednesday, October 5, BookCourt, 163 Court St. between Pacific & Dean Sts., free, 7:00
www.algonquinbooksblog.com
www.hillaryjordan.com

Brooklyn-based author Hillary Jordan’s debut novel, Mudbound (Algonquin, 2009), about racial tension in a family on a Mississippi farm in the post-World War II south, was greeted with both honors and sales, winning the 2006 Bellwether Prize as well as a 2009 Alex Award from the American Library Association and becoming a favorite among reading groups. Two years later, Jordan returns with When She Woke (Algonquin, October 2011, $24.95), a novel set not in the past but the barely removed future, a dystopian America in which Christian fundamentalism, genetic manipulation, and the merging of church and state combine to solve the overcrowding in the penal system by “melachroming” convicted offenders, turning them red, blue, yellow, and green — bringing discrimination based on skin color to a whole new level. “She saw her hands first,” Jordan writes. “She held them in front of her eyes, squinting up at them. For a few seconds, shadowed by her eyelashes and backlit by the hard white light emanating from the ceiling, they appeared black. Then her eyes adjusted, and the illusion faded. She examined the backs, the palms. They floated above her, as starkly alien as starfish. She’d known what to expect — she’d seen Reds many times before, of course, on the street and on the vid — but still, she wasn’t prepared for the sight of her own changed flesh. For the twenty-six years she’d been alive, her hands had been a honey-toned pink, deepening to golden brown in the summertime. Now, they were the color of newly shed blood.” Despite this science-fiction touch, the book hearkens back, quite consciously, to that 1850 classic of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, as the trajectory of Jordan’s fallen woman protagonist, Hannah Payne, echoes that of Hester Prynne, both victims of a tortured “man of God” and overwhelming societal hypocrisy. Jordan’s echo of Hawthorne brings to light the Puritan narrative that still lies so close to the surface of an America that continues to struggle with sexuality, gender, crime, and punishment. Akin to and often compared with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Jordan’s novel will hit stores October 11, and she’s opening her book tour in New York City this week with two special events, a reading, signing, and conversation with Valerie Martin on October 3 at McNally Jackson in the West Village and a reading, signing, and audience Q&A on October 5 at BookCourt in Cobble Hill.

FIRST SATURDAYS: LATINO HERITAGE

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, “Marta Moreno Vega,” pigmented ink-jet print, 2011 (© Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, October 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum will be celebrating Latino heritage at its October First Saturday program, centered on the exhibition “Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: The Latino List,” in which the photographer behind “The Black List” turns his camera on such Latino figures as Marta Moreno Vega, Pitbull, Eva Longoria, Cesar Conde, Robert Menendez, and John Leguizamo. Greenfield-Sanders will screen the HBO documentary The Latino List at 7:30 and participate in a discussion following the film. The evening will also include live performances by ABAKUÁ Afro-Latin Dance Company, Jerry Hernandez y La Orquesta Dee Jay, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jose Conde, a book-club talk by Moreno Vega about her memoir When the Spirits Dance Mambo, a curator talk on “Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk — An Introspective,” an art workshop, and more. Also on view are such exhibits as “Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior,” “Raw/Cooked: Kristof Wickman,” “Eva Hesse Spectres 1960,” “Matthew Buckingham: ‘The Spirit and the Letter,’” “reOrder: An Architectural Environment by Situ Studio,” and “Ten Years Later: Ground Zero Remembered.”

BERNHARD SCHLINK: THE WEEKEND

BookCourt
163 Court St. between Dean & Pacific Sts.
Tuesday, September 27, free, 7:00
718-875-3677
www.bookcourt.org

German writer Bernhard Schlink, whose 1995 novel, The Reader, was turned into a 2008 film directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet, will be at BookCourt in Brooklyn on September 27 for a reading and signing of the paperback edition of his latest book, The Weekend (Vintage International, September 27, 2011, $15). A different kind of Big Chill, the novel is set in a rural estate where a group of old friends have gathered to celebrate the early release of Jörg, who has spent more than two decades in prison for having committed murder related to the group’s revolutionary terrorist activities. But everyone is much older now and has gone their separate ways, leading to crises of conscience, reevaluating past relationships, dealing with suicide, and reexamining their lives individually and as a whole, with each chapter seen through a different character’s eyes. “Henner didn’t know what to make of the weekend they were about to spend together, and what he should expect from it: from meeting Jörg again, along with Christiane and his other old friends,” Schlink writes at the beginning of the second chapter. “When Christiane’s call had come, he had said yes right away. Because he had heard a plea in her voice? Because a friendship formed in youth can claim a lifelong loyalty? Out of curiosity?”

