‘The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust’ Wall Street Journal
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It is hard to overstate Art Spiegelman’s effect on postwar American culture. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author is one of our most influential contemporary artists, and his masterpiece Maus has shaped the fields of literature, history, and art. Collecting responses to the work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status, Maus Now is a new collection of essays that sees writers such as Philip Pullman, Robert Storr, Ruth Franklin, and others approaching the complexity of Maus from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions.

Offering translations of important French, Hebrew, and German essays on Maus for the first time, this collection edited by American literary scholar Hillary Chute – an expert on comics and graphic narratives – assembles the world’s best writing on this classic work of graphic testimony.
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‘The first masterpiece in comic book history’ The New Yorker on Maus

‘No summary can do justice to Spiegelman’s narrative skill’ Adam Gopnik on Maus

‘Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect’ Philip Pullman on Maus

‘It wasn’t an extensive library. In fact, it consisted of eight books and some of them were in poor condition. But they were books. In this incredibly dark place, they were a reminder of less sombre times, when words rang out more loudly than machine guns . . .’

Fourteen-year-old Dita is one of the many imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Taken, along with her mother and father, from the Terezín ghetto in Prague, Dita is adjusting to the constant terror that is life in the camp. When Jewish leader Freddy Hirsch asks Dita to take charge of the eight precious books the prisoners have managed to smuggle past the guards, she agrees. And so Dita becomes the secret librarian of Auschwitz, responsible for the safekeeping of the small collection of titles, as well as the ‘living books’ – prisoners of Auschwitz who know certain books so well, they too can be ‘borrowed’ to educate the children in the camp.

But books are extremely dangerous. They make people think. And nowhere are they more dangerous than in Block 31 of Auschwitz, the children’s block, where the slightest transgression can result in execution, no matter how young the transgressor . . .

Based on the incredible and moving true story of Dita Kraus, holocaust survivor and secret librarian for the children’s block in Auschwitz.