Richard McGuire

Text and illustrations present such puzzles as a hand that is also the head of a rabbit and dinosaur shadows that are also clowns with big feet. Features some die-cut pages.

The latest work by the distinguished French writer Nathalie Sarraute, Here recreates the frustration of attempting to recall a forgotten word. Just beyond the grasp of memory, the elusive name of a person, a tree, or of a well-known artist is pursued through the dialogues, repetitions, and silences of everyday speech. The struggle to remember brings out the many interpretations and misunderstandings caused by the simplest and most banal of phrases - a theme found throughout Sarraute's work. As in previous books, she explores the minute, almost imperceptible responses to spoken words and thoughts, describing them with a minimum of concrete or social context. Although highly abstract, Here is surprisingly sensual in its analogies: intimidating laughter from the ever-present, threatening crowd is frantically mopped up with a sponge and a bucket of disinfectant; the words of subdued politeness are like low-fat foods lacking in real nourishment; the suggestion of obscure menace is experienced as a whiff of cheap make-up.

The progress of time is illustrated by a sequence of objects and themes, including stream/river/ocean and street/highway/bridge.

"Sequential Drawings gathers together more than a decade of McGuire's witty and endlessly inventive spots--a veritable short story collection--each drawing given its own spread, which, in turn, assures for the reader the experience of surprise and delight that the drawings unfailingly deliver. Richard McGuire's first series of "spot" drawings debuted in the New Yorker in February 2005 for the magazine's 80th anniversary issue. Spot drawings, scattered among the magazine's text, had been a long-running feature of The New Yorker, and over the years, many artists had contributed them. But McGuire was the first to conceive them as a sequence, and his drawings were something altogether new: deceptively simple images that imbued the series with movement and narrative, telling their own unexpected stories"--