The New Yorker Book of True Love Cartoons

Meeting. Wooing. Dating. Mating. Wanting sex. Having sex. Regretting sex. Recovering from sex. Talking. Not talking. Proposing. Refusing. Marrying. Unmarrying. Remarrying . . . Here is the dance of true love captured at all its most outrageously funny moments–the graceful and the awkward, the blissful and the tormented.

Here is meeting made easy at the “Mate Mart,” Rilke as an aphrodisiac, and marriage as a daunting threshold (“And do you, Rebecca, promise to make love only to Richard, month after month, year after year, and decade after decade, until one of you is dead?”).

Here is love between all sorts: children too young to know and adults old enough to know better. Between a vampire and a lady (“I think I can change him”), Narcissus and himself, women and their past paramours, men and their current possibilities (“Kathy, I’m updating my files. Do you still love me?”).

Here are pragmatic approaches (“Let’s date to see if we should go out”), rose-colored approaches, no-frills approaches (“Let’s do it, let’s fall in love”), and polite approaches (“Can I trouble you for a sexual favor?”). Here are the inimitably illuminating approaches to love from all the masterNew Yorkercartoonists from James Thurber to Robert Mankoff, from Peter Arno to Roz Chast, from Charles Addams to Victoria Roberts.

The agony and the ecstasy of love (well, maybe a little more of the agony) are here hilariously revealed!