Every Person on the Planet

Edmund and Rosemary lead quiet lives in their Brooklyn apartment with their cat and their neuroses. One day, despite their preference for solitude, they inexplicably decide to throw a party. They feel obliged to invite so many people they do not particularly like that they finally decide they might as well invite everybody in the world. So they do, and most of the world's population shows up. Author and illustrator Kaplan was not only a writer for Seinfeld and Six Feet Under , but he is also a cartoonist for the New Yorker . Heavily illustrated with cartoons on almost every page, Every Person is like a children's storybook written for adults. Though Kaplan engages in surreal exaggeration for comic effect, Edmund and Rosemary's soiree is all too recognizably real. Party givers will empathize with the hosts' worries that their fete will turn into a disaster; party goers will admire Kaplan's keen observations on social behavior. Kaplan's cartoons turn adults into appealingly childlike figures, and he has a talent for visual understatement that fits the dry manner in which he describes the absurdities of this gathering of six billion in one New York apartment. Anyone who has ever given a party should be delighted by this charming, humorous book. (Nov.)