Hyperbole and a Half
1900
- hyperboleandahalf
- non-fiction
- helper dog
- allie brosh
- duncan
- brilliant
- simple dog
- fiction
- genius
- comedy
The story
Every time Allie Brosh posts something new on her hugely popular blog Hyperbole and a Half the internet rejoices. Touching, absurd, and darkly comic, Allie Brosh’s highly anticipated book Hyperbole and a Half showcases her unique voice, leaping wit, and her ability to capture complex emotions with deceptively simple illustrations. This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features more than fifty percent new content, with ten never-before-seen essays and one wholly revised and expanded piece as well as classics from the website like, “The God of Cake,” “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,” and her astonishing, “Adventures in Depression,” and “Depression Part Two,” which have been hailed as some of the most insightful meditations on the disease ever written. Brosh’s debut marks the launch of a major new American humorist who will surely make even the biggest scrooge or snob laugh. We dare you not to. FROM THE AUTHOR: This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely authoritative—like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it—but I soon discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So I decided to just make a list of things that are in the book: Pictures Words Stories about things that happened to me Stories about things that happened to other people because of me Eight billion dollars* Stories about dogs The secret to eternal happiness* *These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!
What it’s like
Crude hand-drawn stick figures on plain white pages, with thick black lines and flat, unshaded fills, give this full-color book a deliberately unpolished, doodled look that makes every panel feel like a private notebook page. The layouts shift constantly: a single small figure in a vast empty field, a tiny frame exploding into a full-bleed panic, a sequence of identical faces stacked down the page to show a day dragging on. Sound comes through in the typography, with capitals, stretched words and sudden italics doing the work of a voice raised or dropped mid-sentence. The vibe is wry, warm and a little bruised, the sort of book to read on a slow Sunday in bed or in one long sitting on a train, with each short essay easy to pick up and put down. Its essays swing from giddy absurdity (a dog that cannot grasp the idea of moving house, a sprawling feud over a cake) to quieter passages about depression that are raw without being grim. Violence is absent, and what intensity there is stays emotional, with bleak moments of despair rendered in a deadpan register that lands softly. It suits readers who love self-deprecating humour, animal stories and honest writing about mental health, and anyone who wants to laugh at their own worst days.
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