(First Edition, with tipped-in Autograph) A new book from New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast ("Wait, didn't she almost get a National Book Award for Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant??" Yes she did, and she actually won a National Book Critics Circle Award and a big Kirkus Prize) is always cause for celebration, and this one is particularly rich and hilarious. For Chast, a Brooklynite who made it to Manhattan, decamping for the suburbs when her kids were small was a surreal experience, while for them, the city's gum-speckled sidewalks, honeycombed streets, and "West-Side-Story-things" (fire escapes) were completely alien. So she wrote a guide to the city for her daughter, who was going there for college, which became this book—a laugh-out-loud portrait of Chast's beloved NYC, the one place on earth where she least feels like she doesn't fit in. Not only does she give us color cartoons on every page, we actually got her to sign the tipped-in autograph pages for these first editions.

"Observations and advice on making one's way through the city's diversions are mixed with the quirky character that oozes from the metropolis's every concrete pore. It's all delivered with obvious and knowing affection and captured with a keenly observant pen."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Those of us who prefer Roz Chast's work to just about any other amalgam of words and pictures since the Egyptian hieroglyphs will not be surprised that her book about New York is a complete delight from first page to last—but all of us may be instructed anew in how much her art depends on her close observation of detail. Everything in the city—from the positive emptiness of the Metropolitan Museum to the ominous emptiness of a subway car—is registered with a discriminating eye for the truth as real as her matchless sense of the wacky."—Adam Gopnik