Hurry Up and Wait, the second volume in a series of collaborations between the artist Maira Kalman, the writer Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), and The Museum of Modern Art, shows people striding forth, dashing across streets, and jumping over puddles, while others daydream on park benches and linger on sidewalks with friends. This follow-up to the critically acclaimed Girls Standing on Lawns contains important photographs from MoMA's collection, by Lee Friedlander, Dorothea Lange, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Stephen Shore, Rudy Burckhardt, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Yves Klein, and Walker Evans, among others. Ten vibrant new paintings by Kalman- inspired by the photographs- and Handler's elegant prose together ponder the merits of action and contemplation, making Hurry Up and Wait a spirited reflection on the daily rhythms of life.
Handler’s meditative writing is a kind of aphoristic prose poetry, at once irreverent and wholehearted and profound, partway between Mark Twain and Rumi, with a touch of Virginia Woolf’s perfectly placed commas to punctuate attention into reflective pause of just the right duration. The accompanying paintings by Kalman — herself a patron saint of “the moments inside the moments inside the moments” and an unparalleled noticer of the magic in the mundane — reimagine the historical photographs through the raw material of Kalman’s art: that delicious dialogue between representation and response. - Maria Popova, Brain Pickings