Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories is the newest book by Ben Katchor, and it isn't a graphic novel either. It's a collection of one-page meditations — on laps, open houses, the space under beds, window shopping, banisters, toaster crumbs — and, yes, restroom hand dryers, among other things — minute observations of urban landscapes that tell us stories about ourselves. In Katchor's world, a tenant is forced to leave his pre-war apartment because his late 20th-century physique

—Myla Goldberg