In her keenly observed graphic memoir, Impossible People, celebrated cartoonist Julia Wertz chronicles her haphazard attempts at sobriety and the relentlessly challenging, surprisingly funny, and occasionally absurd cycle of addiction and recovery. Opening at the culmination of a disastrous trip to Puerto Rico, the first page of Impossible People finds Julia standing stupefied in the middle of the jungle beside a rental Jeep she's just crashed. From this moment, the story flashes back to the beginning of her five-year journey towards sobriety that includes group therapy sessions, relapses, an ill-fated relationship, terrible dates, and an unceremonious eviction from her New York City apartment. Far from the typical addiction narrative that follows an upward trajectory from rock bottom to rehab to recovery, Impossible People portrays the lesser told but more common story: That the road to recover is not always linear. With unflinching honesty, Wertz details the arduous, frustrating, and hilarious story of trying and failing and trying again.

For almost two decades, Julia Wertz has been documenting her life’s most intimate, absurd, and amusing moments through a whimsical and hilarious diary comic book called The Fart Party. Wertz retells childhood antics that end in scars and swears. She tracks, in real-time, her young adulthood as she forgot her college graduation, traveled cross country via train, and drank her way through a harsh break-up. After receiving much acclaim (and controversy), The Fart Party became a series of self-published mini-comics, eventually collected into two volumes, published by Atomic Books. Long out of print, Museum of Mistakes collects anything and everything that is The Fart Party. PLUS: numerous pages of Julia’s early comic work, unpublished and previously uncollected comics, short stories, illustrations, process pages, hate mail, sketchbook pages, tear stains, and more. This massive tome begs the question, “what is a Fart Party?” And the answer is... you’ll have to read to find out!

Here is New York as you've never seen it before; the New York behind the New York that you think you know so well. With drawings and comics in her signature style, Julia Wertz regales us with dozens of street scenes that show exactly what the city looked like "then" versus "now"; cartoons that detail the quirky, quintessentially New York histories that took place there, and several series of detail drawings including the clocks, mailboxes, lampposts and other ephemera that have evolved over the years. Tenements, Towers & Trash takes on a wild ride in a time-machine taxi, from the streets of the present-day Big Apple lined with big Apple stores and CVS's to the Days of Yore, when Mayor La Guardia declared pinball machines illegal and Greenpoint was the city's premier destination for vaudeville and film. Not just for die-hard New Yorkers, this hilarious, charming book will appeal to any history lover or comics fan, as well as Julia's fans who are eager for more of her work.