BEN KATCHOR is the author of The Cardboard Valise, The Jew of New York; Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District; and several works of musical theater with the composer Mark Mulcahy. He teaches at Parsons The New School for Design and has contributed to The New Yorker, The Forward, and Metropolis. The first cartoonist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, he is the subject of the documentary The Pleasures of Urban Decay. He lives in New York.
**Time Magazine's Best Books of the Year 2013**
**NPR's Best Books of the Year 2013**
**The Daily Beast's Best Coffee Table Books of 2013**
“Ben Katchor’s new book (his first in full color and I think also
his best yet), Hand-Drying in America, furthers his reputation as
one of the few geniuses of the form, to say nothing of being one of
the first exemplars of what literary fiction told in comics form
could be.”—Chris Ware
“Reminds me of all the reasons I fell in love with his work 20-odd
years ago… at the heart of all his work is the same intention: to
find, however odd or enigmatic, a moment of real connection in an
increasingly surreal world.” —Los Angeles Times
“The zany world of an inventive and original mind who is endlessly
fascinated by the great city where he lives.” —Metropolis
Magazine
“What ultimately sets Katchor’s work apart from other chroniclers
of the city is his skill with verisimilitude...Katchor’s characters
in Hand-Drying, with their passions, postulations, and crackpot
motives, aren’t merely urban anthropologists: they’re cosmonauts of
wonder and desire, plumbing the tedious and humdrum for meaning,
and awakening readers to the hidden stories that have been under
their feet all along. Katchor’s New York may be alienating to some
of its inhabitants, but Hand-Drying in America is a world for all
of us to enjoy.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“The four-year collection of a visionary polymath’s cartoons about
urban living… Katchor’s wry humor and unique view on the subject
are well worth exploring.” —Kirkus
“Katchor is an urban visionary, building his stories brick by brick
from the detritus of the metropolis…He's a poet of the gone world,
which lingers, like the vacant offices of the Daily Hubris, whether
we notice it or not. His is an aesthetic of ephemera but an
ephemera that transcends itself, in which loss leads to wonder and
then, inevitably, back to loss.” —Los Angeles Times
“As one of our greatest architecturally minded cartoonists, Katchor
is a master at assessing not only the massive skyline but also the
smallest detail, right down to the line on a mass-produced coffee
cup logo. Little misses his critical civic gaze… [Hand-Drying in
America is a] big and beautiful new graphic book… In Katchor’s
corporate chainscape, urban architecture becomes like piped-in and
peddled smooth jazz—designed to be agreeable, but repellent to the
lover of rough edges and raw, original roots. Katchor has been
building his brilliant refracted-satire worlds for decades, with
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer through to The Cardboard
Valise (and earning praise from Building Stories graphic novelist
Chris Ware and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon). The
colorful universe of urban decay and dissipation in Hand-Drying
feels entirely of a piece with those earlier works. It blends his
scratched lines with deviously precise language that careers from
mimicry and mockery to moments of reverent poetry. For all his
cutting remarks, Katchor clearly loves the resilient soul of a
city.” —The Washington Post
“Katchor’s humor relies on cities for its strength: their grime,
their dishonest denizens, and their beautiful decay seem to feed
his imagination. This book hits its target in just about every
panel…Sadness, whimsy, nostalgia, reflection, concern: These
feelings all float through the frames which, despite the wizened
appearance of their characters, could also be said to be bristling
with energy, nearly in motion…The idea that the universal can be
conveyed through close attention to particulars is a cliché,
perhaps, but seeing it executed well is a rare pleasure. This book
is that execution.” —The Boston Globe
“Sumptuous … Katchor's visual depiction of humans rivals his
prowess with buildings. He's never presented such a vast panoply of
humanity before…Katchor's narratives—which often end as bloodily as
any Edward Gorey fable—meander in a fashion that seems haphazard
but really covers all his desired plot points in the most elegant
and evocative way…the final panel features not a rich cluttered
landscape but the lamenting man against a featureless white
expanse. This is Katchor's concept of the ultimate dystopia, a
sterile, featureless white room devoid of any human design. But so
long as he continues to create his art—‘These fragments I have
shored against my ruins,’ as Eliot said—then humanity is saved from
such a fate.” —B&N review
“Sublimely caustic…brilliant, darkly magical new collection.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Gorgeous…Katchor’s judiciously sketchy drawings—half art brut,
half blueprint—literate scripts, and comedic imagination make them
the stuff of genius-level cartooning.” —Booklist, starred
review
“Half urban legend and half magic, these stories that seem on the
one hand far-fetched but on the other are one small step away from
being true…Katchor's stories don't feature characters so much as
ideas. This way of writing could get boring awfully quickly—except
that the ideas he presents are so clever and haunted, it's hard to
imagine that ever happening.” —Jewish Book Council
“Ben Katchor, recipient of a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, lampoons our
shallowest preoccupations so skillfully that half the laughs in his
terrific collection, Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories,
come from realizing you've done more or less the same absurd thing
the cartoonist has taken to its logical extreme…It's the sum of
four years' worth of piecework, but it's sharper still than the sum
of its barbed parts.” —Newsday
“A dark, funny, and compelling experience, as engrossing to view as
it is to read…Comparisons to Chris Ware, the other great comics
artist who deals with urban structures and the enervating enclosure
of modern living, seem obvious. Both specialize in architectural
rendering and characters that are ill at ease within their cities.
