Hand-Drying In America: And Other Stories

"In his latest collection of comics mini-stories, the creator of the brilliant Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer 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. Ben Katchor sets up an intriguing tension between his rough, riotous, almost impressionistic figures and backgrounds and the voice of his captions, which enumerate salient story points with the dry, implacable plainness of a 1950s plumbing-fixture catalog. Elliptical and mysterious but never abstruse, the picture-poems of Hand-Drying in America celebrate the mundane world around us by revealing it to be anything but."