Two of my great loves, the New Yorker and… dogs… are finally coming together in the surely amazing The New Yorker Big Book of Dogs.

The collection is, in short, all things canine from the New Yorker: fiction, poetry, articles, humor, cartoons, cover art, and even manuscript drafts. All this comes from the incredible writers and illustrators that have helped make the magazine what it is (E.B. White, Maira Kalman, John Updike, Jonathan Lethem, Roald Dahl,Susan Orlean, John Cheever, Jerome Groopman, gawd, it goes on and on!).

The book is loosely divided in to four sections: Good Dogs, Bad Dogs, Top Dogs, and Underdogs.

I love this excerpt from the forward, written by Malcolm Gladwell:

A few words about you. You bought this book: several hundred pages on dogs. You are, in other words, as unhealthily involved in the emotional life of dogs as the rest of us. Have you wondered why you bought it? One possible answer is that you see the subject of man’s affection for dogs as a way of examining all sorts of broader issues. Is it the case of a simple thing revealing a great many complex truths? We do a lot of this at The New Yorker. To be honest: I do a lot of this at The New Yorker — always going on and on about how A is just a metaphor for B, and blah, blah, blah. But let’s be clear. You didn’t really buy this boo because of some grand metaphor. Dogs are not about something else. Dogs are about dogs.

Dogs are dogs. Go buy the book!

Via Brain Pickings (Thanks, Steph!)