I wanted to see whether or not this iteration of Carroll's work was a carbon copy or a uniquely new experience. A conversation with Stevens ensued.

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I did a book a couple of decades ago with Marshall Efron and Alfa Betty Olsen, illustrated by Steven Guarnaccia, called Sin City Fables. The cover was Alice going down the subway hole. It made sense at the time. Why is Alice set in 1930s New York in your project?

Sin City Fables looks intriguing, I'll have to hunt out a copy. The reference materials we used for the project were photos of the city from around the 1920s and '30s. I now have a wall here plastered with old photographs of Manhattan. But we weren't religious about representing any particular era, and the New York that Alice explores in the book is more of a dreamy amalgam of a timeless New York.

The reason I picked New York is that (aside from my love of the city) I was looking out across the island from the Empire State Building observation deck last summer, and had a sudden epiphany that Manhattan could be retrofitted onto the original Lewis Carroll book with supernatural accuracy. The chessboard world in Through the Looking Glass found an exact equivalent in the grid-system of the New York City streets. The Red Queen became the Statue of Liberty with very few changes to her character, and locations like Central Park and the subway system matched other key scenes. It was almost like Lewis Carroll had planned it that way.

Tenniel's drawings have been parodied and copied a lot. What makes your Alice in New York unique?

I think the unique part of this book comes from two things: First, the drawings in Alice in New York can be physically moved. Effectively, this is the first time that readers can directly manipulate Tenniel's art from Through the Looking Glass.

Second thing is that, as far as my research has taken me, nobody has ever attempted to take the entire contents of a Wonderland book and transport it entirely to a new location using Tenniel's art—let alone transport it to New York City, far from the Oxford countryside where Carroll wrote the book. Perhaps nobody has dared be so reckless with a classic text. But then Steve Jobs is famous for saying "Good artists borrow. Great artists steal." Although he was quoting Picasso.

It could be because I am from another generation (or planet), but why should people want this iPad application?

Hopefully because, of the current crop on the iPad bookstore, it's the most technically interactive book—it uses particle physics, water simulation, and very advanced modeling of general physics. I worked with the guys who invented this physics simulation stuff, Howling Moon.

From a cultural standpoint, I hope it's an interesting mash-up of classic literature, combined with an iconic world city. It could mean that a new generation will engage with a book that is largely unknown to them. Carroll is overdue a substantial new audience, and I don't think he's being well served by some of the more recent adaptations of his work in Hollywood. Of course Alice in New York is quite a substantial adaptation of the original book, but it does stay extremely faithful to the original dialogue and intention of many key scenes.