Books

We Learn Nothing (Free Press, 2012)

 

"Tim Kreider's writing is heartbreaking, brutal and hilarious-- usually at the same time. He can do in a few pages what I need several hours of screen time and tens of millions to accomplish. And he does it better. Come to think of it, I'd rather not do a blurb. I am beginning to feel bad about myself."

-Judd Apatow

"Tim Kreider may be the most subversive soul in America and his subversions--by turns public and intimate, political and cultural--are just what our weary, mixed-up nation needs. The essays in We Learn Nothing are for anybody who believes it's high time for some answers, damn it."

-Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and The Risk Pool

"Whether he is expressing himself in highly original cartoons that are hilarious visual poems, or in prose that exposes our self-delusions by the way he probes his own experience with candor, Tim Kreider is a writer-artist who brilliantly understands that every humorist at his best is a liberator. Because he is irreverent, makes us laugh, ruffles the feathers of the pretentious and the pompous, and keeps us honest, We Learn Nothing is a pleasure from its first page to the last."

-Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage and Black Humor

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We Learn Nothing - Tim Kreider 

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Simon & Schuster

"What makes Kreider really interesting as a satirist is that he's the polar opposite of most of our pundits these days... once you go through all of his work you can easily see that his views on politics are drawn not from some corporate team-building instinct but from a hatred of liars and cowards of any kind, which makes him an iconoclast in the purest sense of the word."

-from Matt Taibbi's introduction

"Sometimes vulgar and crude but often insightful, always passionate, Kreider's essays and illustrations offer a voice for a nation seemingly without hope."

-Publisher's Weekly

"Kreider employed a vicious, scorched-earth set of tactics that matched the passionate intensity of the right, only imbued with a wicked and outrageous sense of humor to go with a keen sense of observation. The sheer relentlessness of [his] attacks combined with the elegance and intensity of his line carried a certain punishing quality."

-Rob Clough, The Comics Journal

"Excoriating, withering humour and viciously necessary satire tellingly rendered and savage yet personable and winningly intimate reportage make this one of the best cartoon coshes ever applied to the politics of this century."

-Win Wiacek, "Now Read This"

 

Twilight of the Assholes (Fantagraphics, 2011)

Volume II of the Chronicle of the Era of Darkness (Political cartoons, 2005-2009).

Available at Fantagraphics, Abebooks, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, or Indiebound.

 
Why Do They Kill Me? (Fantagraphics, 2005)

Volume I of the Chronicle of the Era of Darkness (Political cartoons, 2000-2004).

Available at Fantagraphics, Abebooks, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Indiebound

 

"His cartoons are merciless, sparing no one--not even their own horrified, disoriented author. His drawings are inspired, his humor devastating, and his truthfulness almost unbearable. In short, he is to the satirical cartoon what Stanley Kubrick was to cinematic satire--e.g., Dr. Strangelove."

-Mark Crispin Miller
author of Boxed In and
The Bush Dyslexicon


"Less a collection of cartoons, more a searingly angry document of our times... Drawn with the same grotesque savagery as Ralph Steadman, [these cartoons] pull no punches."

-The Ecologist


"Why Do They Kill Me? still isn't anything close to a distillation of the enormous talents of cartoonist Tim Kreider... [His] first book revealed a comentator and critic who was both brilliant and crazy, but crazy in the way we describe people who are audacious enough to lampoon and criticize our cowardly and dishonest social and political figures and governmental leaders."

-Leroy Douresseaux, The Comic Book Bin


"Simply put, he is the most acerbic, nastiest, and (most importantly) funniest political cartoonist alive. His attacks on the Bush administration are surgical strikes, and his venom for the culture that supports it is even more vicious. This is scorched-earth humor at its best, jokes that make the reader laugh out loud while flinching."

-Rob Clough, Sequart.com

 

 
 

The Pain - When Will It End? (Fantagraphics, 2004)

Quite simply the funniest fucking book of cartoons ever published.

Buy at Abebooks, Amazon, Barnes & Noble

 

"I have had the cartoon ''Male Anorexia' on my bathroom mirror for seven months. I cannot floss, shave, or pimple-scan without it. I am it; he is me. Kreider rules, and also has a simply mammoth penis--you'd (almost) have to see it to believe it."

-David Foster Wallace
author of Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Funny Thing I'll Never Do Again

 "Tim Kreider is the unsung hero of contemporary comics. He is funny and crazy and brave enough to proclaim as truths the things the rest of us are too chickenshit to say out loud."

-Myla Goldberg,
author of Bee Season and The False Friend

 "Kreider obsessively dwells upon crucifixion in various scenarios, somewhat suspiciously, as it points to the heart of his work, which seems to be about humanity unable to love, unable to stop destroying each other, though there is a need for love, and there is a certain poetry to human destruction."

-Chris Estey, Bandoppler

"He has a talent for connecting the tiny exasperations of life to the big fucking problems. There are many moments in the book that trigger a feeling of recognition, followed closely by a feeling of hollowness and shame, as in, 'Hey, that's something that might happen to me! Oh...Crap. That's not too good.'"

- Ellen Johnston, "It Never Ends," The Sex Herald

"Kreider's style is in the great scratchy, sensationalized and sick tradition of master satirists Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman. Coarse, crude, confrontational and cool."

- Christopher Arnott, "Kreider's Crass Courage," The New Haven Advocate

"Where other cartoonists 'poke fun at our foibles,' Kreider punctures them with a fisherman's gaffe, hoisting them aloft, gore-streaked and still warm and beating."

-Chris Allen, The Comic Book Galaxy

"He takes evil and shows it as pathetic."

-L.J. Douresseau, The Comic Book Bin


 

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