Cartoons

by Kit Schluter

Set in the uncanny valley between Bugs Bunny and Franz Kafka, Cartoons is an explosive series of outrageous, absurdist tales.

More than simply a book, Cartoons proposes itself as a genre of imaginary writing in opposition to the realism of most contemporary U.S. fiction, aligning itself with the French symbolism and Latin American fabulism its author is known to translate. A giant cricket with a tiny Kit Schluter in a jar, The Girl Who Is a Piece of Paper, an umbrella who confuses the words porpoise and purpose in its quest for self-fulfillment, these are just a few denizens of its pages, suffused with a fairy tale-like animism.

A pair of slugs go on a bender. A microwave oven decries microaggressions. A beer bottle is filled with regret. An escalator mechanic’s shoe conceals a terrible secret. As befits its title, Cartoons defies the laws of physics and fiction alike, eschewing tonal consistency in favor of a simultaneity of joy and horror, ecstasy and disgust, wrapped in an extravagant layer of black humor. The stories blur the boundary between microfiction and poet’s prose, featuring impossible transformations and surrealistic events, even as they wrestle with urgent psychic and moral dilemmas. Heightening the atmosphere of pervasive unreality are a number of drawings by the author, which don’t so much illustrate as parallel the tales with their own fantastic scenarios.

“The true surrealist is unblinking, convulsive, and cheerfully open to the mysterious flow, into their texts, of mythic and archetypal elements operating beyond their conscious control. In  Cartoons , Kit Schluter vaults into the zone of Julio Cortazar, Richard Brautigan, and late Giorgio di Chirico, where the reader breaths the air of pure freedom attained rattling inside the chains of self.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of  Motherless Brooklyn

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Humor

176 pages, Paperback

Published May 21, 2024

Reviews

[katryna · Rating 4 out of 5]

at first i thought this wasn’t gonna be weird or depraved enough for me but it turned into a pretty incredible marriage of some really beautiful prose and some total freak shit and by total freak shit i mean Total Freak Shit

While the Two Slugs Take Turns Drinking Shots of Vodka and An Umbrella made me cry and the best panel is on page fifty-five

this was very fun to float along to

[Natalie Wehrer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing like a golden shower to tie together this short story/microfiction? collection. Kinda freaky. Reading this felt like a fever dream that I didn’t want to wake up from.

[Rabayah · Rating 5 out of 5]

i think i’ve discovered that i love short stories (especially when they lean into absurdity!)

bizarre in the best way possible

[Hannah Hiemstra · Rating 3 out of 5]

So cute. My favourites were: Ah, the bushes…!, The little pencil that could, An umbrella, and Like a cloud can do!

This is a psychological ‘compensation’ of the author to deal with uncomfortable moments in their every day life, and is really just a collection of intentionally twisted thoughts, which I can relate to practicing myself especially when I was younger. The author calls these mental tangents their “cartoons,” which really are a bunch of cute little weird stories. As someone who reads a lot of collections of shorts, I found it difficult to overlook that that’s not what this book was supposed to be. So, I give it 3 stars, I respect it wholly but it wasn’t always easy to connect with. I recognize that it just maybe wasn’t for me in that regard, but what a unique little book!!

[Marina Akamatsu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was given to me by a friend and was probably one of the most flattering gifts possible. It had me clapping like a baby eating spaghetti for the first time. Part of my delight stemmed from the fact that this book hit me at a perfect time -- I'd recently been into very short form lit and falling down rabbit holes until it got ridiculous. These aren't rabbit holes but more like the crevices in coral that moray eels poke their mugs out of. I also enjoyed the arc of the cartoons, I thought they were compiled in a very nice flow. This book is perfect for identifying the unidentifiable without explaining it but instead pointing a thumb and going "get a load of THIS guy!"

[bro do NOT text me · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Cartoons" is basically César Aira worship. In the preface, Schluter says, "many of the pieces in this book [...] were written in a similar way. Concerned more with personal psychological experiment than anything literary at first, I found myself writing until I stumbled upon an overwhelming concern, an unresolved curiosity, a sense of repulsion, some particularly charged node of sentiment, and instead of letting it get the best of me, chose to open my attention to its particularities." This is the same playbook, is it not? Because these pieces are mostly existing in the disputed microfiction/prose poetry territory, they're scaled more like how you'd anticipate Aira's short stories to be than how Aira's actual short stories are.