But against Ware’s exploration of the sterile and alienating
quality of modern technologies Katchor’s work has a pungency and
strange sexual energy applied to the appliances of the late 20th
century. Then there is the quality of Katchor’s humor, a smoked
fish surrealism that gives a vaudevillian undercurrent to even his
bleakest stories…Katchor trains his eye on everything we fail to
notice, the details that are traditionally only props in the
background, not fitting subjects for art. But Katchor’s art is to
take the human endeavor seriously by examining our interactions
with something as mundane as a hand-drying machine. The pathos is
in the appliances and the props become the subjects that reveal us
to ourselves.” —The Daily Beast
“Hand Drying In America is at once a mind-boggling work of
alternate history and a powerful indictment of contemporary
American society, but the stories seem only slightly surreal and
entirely plausible. They're quick parables with the mind-altering
power of smart philosophy wrapped up in goofy stories that glance
down dead-end alleys with a combination of mordant humor and
wistful nostalgia…Katchor's ability to creating elements of the
fantastic that seem almost logical and yet are utterly
mind-boggling is consistently amazing…The sketched, causal feel of
the art combined with a very precise use of colors combine to
establish an everyday urban gestalt. The places you visit feel
real. It's as if Katchor has been to all the parts of whatever city
you live in that your have not managed to visit yet…It is, not
surprisingly, like an artifact from one of the worlds it creates, a
troubling wedge that slides into the bricks of our beliefs and
upsets a balance that we did not know to exist. Read it at your own
risk; watch the walls of your world come tumbling down.”
—Bookotron.com
“Katchor’s vignettes brilliantly satirize human behavior, changing
social values and cities in flux. Perhaps most of all, they
highlight the timeless need for human connection.” —Time Out
Chicago
“Katchor’s forte is nudging a real-life absurdity one or two
notches too far…It’s unsurprising that Katchor’s artwork has a
peculiar, well-entrenched architecture of its own.” —Jewish Daily
Forward
“Brilliant…Katchor's trademark storytelling bends just a little bit
away from our own reality to make us see it more clearly.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Katchor gently interrogates the everyday—the click of a light
switch, say, or the nozzle on a can of shaving cream—and finds
unimagined and uncanny depths within…Elliptical and mysterious but
never abstruse, the picture-poems of Hand-Drying in
Americacelebrate the mundane world around us by revealing it to be
anything but…Hand-Drying in America is a large book, roughly the
size of a tabloid newspaper. Not only does this make it easier to
appreciate Katchor's backgrounds, stuffed as they are with peculiar
signage ("Putti Dental," "Surd," "Cowlick," "ANKLE SOCK"), but it
also encourages us to linger over these pages and the rich, wry and
quietly remarkable worlds they contain.” —NPR.org
“The imaginative snatches of consumer life in the city and abroad
prove to be funny and jarring.” —Time Out New York
“Wonderful…I like Ben Katchor. And I’m fairly certain you will
too.” —Edrants.com
“Smart and perceptive.” —Time Out New York
“Hand-Drying is a marvelous collection of more than 150 strips
Katchor has drawn for Metropolis magazine, inventive and funny
cartoons filled with the trademark old-fashioned characters,
absurdist situations, and unusual city environments that Katchor
has been detailing for several decades…an endlessly entertaining
and extremely funny and insightful look at human nature and our
changing world as only Katchor can depict it.”
—Twi-NY.com
“Fascinating.” —InArkansas.com
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