FAB! FESTIVAL

Dan Fishback will be at the Fab! Festival performing songs that did not make it into his upcoming Dixon Place show, THIRTYNOTHING

East Fourth St. between Bowery & Second Ave.
Saturday, September 24, free, 1:00 – 5:00
www.fabnyc.org

The FAB! Festival, sponsored by the nonprofit Fourth Arts Block, which supports arts and culture in the East Village, features a host of free live performances, site-specific installations, arts and crafts booths, film screenings, theater previews, yoga classes, writing workshops, and food vendors this afternoon from 1:00 to 5:00 on East Fourth St. between Bowery & Second Ave. Among the highlights are a double feature of Celia Rowlson-Hall’s Three of a Feather, a short film with choreography by Monica Bill Barnes, and Marc Kirsch’s TenduTV; WOW! Wow Cabaret with JZ Bich, Micia Mosely, and Kim Howard; dance presentations by Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Theater, Classical Contemporary Ballet Theatre, Suzanne Beahrs and Dancers, Theater in Asylum (Frankenstein), Sobers & Godley (The Lesser of Two Sobers & Godley), Maia Ramnath and Constellation Moving Company, Li Chiao-Ping Dance, JT Lotus Dance Company Beyond, Rod Rodgers Dance Company, and others; cabaret and poetry from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Dixon Place, the New York Neo-Futurists, La MaMa E.T.C., and Judith Malina’s Living Theater, including a sneak peek at Dan Fischback’s thirtynothing; and much, much more.

DUMBO ARTS FESTIVAL

Sean Boggs’s “Blue Monster” is among the many multimedia projects at this year’s DUMBO Arts Festival

Multiple venues in DUMBO
September 23-25, free
www.dumboartsfestival.com

The fifteenth annual DUMBO Arts Festival begins today, kicking off a weekend of live performances, art exhibitions, site-specific projections and installations, and just about anything else you can think of inside and outside of the thriving neighborhood Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Such locations as St. Ann’s Warehouse, Tobacco Warehouse, Smack Mellon, Superfine, and Brooklyn Bridge Park will host Tajna Tanovic, the Great Small Works Procession, the Jack Grace Band, a panel discussion on immersive surfaces, the White Wave Dance Company, the “Runaway Cape-Cart,” Janet Biggs’s “Wet Exit” multimedia presentation on the East River, “Kafkaesque Hammock,” the “Samsara” scroll, arm wrestling, a Mobile Tea Garden, “The Dumpster Project,” a series of virtual pavilions, Sean Boggs’s “Blue Monster,” the Fisher Ensemble’s Kocho, a steel cage Battle Royal, “Foop,” Carl Skelton and Luke DuBois’s interactive “Sweet Stream Love’s River,” readings by Sapphire and Samantha Thornhill, Bubby’s Pie Social, the newly moved and reopened Jane’s Carousel, and art projects just about everywhere you look, in stores, on street corners, in lobbies, and up in the sky.

CELEBRATE MEXICO NOW

Botellita de Jerez will rock out at SOB’s as part of annual celebration of Mexican art and culture

Multiple venues
September 21 – October 1
www.mexiconowfestival.org

The eighth annual Celebrate México Now festival celebrating Mexican culture begins tonight with the free panel discussion “México se escribe con J: A Celebration of Gay Culture in Mexico” at NYU’s King Juan Carlos 1 of Spain Center, with Nayar Rivera, Michael Schuessler, Alejandro Varderi, and Earl Dax talking about “The Famous 41” and other issues of sexual orientation in Mexico, and continues through October 1 with dance, music, theater, art, films, food, and parties. Anthology Film Archives will screen “Gen Mex: Recent Films from México,” the Queens Museum of Art will host the Trajinera Xochitl Project and the multimedia theatrical presentation “Hecho en Mexico: Estreno Nacional,” Mexican electronica band Sweet Electra will play the Church of All Nations, chef Daniel Ovadía will prepare special dishes for the panel demonstration “History and Traditions of Mexican Gastronomy” (yes, the audience will get to sample his food), Botellita de Jerez will rock out at SOB’s, the collective Rey Trueno will perform the multimedia Radio Soap Opera at the Bowery Poetry Club, and the folkloric Pasatono Orchestra will play a free show at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center and a ticketed show at Casa Mezcal.