After 15 years of designing more than 1,500 book jackets at Knopf for such authors as Anne Rice and Michael Chrichton, Kidd has crafted an affecting an entertaining novel set at a state university in the late 1950s that is both slap-happily funny and heartbreakingly sad. The Cheese Monkeys is a college novel that takes place over a tightly written two semesters. The book is set in the late 1950s at State U, where the young narrator, has decided to major in art, much to his parents’ dismay. It is an autobiographical, coming-of-age novel which tells universally appealing stories of maturity, finding a calling in life, and being inspired by a loving, demanding, and highly eccentric teacher. “Kidd’s book is at once quotably quippy…and unmistakably melancholy.” - San Francisco Chronicle “Kidd’s funhouse designs never fail to thrill. The same could be said of this unexpected, terrific novel by the designer himself…. It’s a pleasure to find that Kidd’s writing is as meticulous and energized as his book jackets; still more a pleasure to discover in Kidd an irresistible comic voice that sounds so modern, and so right, even as it re-creates the undergraduate life of the late 1950s….THE CHEESE MONKEYS is, we realize, a manifesto for design itself. But it’s more, too, thanks to Kidd’s knack for disarmingly left-field observations….Like the provocative Sorbeck, Kidd, in this comic gem, teaches us a thing or two about how to look at the world.” - Los Angeles Times After 15 years of designing more than 1,500 book jackets at Knopf for such authors as Anne Rice and Michael Chrichton, Kidd has crafted an affecting an entertaining novel set at a state university in the late 1950s that is both slap-happily funny and heartbreakingly sad. The Cheese Monkeys is a college novel that takes place over a tightly written two semesters. The book is set in the late 1950s at State U, where the young narrator, has decided to major in art, much to his parents’ dismay. It is an autobiographical, coming-of-age novel which tells universally appealing stories of maturity, finding a calling in life, and being inspired by a loving, demanding, and highly eccentric teacher. Chip Kidd was born in Reading, PA in 1964. He lives in New York City and Stonington, CT. The Cheese Monkeys A Novel In Two Semesters By Chip Kidd HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2008 Chip Kidd All right reserved. ISBN: 9780061452482 Chapter One Registration During which we construct our course of study. "So, what are you taking?" At that point I could have said a lot of things -- I could have said, "If I don't get the classes I need after waiting five hours in this line, I am taking that clipboard out of your sausage-fingered hands, breaking it into ten thick splinters, and slowly introducing each one of them beneath your cuticles as a way of saying Thanks for herding us like a flock of three thousand Guatemalan dirt pigs into a ventilation-free hall built for three hundred in order to ask us questions we've already answered so many times our minds are jelly and our jaws squeak -- an act which has to be covered somewhere in the Bible as punishable by any manner we, in His righteous stead, see fit." But I didn't. I mumbled for the umpteenth time that yearlong day of that first awful month, my tongue thick with shame, "Me? Art." *** Majoring in Art at the state university appealed to me because I have always hated Art, and I had a hunch if any school would treat the subject with the proper disdain, it would be one that was run by the government. Of course I was right. My suspicions were confirmed the minute I entered the Visual Arts building on arrival my freshmen year and took in the faculty show in its gallery. I beheld: melting lop-sided Umbrian? hillsides, nudes run over by the Cubist Express, suburban-surrealist flower ladies going about their daily tasks weeping blood tears the size of water balloons, and kittens. Yes, kittens. I thought, "Now these people hate Art a lot . This is where I belong. Perfect." So what did I like? Well, that spring of senior year at Upper Wissahicken High I was quite pleased with a drawing in green pencil I did on the margin of a page in my dreary Civics textbook of Mickey Mouse (from the Steamboat Willy era when he really looked like something you'd set out a trap for and cross your fingers) ritually eviscerating Olive Oyl with an oyster fork, because it marked the first time I finally got the proportion of his eyes to his mouth and nose absolutely right without any reference material. I was also rather partial to the scoreboard I'd Made in April out of aubergine sequins and six shirt cardboards for Skizzy Bickfield's Wingless Fly Races. Even then I knew these sorts of things and the many others like them were NOT Art. They were too much fun. Real artists -- the ones I'd read about, anyway -- lopped off their ears and starved themselves, twitching with demented fits in drafty attics of unredeemed