F

Flavorwire

Art Spiegelman

Books

An Essential Nonfiction Reading List for High School and Beyond

By Emily Temple on

Recently, we took in a fascinating article entitled “What Should Children Read?” over at the Times‘ Opinionator. In it, Sara Mosle briefly outlines elements of the new Common Core State Standards, contentious national curriculum guidelines which will begin to be implemented in public schools in 2014, and takes a look at some of the arguments over the new standards, suggesting that part of the problem is that high school English curriculums are often lacking in good narrative nonfiction that appeals to teenagers. Inspired by this question of what high school kids should be reading, we’ve put together an essential reading list of narrative nonfiction and memoir, from the canonic to the contemporary, that we think would benefit anyone under (and let’s face it, over) the age of 18. Click through to see our picks, and since every high schooler, past or present, should read way more than ten nonfiction books in their lives, be sure to add your own favorites to our list in the comments. … Read More

Comics

What Your Favorite Comic Says About You

By Emily Temple on

Yesterday, at long last, the paperback edition of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes hit stores. As far as we can tell, there is a certain kind of person who really goes gaga for Calvin and Hobbes — the person who as a kid loved to tromp through the forest all day and come home to read on the couch with a fat hot chocolate at night, who maybe saw things a little differently than those pesky grownups — and that got us to thinking. While being into comics already gets you into the first stage of nerdery, the stories the form brings us range from the serious to the goofball, the superhero to the realist, so there’s no real way to lump comic fans all together. So what does your favorite comic (or graphic novel, just to be inclusive) say about you? Find out after the jump — and let us know if we’ve hit the nail on the head or if you’re plotting our demise in the comments. … Read More

Books

10 of the Best Literary Memoirs of All Time

By Emily Temple on

This week saw the release of Paul Auster’s second memoir, Winter Journal, wherein he turns his eye from the portrait of fatherhood he explored in The Invention of Solitude to his mother’s life, and her death, and the ever encroaching inevitability of his own death. Inspired by this new and deeply affecting work by one of our greatest contemporary authors, we started thinking about our favorite literary memoirs, from the contemporary to the classic, those that suck us in and leave us gasping for breath as well or better than any novel. Click through to see the books we chose, and if we’ve missed your own favorite, make a case for it in the comments — we can always use another book to read! … Read More

Art

Famous Artists Pay Homage to Maurice Sendak

By Caroline Stanley on

For such a determined curmudgeon, Maurice Sendak was one popular guy. Case in point, Dangerous Minds just tipped us off to the fact that over the weekend the Sunday Review section of The New York Times featured a lovely visual tribute to beloved children’s author from a group of artists who included … Read More

Comics

Leaping Tall Buildings: Portraits of Masters of American Comics

By Emily Temple on

You may think you know the men and women behind your favorite superheroes, but of course, there’s yet another man behind Clark Kent — his creator. PowerHouse Books’s beautiful new book Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics celebrates one of the essential American art forms with interviews with and portraits of some of the all-time greats of American comics, from Stan Lee to Art Spiegelman, mixing in some newer — but no less phenomenal — faces as well. Click through to see a few elegant, revealing, and whimsical portraits of some of the true giants of American comics that we excerpted from the book, as well as a few choice quotes from their interviews, and if you’re in the neighborhood, be sure to check out the book’s launch event on April 14 at The powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn. … Read More

Art

Of Mice and Politics: Celebrating the Work of Art Spiegelman

By Emily Temple on

We’ve been thinking a lot about Art Spiegelman lately, in part because the comic artist’s first major Paris retrospective recently opened at Centre Pompidou, the city’s biggest modern art museum. The exhibition, entitled Art Spiegelman: Co-Mix, spans the artist’s 45-year career and contains over 400 original cartoons, sketches, book and magazine covers, and other Spiegelman ephemera (check out a few early photos of the exhibit at Angoulême, where it originated, here). Though Spiegelman is perhaps best known for Maus, his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir, he’s also created countless covers for The New Yorker, where he worked for ten years, founded the famous underground comics magazine RAW with his wife Françoise Mouly, and had his hand in hundreds of other projects. We’ve been fans of the cartoonist since we were kids, so we decided to take the opportunity to do our own totally incomplete, biased mini-retrospective of some of the artist’s illustrations and projects. Click through to check out a few images from Spiegelman’s enormous body of work, and if you can’t make it to Paris, have no fear – the exhibition will hit Cologne, Vancouver, and New York in the coming months. … Read More

Books

10 Disturbingly Brilliant Graphic Novels

By Emily Temple on

Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic hits shelves this week, and being huge fans of Spiegelman (and particularly Maus) we couldn’t be more excited. First published twenty-five years ago, Maus has become a modern classic, though it is at times a difficult and disturbing novel. MetaMaus delves into the history of the book with hundreds of pages of answered questions and supporting information and is sure to satiate any fan — at least for a while. If you’re anything like us, you’ll need something to keep your graphic novel kick going when you come up for air, so we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite disturbingly brilliant graphic novels, including the famous Maus. Click through to see our picks, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments. … Read More

Books

A Chronology of R-Rated Animals in Pop Culture

By Chelsea Bauch on

Beyond the big bad wolves of medieval folk tales, animals are mostly appropriated these days for innocent children’s entertainment. From Looney Tunes‘s Bugs Bunny to Ratatouille‘s Remy, fuzzy woodland creatures are now regularly stripped of their primal natures in the name of cuddly, moral-leveraging amusement. But David Sedaris’s Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary — essentially an R-rated answer to Aesop’s Fables — reaffirms that pop culture has had an equally engaged, if somewhat less overt, relationship with animal characters intended for mature audiences. From books to comics, movies to street art, and puppets to paintings, the following artists have created a spectrum of grown-up animal iconography that’s best kept away from young eyes. … Read More

Boldtype

The Birds and the Bees: Our Favorite Animal Point-of-View Fiction

By Adam Wilson on

Last week’s New Yorker featured beloved biologist E.O. Wilson’s “Trailhead,” a short story about ants in flux in the aftermath of their queen’s death. The conceit provides Wilson ample opportunity for desert-dry ant humor — one ant’s entire existence is summed up thusly: “The only thing he had ever done was accept meals regurgitated to him by his sister” — but, for the most part, “Trailhead” walks a fine line between an over-literal take on dirty realism, and a not-quite literary take on a middle-school biology text. Wilson is certainly a genius, and an ant expert — his 1991 book The Antswon the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction — but maybe the switch to fiction isn’t the best idea. However, he’s by no means the first writer to tackle animal POV  in fiction. Here are some other examples, from 8 AD to the present day. … Read More

Boldtype

Check Out San Francisco Panorama, McSweeney’s Newspaper

By Toby Warner on

Forget all this talk about the death of print for a moment. Tomorrow a newspaper launches in San Francisco. Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time-only, Sunday-edition sized newspaper — the San Francisco Panorama. Here’s what it will cover: “It’ll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much… Read More