Nosy

""His latest, “Nosy!” (2025), comes in the shape of a rectangular face with a triangular honker busting through the volume’s otherwise conventional dimensions. A meditation on noses — “A dog’s nose can smell better than yours can” — it is illustrated in Chwast’s signature style, with deadpan lines of unvarying width and flat planes of “uninhibited, confectionary” color, to quote Leonard S. Marcus, the critic and historian of children’s literature (who two years ago curated a delightful Chwast exhibition for the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass.). One evolution in Chwast’s style: His line has gotten sketchier and more expressive over the decades, to the point that he now rivals Charles Schulz as a master of the impossibly eloquent squiggle. The grimacing mouth belonging to a guy smelling a stinky shoe in “Nosy!” is just a loop, but it’s perfect. You feel the sniffer’s disgust. I wonder how many times Chwast drew that loop until he felt it was right. It appears effortless until you really look at it — which is one thing good picture books do: draw our eyes in to make us look, and look again." "

— Bruce Handy, New York Times (July 17, 2026)