Each week about fifty New Yorker cartoonists submit ten ideas, yielding five hundred cartoons for no more than twenty spots in the magazine. Arguably the most brilliant single-panel-gag cartoonists in the world create a bunch of cartoons every week that never see the light of day. These rejects were piling up in the dusty corners of studios all over the country. Sam Gross, who has been contributing since 1962, has more than 12,000 rejected cartoons. (Seriously. He's been numbering every single cartoon he's ever submitted to The New Yorker since the very beginning.) Enter editor Matthew Diffee. He tapped his fellow cartoonists, asking them to rescue these hilarious lost gems. From the artists' stacks of all-time favorite rejects, Diffee handpicked the standouts -- the cream of the crap -- and created The Rejection Collection, a place where good ideas go when they die. Too risqué, silly, or weird for The New Yorker, the cartoons in this book offer something no other collection has: They have never been seen in print until now. With a foreword by New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff that explains the sound judgment, respectability, and scruples not found anywhere in these pages, and handwritten questionnaires that introduce the quirky character of each artist, The Rejection Collection will appeal to fans of The New Yorker...and to anyone with a slightly sick sense of humor.

It’s the best of the worst: 293 of the funniest cartoons rejected by The New Yorker but luckily for us, now in paperback and available to enjoy. The Rejection Collection brings together some of The New Yorker’s brightest talents—Roz Chast, Gahan Wilson, Sam Gross, Jack Zeigler, David Sipress, and more—and reveals their other side. Their dark side. Their juvenile side. Their sick side. Their naughty side. Their outrageous side. And what a treat. Ventriloquist dummy cartoons. Operating room cartoons. Bring your daughter to work day cartoons (the stripper, the prison guard on death row). Lots of couples in bed, quite a few coffins, wise-cracking animals—an obsessive’s plumbing of the weird, the scary, the off-the-wall, and done so without restraint. Every week The New Yorker receives 500 cartoon submissions, and rejects a great majority—mostly, of course, for not being funny enough. There’s no question why these were rejected, and it’s not for lack of laughs. One can almost hear Eustace Tilley sniffing, We are not amused.

A bright young comic talent presents 18 bitterly funny--and frighteningly universal--tales of rejection, humiliation, and misfortune.

"Contains Diffee's funniest [New Yorker] drawings and writings from the past decade as well as all-new cartoons and sketches organized into categories that will appeal to smart attractive people in all walks of life, based on profession and circumstance."--Amazon.com.

Shapiro presents a colorful panoply of rejection letters--many from famous people including A-Rod, Jimi Hendrix, and Andy Warhol--that when taken together offer humor, insight, and the comfort of shared experience.

"Since he was a graduate student in the early 1980's, Arthur Gonzalez, an American artist, saved his rejection letters after making them into cathartic art by retaliating with reactionary drawings. With tongue in cheek, the results are often humorous, ironic and cynical. The ability to stay upright once rejection hits, marks the longevity of a career. This book is a chronicling of such an endeavor"--P. 1.

It’s no secret that most New Yorker readers flip through the magazine to look at the cartoons before they ever lay eyes on a word of the text. But what isn’t generally known is that over the decades a growing cadre of women artists have contributed to the witty, memorable cartoons that readers look forward to each week. Now Liza Donnelly, herself a renowned cartoonist with the New Yorker for more than twenty years, has written this wonderful, in-depth celebration of women cartoonists who have graced the pages of the famous magazine from the Roaring Twenties to the present day. An anthology of funny, poignant, and entertaining cartoons, biographical sketches, and social history all in one, VeryFunny Ladies offers a unique slant on 20th-century and early 21st-century America through the humorous perspectives of the talented women who have captured in pictures and captions many of the key social issues of their time. As someone who understands firsthand the cartoonist’s art, Donnelly is in a position to offer distinctive insights on the creative process, the relationships between artists and editors, what it means to be a female cartoonist, and the personalities of the other New Yorker women cartoonists, whom she has known over the years. Very Funny Ladies reveals never-before-published material from The New Yorker archives, including correspondence from Harold Ross, Katharine White, and many others. This book is history of the women of the past who drew cartoons and a celebration of the recent explosion of new talent from cartoonists who are women. Donnelly interviewed many of the living female cartoonists and some of their male counterparts: Roz Chast, Liana Finck, Amy Hwang, Victoria Roberts, Sam Gross, Lee Lorenz, Michael Maslin, Frank Modell, Bob Weber, as well as editors and writers such as David Remnick, Roger Angell, Lee Lorenz, Harriet Walden (legendary editor Harold Ross’s secretary). The New Yorker Senior Editor David Remnick and Cartoon Editor Emma Allen contributed an insightful foreword. Combining a wealth of information with an engaging and charming narrative, plus more than seventy cartoons, along with photographs and self-portraits of the cartoonists, Very Funny Ladies beautifully portrays the art and contributions of the brilliant female cartoonists in America’s greatest magazine.

ONE OF TIME'S 10 BEST FICTION BOOKS OF 2020. Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, Bustle, Good Housekeeping, the New York Public Library, Library Journal, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and Tor.com "As enchanting as fairy tales, as mysterious as dreams, these exquisitely composed fictions are as urgent and original as any being written today.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction An urgent and unsettling collection of women on the verge from Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Laura van den Berg’s first story collection since her prizewinning book The Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories that linger in the mouth and the mind. Both timeless and urgent, these eleven stories confront misogyny, violence, and the impossible economics of America with van den Berg’s trademark spiky humor and surreal eye. Moving from the peculiarities of Florida to liminal spaces of travel in Mexico City, Sicily, and Iceland, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is uncannily attuned to our current moment, and to the fears we reveal to no one but ourselves. In “Lizards,” a man mutes his wife’s anxieties by giving her a LaCroix-like seltzer laced with sedatives. In the title story, a woman poses as her more successful sister during a botched Italian holiday, a choice that brings about strange and destructive consequences, while in “Karolina,” a woman discovers her prickly ex-sister-in-law in the aftermath of an earthquake and is forced to face the truth about her violent brother. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears presents a collection of women on the verge, trying to grasp what’s left of life: grieving, divorced, and hyperaware, searching, vulnerable, and unhinged, they exist in a world that deviates from our own only when you look too closely. With remarkable control and transcendent talent, van den Berg dissolves, in the words of the narrator of “Slumberland,” “that border between magic and annihilation,” and further establishes herself as a defining fiction writer of our time.

It’s the best of the worst: 293 of the funniest cartoons rejected by The New Yorker but luckily for us, now in paperback and available to enjoy. The Rejection Collection brings together some of The New Yorker’s brightest talents—Roz Chast, Gahan Wilson, Sam Gross, Jack Zeigler, David Sipress, and more—and reveals their other side. Their dark side. Their juvenile side. Their sick side. Their naughty side. Their outrageous side. And what a treat. Ventriloquist dummy cartoons. Operating room cartoons. Bring your daughter to work day cartoons (the stripper, the prison guard on death row). Lots of couples in bed, quite a few coffins, wise-cracking animals—an obsessive’s plumbing of the weird, the scary, the off-the-wall, and done so without restraint. Every week The New Yorker receives 500 cartoon submissions, and rejects a great majority—mostly, of course, for not being funny enough. There’s no question why these were rejected, and it’s not for lack of laughs. One can almost hear Eustace Tilley sniffing, We are not amused.

This important collection examines peer rejections among children.