"A meditation and a manifesto." Brian Selznick and David Serlin
Lochlann Jain's drawings are playful, wry, charming, and strangely, even a little profound.
Barry Blitt
Pulitzer Prize Winning Cartoonist
Jain, with clever wit, has done the nearly impossible—taken apart the very category of classification. In this masterwork of graphic philosophy, metaphor elides with the literal as the basis of sorting and sense-making. With deft economy of means, Jain manages to take a topic that has puzzled many great minds and make its conundrums and complexities amusing for us all.
Johanna Drucker
Breslauer Professor at UCLA, historian of graphic design and an internationally renowned book artist.
Løchlann Jain elevates the list format into no less than a cabinet of curiosities with juxtapositions that amuse, disgust, inform, and break your heart, maybe all at the same time. You will never look at a hippo or a pair of lips in quite the same way again.
Lisa Brown, New York Times bestselling illustrator, writer, and cartoonist.
Excerpts
Lochlann Jain, Introduction and "What Things Mean."
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Maria McVarish, "Various Things."
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Elizabeth Bradfield, "'Natural' Collections."
Drew Daniel, "Things that What?"
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Related Publications
Jain, L. "Binomial Nomenclature,” drawings published in Public Books, March 2016.
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Jain, L. “Things that Art,” Anthropology and Humanism 43(1), Summer 2018: 6-20.
Jain, L. “Graphic Poesis: Drawing things Together,” Commoning Ethnography, 4(1), Dec. 2021.
Jain, L. “The Lung is a Bird and a Fish,” in Sovereignty Unhinged: An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements, edited by Deborah Thomas and Joseph Masco, Duke University Press, 2022. (essay, original drawings, and book cover illustration).
Reviews
The Sunday Edition, CBC Radio, interview, January 31, 2020: here.
This is Not a Pipe podcast, interview, March 19, 2020. here
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Feature in 4S online, by Yelena Gluzman, “Things Worth Categorizing.”
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Alisse Waterston, "Things and the Company they Keep," Anthropology Now, here.
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Sophie Killip, "Exploring the Nature of Categories: Things that Art," Design Curial,
November 22, 2019, here.
Anne Brackenbury (my editor at UofT Press) interview: here.
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BBC Radio London, Jumoke Fashola, September 29: here.
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Jose Villareal, Art Daily, October 25: here.
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Matthew Reisz interview, The Times Higher Education, October 31: here.
BiteIntoBooks, Review: here.
Linda’s Book Bag, Review: here.
Annabookbel, Review: here.
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This is Lit, Review: here.
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Sara Boorman, NB Magazine, November 28: here.
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Book Brunch, Nicholas Clee, November 11: here.
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