What I Hate: From A to Z

by Roz Chast

Overview

A hilarious illustrated compendium of pet peeves and personal nightmares from the beloved New Yorker cartoonist and New York Times bestselling author of Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? and Going into Town.

The pages of the New Yorker are hallowed ground for cartoonists, and for the last thirty years, Roz Chast has helped set the magazine's cartooning standard, while creating work that is unmistakably her own- characterized by her shaggy lines, an ecstatic way with words, and her characters' histrionic masks of urban and suburban anxiety, bedragglement, and elation.

What I Hate is an A to Z of epic horrors and daily unpleasantries, including but by no means limited to rabies, abduction, tunnels, and the triple-layered terror of Jell-O 1-2-3. With never-before-published, full-page cartoons for every letter, and supplemental text to make sure the proper fear is instilled in every heart, Chast's alphabetical compendium will resonate with anyone well-versed in the art of avoidance- and make an instructive gift for anyone who might be approaching life with unhealthy unconcern.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608196890
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	10/18/2011
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	7.60(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Roz Chast grew up in Brooklyn. Her cartoons began appearing in the New Yorker in 1978. Since then, she has published more than one thousand cartoons in the magazine. She has written and illustrated many books, including What I Hate: From A to Z, and the collections of her own cartoons The Party After You Left and Theories of Everything. She is the editor of The Best American Comics 2016 and the illustrator of Calvin Trillin's No Fair! No Fair! and Daniel Menaker's The African Svelte, all published in Fall 2016.

Editorial Reviews

The wacky world Roz Chast has created in her cartoons is a parallel universe to ours, utterly recognizable in all its banalities and weirdnesses, but slightly askew...” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“The magazine's only certifiable genius.” —David Remnick, about Roz Chast at the New Yorker

“The wryest pen since Dorothy Parker.” —O magazine, about Roz Chast

“Where would we be without Roz Chast? . . . Chast's magnificent career-spanning collection . . . highlights her position as master of the deep interior, of the obsessions, the baseless fears and the weird proverbs to which we cling in our desperation not to leave the house.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times on THEORIES OF EVERYTHING

From the Publisher

BelovedNew Yorkercartoonist shares an alphabetized listing of life's little irritants.

Veteran illustrator and humorist Chast (Too Busy Marco, 2010, etc.) has crafted a colorful career from parodying unsavory situations and maladies alongside the happenstances of the human condition. To truly enjoy her nimble pen and watercolor sketches, readers must be willing to laugh at their own harmless foibles. In the charming introduction, the author admits to being a life-long "anxious person," a chronic insomniac who is "genetically inclined to worry," and she brilliantly plays this personal shortcoming to maximum comical effect with the jagged line-drawing style and ironical wit that have become her trademarks. From the unsettling possibility of waking up during general anesthesia to the offbeat catastrophes of "Jell-O 1-2-3" and spontaneous human combustion, the author presents an A-to-Z catalog of distressing concerns and her unique take on "what might funny about them." Chast prefaces each pictorial with a short, personal preamble describing what it is about each subject that has become so bothersome for the apprehensive author. She lightheartedly exposes the inconvenient nuisance of nightmares and beach undertows, the unknown consequences of Ouija boards and the wincing "imminent explosion" of annoying balloons. Chast doesn't have much use for assumptive doctors, quicksand or carnivals, either (they're "particularly awful at night"). Her takes on vision loss ("the girl who sat too close to the TV"), "mysterious" dental tools and the dark sides of the color yellow are sure to elicit knowing chuckles. With realistic, tongue-in-cheek foresight, the author spotlights a selection of the most commonplace, phobia-inducing situations (elevators, air travel, heights, etc.) and defuses them with brilliantly dry, flippant humor.

A hilarious, collectively appealing index of words and pictures drawn with wry exuberance and a head-nodding relevancy.

Kirkus Reviews