Meta Maus

So when I was searching the great wide interwebs looking for interesting links about Maus and Art Spiegelman, I ran across the Steven Barcley Agency website’s biography of Art Spiegelman. More interesting  than the (very standard) biography is the link in the right-hand column which lists Spiegelman’s works and has a picture of a book called Meta Maus. Indie Bound and Amazon both list it as coming out in October of 2011, but interestingly, on both sites there is no product description explaining what this book is: another sequel in the series? Something entirely new? Something entirely unrelated?

As it turns out, the book is going to be “like the Criterion DVD [of Maus I and II] that has [Spiegelman’s] notebooks, [his] sketches, rough drafts, interviews, transcripts, photos, historical references made into a work that can sit next to Maus.” I found this description of the book in an online interview with Art Spiegelman, conducted by Rebecca Milzoff. Personally, I’m very excited for this collection to come out as I’m interested to see how Spiegelman organizes or narrates the material. The books are already highly saturated with metamoments so having all of this outside information will make for another of layer of meta in which the author is telling us about being the author who is telling us about being told his father’s story of the Holocaust. Anyways, the rest of the interview is pretty entertaining as well, especially Spiegelman’s take on therapy as vomiting, and how he does not consider his work therapeutic.

Oh, and one last thing that probably won’t apply to many of you, but if you happen to read Portuguese, I found this Portuguese language edition of the book online. I just think it’s funny because on page 41 he’s talking about how the 15 foreign editions of the book like it’s a bad thing and here’s one of them.

4 thoughts on “Meta Maus”

  1. Right you are! I guess a lot of the words just look very similar. It wasn’t very hard for me to comprehend (though it does help that I already know what it says).

  2. Meta Maus will be a book about the making of Maus by art spiegelman. It won’t be “another sequel”. There never was a sequel in the first place. Maus II is only the second volume of one book, not a sequel (as should be obvious to those who’ve read it).

    1. By sequel I simply meant “The ensuing narrative, discourse, etc.; the following or remaining part of a narrative, etc.; that which follows as a continuation; esp. a literary work that, although complete in itself, forms a continuation of a preceding one” (“Sequel,” def. 7, OED). I apologize if you found this a poor choice of wording.

Comments are closed.