Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0671035576, Hardcover)

Welcome to The New Yorker Book of Literary Cartoons, a timeless tribute to the peerless power of the literary landscape. In 104 drawings, each of them certified by experts to be worth a thousand words (and some of them quite amusing), the essence of reading, writing, publishing, and shelving books is explored in all its glory and absurdity, from the stunning and sublime to the purple and pretentious. Here is Emma Bovary shrugging off those pesky bouts with existential boredom (on the tennis court), Dickens' fateful encounter with a martini (olive or twist?), and T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" thoughtfully rewritten for the Beavis and Butt-Head market ("April sucks"). Here is a long-awaited and wholly unprecedented comic takedown of that loftiest of all cultural arenas, the world of belles lettres. It is a world where books stamped with promises from Oprah stand alongside others arranged by the attention span they require, a world where the Bible can now be found in the self-help section. Here, finally, are dead-on portraits and eye-opening ruminations on all things bookish, writerly, and readerly, courtesy of The New Yorker's renowned stable of cartoonists, from Charles Barsotti to Roz Chast, Ed Koren to J.B. Handelsman, and Jack Ziegler to Victoria Roberts. In the bestselling tradition of such classics as The New Yorker Book of Lawyer Cartoons and The New Yorker Book of Cat Cartoons -- THE NEW YORKER BOOK OF LITERARY CARTOONS is manna straight from bookworm heaven.