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What follows are two exclusive excerpts of In the Shadow of No Towers, a new graphic novel by Art Spiegelman. The oversized volume traces the author's frightening day on Sept. 11, 2001 (he and his family live blocks from the World Trade Center site), invoking the style and characters of classic cartoons as solace. ''Disaster is my muse,'' says Spiegelman, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for Maus, a similarly unsettling comic book about his father's experience in the Holocaust.
In the first excerpt, Spiegelman assumes his rodent alter ego (à la Maus) to compare Lower Manhattan's air quality to that surrounding WWII-era concentration camps. In the second, he and wife Francoise Mouly (art editor of The New Yorker) race away from the burning towers with their daughter, Nadja, only to realize how rooted their life in New York really is.