If you, like me, are an eager audience for that, this is definitely worth the two hours max it'll take to read this. "I Am Not A Happy Person and I Don't Like My Friends" is easily the best piece in the collection, but "Parable of the Perfect Translator," "The Good in Having a Nuclear Family," and "By the Dawn's Early Light" are all great fun, as are basically all of the pieces that appear to be, like, a paragraph long. Sometimes Schluter gets too tied up in his shtick and a piece fails to launch -- these are generally the ones that end up feeling particularly cartoonish, in way that often reminded me of the 15-minute shows Adult Swim ran at 2:45 AM -- but this is easy to forgive, as it's 400 words long. I think Schluter's going to reveal himself to have some real heat once he hits that 5-8 page range a bit harder.

[Sophia Jaffe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel in my soul this should be a four star book but I loved it so much I’ll give it five. They are right with the comparison to Kafka but I’ll soften it by saying much less ominous and stress inducing than Kafka and much funnier but with a surprising touch of heart. I’ll never forget the bush hand man

[Sarzaddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trippy stuff I sometimes felt too dumb to understand but I also loved it?

[Vivian Soucie · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Lynch you would have loved cartoons by Kit Schulter :(

[Miah Emerson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think that I have to be in a very specific mood to enjoy this book. Because it's a collection of short stories when I was craving a good plot, I wasn't too keen on it. I think the concept is really creative though and I would love to discuss it with someone who's also read it. The author has a lot of profound messages hidden in the most outrageous anecdotes. They were almost so weird that I often couldn't pick out the meaning in them. Nothing against weird I love weird, but it just wasn't what I was looking for right now.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got varying mileage out of this on a story-to-story level but I cannot deny that it is very fun. Not hard to see why Schluter is such a great writer to translate Copi; there is something of the great French bawdy humour tradition present here, Schluter is every bit a descendent of Rabelais as anyone else

[Hannah J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine you gave Voltaire cocaine and then showed him 24 hours of Looney Tunes and Animaniacs. All of this to say, your mileage may vary, but I would highly recommend this as a read-aloud activity.

[Sara Corley · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like Alice in wonderland and listening to people describe their dreams, you’ll probably enjoy this book.

[Alana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This takes its final bow out (to my raucous applause) with a place to write and illustrate your own little cartoons. This is what I wrote in the space provided:

A rash appears on my left breast.

“Oh my, oh my gauche,” the Antelope coughs behind cackles of laughter, undisguised.

“Hey! You told me you were a doctor!” I yell after her graceful bound through and out the window. Absconding the scene along with my dignity.

When my mind gets distracted while reading, I scratch away. I know I’m not supposed to, and the red splodge widens and deepens as it variegates in colour. It is beginning to glisten, transforming into a petite window looking out on what appears to be either a too early sunrise or a sunset approaching its final sweeping and spectacular close, a foghorn signalling the descending night.

Worrying it will never go away and if another itch I prefer not to scratch suddenly appears, what then? How will I have sex with my hideous and deformed condition? I won’t have someone describe sex with me as ‘crepuscular’. Not again. Not after last time. It took me weeks, if not days, to recover from that wagon of embarrassment. I might have to cart this feeling around with me forever. That could be another 60 years!

A dead tree stump blocks my path, conveniently holding out the information I require the most. Perusing this handy rolodex of possible causes to my gross disfigurement, which has grown to resemble a full-blown case of J. M. W. Turner by the seaside, I spy that horrible word, a slur in some parts of my neighbourhood: gluten.

Remembering the day before the rash appeared I was in enthusiastic attendance of The Great Marsupial Bake-Off. I thought I told those cheeky sniffing-nosed Tasmanian Devils and I recall repeating it several times to each and every blank-faced Wallaby in a 5km radius of the ovens, “I don’t care if the gluten is ‘free’, I don’t want it.”

How could anyone misinterpret that. Do they want me to end up on the endangered species list too?

[Michel Siskoid Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though prosaic, Kit Schluter's Cartoons should be filed in the poetry section - a collection of short surreal tales, sometimes separated by cartoons that belong to this same, dark world, if not to any specific story. Sometimes reading as twisted fairy tales (I want to borrow the title Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children), sometimes as hallucinatory confessionals, Cartoons creates - as its title proposes - vivid images that play on the idea of attraction and repulsion. Kit is visited by his younger selves, including a wheezing fetus. He holds a conversation with a sassy microwave. He is forced into a golden shower situation by a modern-day de Sade. He shows us an umbrella's most private thoughts. And very often, he bails out of these nightmares with some wordplay, some alchemical transformation that works on dream logic and sends us crashing into a the vilest pit. I wasn't always sure what to think - a pitfall of surrealism, with its private symbology - but I enjoyed the ride.

