Cheese Monkeys

After 15 years of designing more than 1,500 book jackets at Knopf for such authors as Anne Rice and Michael Crichton, 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.

"Art school in the 50's--for the first and probably definitive time. This wise, funny and ragingly shrewd first novel explodes all the myths of academia and brilliantly builds its own. The world's greatest book-jacket designer finds a second spellbinding artistic voice." --James Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential

"The renowned graphic artist Chip Kidd has with The Cheese Monkeys shown us that there is nothing he cannot do. This, his bold first novel (and his readers will eagerly demand a second), is full of style and verve and nerve and spirit." --Lorrie Moore, author of Birds of America

"Kidd's gifts as a designer are also his gifts as a writer: wit, exquisite taste, high energy, and a mad love for the things of this world. A wild ride through a unique consciousness." --George Saunders, author of Pastoralia

"Chip Kidd has created in Winter Sorbeck and his vaunted course, Art 127, one of the most vivid, expert, hilarious, and stragely gripping accounts of what it means to learn how to see. If The Cheese Monkeys weren't so intelligent, rollicking, and downright entertaining, it would be chastening indeed to find that someone as visually gifted as Mr. Kidd also turned out to have considerable verbal plumage as well." --David Rakoff, author of Fraud

"Thanks to The Cheese Monkeys, Chip Kidd's inimitable genius is no longer limited to visual art. Fans of his groundbreaking and highly inventive graphic designs will recognize the same wit, intelligence, and wry humor at work here in his fiction. Part coming-of-age story, part introduction to graphic design, this first novel is a wonderfully strange, deeply ironic, and always fascinating glimpse into the dark, secret workings of the creative mind and of the mysterious alchemy that sometimes spins the raw elements of talent, desire, astonishment, and desperation into gold." --Laura Zigman, author of Animal Husbandry