Baking With Kafka

In his inimitable style, British cartoonist Tom Gauld has opened comics to a crossover audience and challenged perceptions of what the medium can be. Noted as a “book-lover’s cartoonist,” Gauld’s weekly strips in The Guardian, Britain’s most well-regarded newspaper, stitch together the worlds of literary criticism and pop culture to create brilliantly executed, concise comics. Simultaneously silly and serious, Gauld adds an undeniable lightness to traditionally highbrow themes. From sarcastic panels about the health hazards of being a best-selling writer to a list of magical items for fantasy writers (such as the Amulet of Attraction, which summons mainstream acceptance, Hollywood money, and fresh coffee), Gauld’s cartoons are timely and droll—his trademark British humour, impeccable timing, and distinctive visual style sets him apart from the rest. Lauded both for his frequent contributions to New Scientist, The Guardian and The New York Times, and his Eisner-nominated graphic novels, Tom Gauld is one of the most celebrated cartoonists working today. In Baking with Kafka, he proves this with one witty, sly, ridiculous comic after another.

New York Times Magazine cartoonist Tom Gauld follows up his widely praised graphic novel Goliath with You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, a collection of cartoons made for The Guardian. Over the past eight years, Gauld has produced a weekly cartoon for the Saturday Review section of Britain’s most well regarded newspaper. Only a handful of comics from this huge and hilarious body of work have ever been printed in North America – exclusively within the pages of the prestigious Believer magazine. You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack distils perfectly Gauld’s dark humor, impeccable timing, and distinctive style. Arrests by the fiction police and fictional towns designed by Tom Waits intermingle hilariously with piercing observations about human behavior and whimsical imaginings of the future. Again and again, Tom Gauld reaffirms his position as a first rank cartoonist, creating work infused with a deep understanding of both literary and cartoon history.

Since the 2011 release of Goliath, Tom Gauld has solidified himself as one of the world’s most revered and critically-acclaimed cartoonists working today. From his weekly strips in the Guardian and New Scientist, to his lauded graphic novels You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack and Mooncop, Gauld’s fascination with the intersection between history, literary criticism, and pop culture has become the crux of his work. Now in paperback, with a new cover and smaller size, Goliath is a retelling of the classic myth, this time from Goliath's side of the Valley of Elah. Goliath of Gath isn't much of a fighter. He would pick admin work over patrolling in a heartbeat, to say nothing of his distaste for engaging in combat. Nonetheless, at the behest of the king, he finds himself issuing a twice-daily challenge to the Israelites: "Choose a man. Let him come to me that we may fight." Quiet moments in Goliath's life as an isolated soldier are accentuated by Gauld's trademark drawing style: minimalist scenery, geometric humans, and densely crosshatched detail. Simultaneously tragic and bleakly funny, Goliath displays a sensitive wit and a bold line--a traditional narrative reworked, remade, and revolutionized into a classic tale of Gauld’s very own.

Tom Gauld returns with his wittiest and most trenchant collection of literary cartoons to date. Perfectly composed drawings are punctuated with the artist’s signature brand of humour, hitting high and low. After all, Gauld is just as comfortable taking jabs at Jane Eyre and Game of Thrones. Some particularly favoured targets include the pretentious procrastinating novelist, the commercial mercenary of the dispassionate editor, the willful obscurantism of the vainglorious poet. Quake in the presence of the stack of bedside books as it grows taller! Gnash your teeth at the ever-moving deadline that the writer never meets! Quail before the critic’s incisive dissection of the manuscript! And most importantly, seethe with envy at the paragon of creative productivity! Revenge of the Librarians contains even more murders, drubbings, and castigations than The Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, Baking For Kafka, or any other collections of mordant scribblings by the inimitably excellent Gauld.

'Tom Gauld is always funny, but he's funny in a way that makes you feel smarter. Which is especially useful when he's being funny about science' Neil GaimanA dog philosopher questions what it really means to be a 'good boy'. A virtual assistant and a robot-cleaner elope. The undiscovered species and the theoretical particle face existential despair.Just as he did with writers, poets and literary classics in Baking with Kafka, Gauld now does with hapless scientists, nanobots, and puzzling theorems - with comic strips funny enough to engage science boffins and novices alike.

The Guardian cartoonist relates the daily deadpan adventures of the last policeman living on the moon "Living on the moon...Whatever were we thinking? ...It seems so silly now.” The lunar colony is slowly winding down, like a small town circumvented by a new super highway. As our hero, the Mooncop, makes his daily rounds, his beat grows ever smaller, the population dwindles. A young girl runs away, a dog breaks off his leash, an automaton wanders off from the Museum of the Moon. Each day that the Mooncop goes to work, life gets a little quieter and a little lonelier. As in Goliath, Tom Gauld’s retelling of the Bible story, the focus in Gauld's science fiction is personal—no big explosions or grand reveals, just the incremental dissolution of an abandoned project and a person’s slow awakening to his own uselessness. Depicted in the distinctive, matter-of-fact style of his beloved Guardian strips, Mooncop is equal parts funny and melancholy. Gauld captures essential truths about humanity, making this a story of the past, present, and future, all in one.

A windfall for every reader: a trove of marvelous impossible-to-find Kafka stories in a masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades and two of them have never been translated into English before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages). “Franz Kafka is the master of the literary fragment,” as Stach comments in his afterword: "In no other European author does the proportion of completed and published works loom quite so...small in the overall mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off beginnings.” In fact, as Hofmann recently added: “‘Finished' seems to me, in the context of Kafka, a dubious or ironic condition, anyway. The more finished, the less finished. The less finished, the more finished. Gregor Samsa’s sister Grete getting up to stretch in the streetcar. What kind of an ending is that?! There’s perhaps some distinction to be made between ‘finished' and ‘ended.' Everything continues to vibrate or unsettle, anyway. Reiner Stach points out that none of the three novels were ‘completed.' Some pieces break off, or are concluded, or stop—it doesn’t matter!—after two hundred pages, some after two lines. The gusto, the friendliness, the wit with which Kafka launches himself into these things is astonishing.”

Fifty postcards from The Guardian, by Britain’s most well regarded cartoonist Tom Gauld (Mooncop, You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, Goliath) has created countless iconic strips for The Guardian over the course of his illustrious career. A master of condensing grand, highbrow themes into one- to eight-panel comics, his weekly strips embody his trademark British humor while simultaneously opening comics to an audience unfamiliar with the artistry that cartooning has to offer. Funny but serious, these postcards allow Gauld to put his impressive knowledge of history, literature, and pop culture on full display—his impeccable timing and distinctive visual style setting him apart from the rest. This postcard set celebrates more than a decade of Gauld’s contributions to The Guardian, with fifty of his most beloved strips, on everything from Samuel Beckett’s sitcom pitches (such as Waiting for Kramer: a show where two men await the arrival of a man named Kramer who never comes), “Procrastination for Creative Writers, a 10-Week Course,” and “Poetry Anthologies for People Who Don’t Like Poems.” Witty and beautifully drawn, The Snooty Bookshop will make you chuckle at least fifty times, guaranteed.