Post­ed by Alyssa Berlin

There are very few books that I have read more than once. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is one of the few that I have want­ed to pick up again and again. Every time I’ve gone back to it, either to ref­er­ence for school or as a per­son­al refresh­er, I’ve found myself sit­ting for hours on end reread­ing the entire book from begin­ning to end.

This sum­mer marks the 25th anniver­sary of Maus, which, for those who don’t know, is a graph­ic nov­el that rev­o­lu­tion­ized the way peo­ple thought and read about the Holo­caust. It has graced our book­shelves for a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry, and has impact­ed many of our lives.

In Octo­ber, Art Spiegel­man will pub­lish Meta­Maus, which will take read­ers on a jour­ney inside the mod­ern clas­sic. Meta­Maus describes Spiegelman’s thought process behind Maus, his fail­ures and suc­cess­es, and gets to the bot­tom of why exact­ly he chose to pub­lish his father’s sto­ry as a graph­ic nov­el. Each page is more beau­ti­ful than the next , with pic­tures of his orig­i­nal sketch­es, fam­i­ly pho­tos and memen­tos from the whole process. Includ­ed with the book is a hyper linked DVD of Maus with an in-depth archive of audio inter­views with his father, pho­tos, note­books, draw­ings, essays and more which add even more to the rich­ness of this book.

The book comes out on Octo­ber 4th, so if you have a chance pick it up, I promise that you’ll find your­self as engrossed in it as your were in Maus.