Dink! Pickleball Facts, Fictions & Cartoons by Ellis Rosen

(Union Square & Co., April 2023)

Maybe you’ve heard the word “pickleball,” but you want to know what all the fun is about. Or you’re already an enthusiastic fan and want to celebrate the ins, the outs, the dillballs, the chops, and the falafels of it all. Enter Ellis Rosen, resident cartoonist for In Pickleball magazine and frequent contributor to The New Yorker. Rosen is a master of communicating this fantastic sport’s primary characteristics with subtlety and wit. Alongside background on the game—its founding in 1995, the mysterious origins of its name, and more—Ellis will relate some tips for improving your on-court moves, a lovingly humorous glossary of pickleball terms, and some cheeky nods at pickleball culture. A celebration of community in addition to a what’s-what and how-to guide to this unique and amazing sport, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better gift for the pickleball lover in your life.

Ellis Rosen is a cartoonist, writer, and illustrator whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker. He has also been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, The Paris Review, and Late Night with Seth Meyers. For more on Rosen visit ellis-rosen.format.com.

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Send Help! by James Adams and Ellis Rosen

Send Help!: A Collection of Marooned Cartoons
by Jon Adams and Ellis Rosen (Voracious, 2021)

A hilarious collection of desert island cartoons from New Yorker cartoonists Jon Adams and Ellis Rosen to help us feel isolated…together.

This timely reflection on isolation brings together the best of a beloved genre, featuring an array of desert cartoons done in the signature single-panel style of a New Yorker cartoon. Whether you’re feeling marooned in too-close quarters with a loved one, are frantically dreaming up ways to escape from your own quarantine island, or are simply feeling nostalgic for palm trees and sand, these cartoons are sure to make you smile – and we could all use a laugh right now.

Drawn from a diverse collection of contributors, these humorous drawings are an essential addition to any coffee table collection, and bring a much-needed dose of levity to the circumstances we all find ourselves in.

Jon Adams is a New Yorker and MAD Magazine cartoonist based in San Francisco. He has created comics for McSweeney’s, Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Wired, and Fantagraphics, written animated shorts for MTV, and created illustrations for Netflix, Bloomsbury, Chronicle Books, California Sunday, Sunset Magazine, Johns Hopkins Magazine, and Womens Wear Daily, among others. His work has appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers, Comedy Central’s @midnight, and CBS Sunday Morning.

Ellis Rosen is a cartoonist and illustrator living in Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, MAD Magazine, The Washington Post, Wired, The Paris Review and Air Mail. He has also done several comics for the Daily Shouts section at TheNewYorker.com. He is the illustrator of a children’s chapter book, Woundabout, from Little, Brown and a contributor to the Eisner-nominated graphic anthology Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land.

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Wondabout by Lev AC Rosen. Illustrated by Ellis Rosen.

wondaboutWelcome to Woundabout, where routine rules, and change is feared. But transformation is blowing in the wind…

In the wake of tragedy, siblings Connor and Cordelia with their pet capybara are sent to the precariously perched town of Woundabout to live with their eccentric aunt. Woundabout is a place where the mayor has declared that routine rules above all, and no one is allowed to ask questions.
But Connor and Cordelia can’t help their curiosity when they discover a strange crank that mysteriously fits into certain parts of town, and by winding the crank, part of the town is transformed into something beautiful. When the townspeople see this transformation, they don’t see beauty, they only see change. And change, the Mayor says, is something to fear. With the Mayor hot on their trail, can Connor and Cordelia find a way to wind Woundabout back to life?

Lev AC Rosen is the author of the critically acclaimed ALL MEN OF GENIUS (Tor, 2011), which was an Amazon best of the month, on over a dozen best of the year lists, and has been nominated for multiple awards. His middle grade novel, WOUNDABOUT, will be published by Little Brown Books for Young Readers in Summer 2015. His post-apocalyptic noir novel DEPTH will also be published in Spring 2015 with Regan Arts. His second middle grade novel, THE MEMORY WALL, will be published by Knopf Books for Young Readers in 2016. He received his BA from Oberlin College and his MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Lev teaches creative writing and lives in Manhattan.

Ellis Rosen’s illustrations can be seen at EllisRosen.com.

Publishers Weekly
Recently orphaned when their fathers—who trained bomb-sniffing capybaras—were killed in an explosion, siblings Connor, 11, and Cordelia, nine, have no relatives except their Aunt Marigold, who they have never met. When they arrive in the town of Woundabout, along with a surviving capybara, Connor and Cordelia discover that their aunt’s home is just as “weird” as their fathers had hinted—the town has no Internet service, the mayor doesn’t allow questions, and everyone in Woundabout is expected to stick to a predictable daily routine. When the mayor’s prized artifact goes missing, Cordelia and Connor decide to track it down. With the help of a boy named Nico, they begin to uncover the truth behind Woundabout’s origins and strange traditions in a fairy tale–like novel that weaves a gentle spell as it builds to a dramatic, satisfying conclusion. Lev Rosen (All Men of Genius) sensitively addresses change, growth, and painful emotions like grief, while Ellis Rosen’s b&w illustrations are alternately haunting, comedic, and poignant, in keeping with the overall tone of the story.

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