D C-T!

by Joana Avillez, Molly Young

Overview

A joy-inducing illustrated book about New York City in the ingenious style of William Steig's classic CDB!

Just as there are few cities as storied and replete with life as New York City, there are few illustrators or writers who have charmed as many generations as William Steig. To Molly Young and Joana Avillez, a connection between the two seemed obvious, and so D C-T! ("The City!") was born.

Using a playful phonetic language first invented by Steig in his now classic 1968 book CDB!--but which in today's world of text message and internet shorthand feels uncannily contemporary--Young and Avillez tell a different story on each page of this collection of illustrations stuffed to brim with humor and cleverness:

"S L-I-F!" (It's alive!) A boy shouts gleefully at a pile of rubbish seething with rats

"I M B-Z" (I'm busy) Declares the phone-wielding businesswoman to the would-be mugger

"R U I?" (Are you high?) Asks the clerk at a bodega to the blissed out shopper

Brought to life in Avillez's distinctively ebullient and droll style are precocious pets and pet-owners, iconic architecture, and startlingly intrepid anthropomorphic rats. At once recognizable, and imagined like never before, are the surprising, intoxicating, and not-always-entirely-welcome sights, sounds, and smells of New York City.

Full of wit, romance, and sheer delight, D C-T! is both an affectionate portrait of the visual cornucopia that is New York City and a gracious love letter to the great William Steig, sure to enchant readers young and old alike just as his work has for half a century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525558064
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	17 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Molly Young is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. She has written features for GQ, Elle, New York magazine, n+1 and other publications, and has authored columns for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Times. She has also published crossword puzzles in the New York Times.

Joana Avillez is an illustrator from and still living in New York. Her drawings and illustrated stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, New York magazine, Zeit Magazin, Apartamento, and many other places. She illustrated Lena Dunham's memoir, Not That Kind of Girl.

Editorial Reviews

02/05/2018
Visually and textually witty, D C-T (pronounced, with implied humorous accent, “The City”) is a riff on William Steig’s 1968 collection of word puzzles, CDB. Avillez’s cunning vignettes depict sights that will be familiar to New Yorker readers as well as actual New Yorkers: fire escapes, subways, restaurants, Fran Lebowitz. The collection is a mix of old and new. On one hand, it’s a minimally colored, self-proclaimed paean (“P-N”) to Steig and perhaps to a form of wordplay not often indulged outside of Will Shortz’s universe. On the other, the premise inherently invokes text culture and its Twitterverse renaissance. The fast-paced C-T is always looking for shortcuts, even as Avillez and coauthor Young take time to appreciate small urban moments, from a rat watching a video on a smartphone (it’s a big-screen TV for him) to a young skateboarder telling skeptical cops that the drink in his hand is iced tea (“S I-S T”). Like a sticky song, these puzzle comics evoke both delight and mild annoyance, and there’s a key in the back if the latter overwhelms. But it’s hard to stay mad when there’s a rat or pigeon in a dapper hat on every other page of this breezy charmer. Agent: David Kuhn, Aevitas Creative Management. (May)

Publishers Weekly

What does it mean to be a city person? Or, more specifically, a New Yorker? Some would say you need to have lived here for 10-plus years, whereas others think the requirement starts at birth…I'd like to suggest that the real tell of a New Yorker is whether or not they're able to decipher all the coded messages inside this clever, funny, beautifully wrought new book.” –Nylon

"The book is ostensibly about life in New York but otherwise slightly uncategorizable: it’s part comic book, part ethnography, part love letter." –nymag.com

“Visually and textually witty … [a] breezy charmer.” —Publishers Weekly

“D C-T! is an ILU to NYC. Avillez and Young chronicle its everyday exploits with whimsy and clear-eyed love. Their adaptation of William Steig's alphabet-soup cipher invites you to linger, to meander, to look at both language and New York City with a child-like, hand-clapping wonder. “S A P-N” (‘It’s a paean’) reads the first sentence, and it is: to language, to playfulness, and to the city that never sleeps. By the end of this delightful book, everyone will feel like a native of this wild, lovely C-T.” —Kory Stamper, lexicographer and editor for Merriam-Webster, author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“New York City is never finished. It is forever being remade and reinvented. In D C-T!, Joana Avillez and Molly Young become its latest inventors, and do so with style and wit. Welcome to The City. You won’t have seen it like this before.” —Gay Talese, author of New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey
 
“In the style of William Steig's classic CDB! and CDC? except (is it possible?) even better.”—Will Shortz, Crossword Editor, The New York Times
 
“Can you come up with a bon mot while watching rats scurry in a pile of garbage? Molly Young and Joana Avillez can, breathing the true spirit of life in the big C-T in this hilarious collection of cartoon puzzles. The knowing details and clever use of language made me explode with laughter. Having to work to get to that Eureka moment only makes these witty cartoons even funnier.” —Françoise Mouly, Art Editor, The New Yorker
 
“D C-T! is truly pure and cleverly created joy. As a train operator in the NYC subway system I found myself laughing out loud at the truly recognizable realities of our great city—from a subway car full of available seats to city rats—in this aphoristic composition of gut-felt giggles.” —George Kmeck, MTA NYC Transit Train Operator, W, N, and D lines

From the Publisher