An enthusiastic love letter to books and bookstores, these cartoons celebrate and critique the literary world through the work of 33 masters, including Sam Gross, Roz Chast, Peter Steiner, Liza Donnelly, Bob Mankoff, and Michael Maslin. Many of the cartoons have appeared in the New Yorker, while others are published here for the first time. Some of these will be especially funny if you are familiar with Ernest Hemingway, Joyce Carol Oates, the Brontë sisters, or Moby-Dick, but all of them have zingers and one-liners worth savoring, including one where an author is informed, "We used your unsold copies to build a tree, but it's not the same."