[Allan N · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this was a fun concept. Clearly throwing things at the wall, and leaning into the absurdity. I liked that angle of it. I liked the little cartoons too.

The stories were fun, asked questions and generally also meaningless which I obviously like. A bit too heady at times and, as with most short story collections, scattershot in to what’s good and what’s not.

Some will stick, some won’t. That’s the whole point. But I generally had a good time even if I didn’t spend enough time with the ideas as I maybe ought to have. But isn’t that always the case? Probably truly a 3.5 but can’t do that, so rounding up for joy’s sake. Keep writing!

[Logan]

Saw this on display at my library and checked it out because the cover intrigued me. I can’t remember the last time I’ve picked up a piece of media that is so different from anything I’ve ever encountered before.

This collection of comedic short stories is deeply weird, unpredictable, and now has me wondering about the day-to-day lives of every damn inanimate object that I come by. There are a few stories that are a level above the others but that’s to be expected with a collection like this. Loved the little cartoons sprinkled throughout as well.

[Thomas Mojica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well. Based on when I was supposed to take off, and the time I reboarded, I finished this book in about 3 hours. It was a mental game of juggling the absurd characters in each of the surreal, dream state stories. 5/5, great way to kill time and spark the part of my imagination that adulthood has all but killed. It’s Dali’s work, personified in text, carrying fables and universal woes.

The story, “the clairvoyant mother” is my favorite.

“I can hear you hearing the music while it plays, and that makes it sound all the sweeter.”

[Angel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blips and vignettes of comic absurdity that orbit human tragedy and expressionistic frailty, sometimes observing for a laugh at our own expense, sometimes crashing down to devastating effect. The stories are like lightning flashes, from a few pages to a mere paragraph—not every single one dazzles, but (assisted by some very lovely artwork) the comedic highs are goddamn hilarious and the emotional lows are equal amounts heartbreaking and introspective.

A brief collection that burns bright, from a newfound author of which I'm ecstatic to now follow through future works. :)

[Christopher Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I had read more into this. The person who reccomended it to me said they were short stories (my favorite format) but not much else (Other than sharing the name Kit). I wish I had known they were postmodern esque micro fictions. Maybe I'd have enjoyed it more, maybe I'd have passed on it completely, maybe I just need the kind of drugs Kit's on. This book has an audience and Kit has a future, but it doesn't speak to me.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book feels like a fever dream in the best possible way. Each story is short and imaginative, feeling like something you would see at 1 am on cartoon network after dark or a cutaway gag from MAD TV. Kit does a great job in keeping you on your toes with each story, while also given hidden peaks into his brain and how it works

[andrea ✿]

The clairvoyant mother. On a car ride through certain beautiful mountains, the boy's deaf mother says, "Son, you just have the best taste in music." The boy thinks to himself, "But mother, you're deaf." And the mother, reading the boy's mind, answers: "But son, I can hear you hearing the music while it plays, and that makes it sound all the sweeter."

[Michael Chenchard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better than Food said that this book was "hysterical." I did not laugh even once. I enjoy it, but not life-changing nor hysterical. some of them were a little sad in fact. actually, the sloth story reminds me of Vewn. Schluter is a talented translator, translating classic works from French and Spanish to English, so his command of language is very strong.

[Ryan Mullin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was interesting… At best, the anthological stories inside are poignant, evocative and thought provoking. At worst, they just kind of feel like a bad, wandering psychedelic children’s book. If you’ve got a good imagination give it a go, but if you don’t like reading about anthropomorphized everything then pass

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Snapshots of absurdisms, blips of strange. My kind of short story collection. Fast-paced, hysterical, and unique as hell. Like Russell Edson spending time with Calvin and Hobbes, or Italo Calvino watching Ren & Stimpy.

[Joshua Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only words fit to describe this amazing book by Kit Schluter are contained within the book itself; which is to say, in order to read about it, you have to read it . . . nothing else will do.

[Blake Gidley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surreal, funny, and more personally cutting than I imagined.

[Ryan Lytle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read, but I truly couldn’t stop once I got going. I respect a brain that truly works in a way I couldn’t even imagine. Huge kudos to the author!

[Mark Matheson · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enthusiastic, if uneven, collection of comedic short stories.

[Greta · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5*