All My Friends... Books in Order

The All My Friends... books grew out of Jory John’s long-running collaboration with artist and writer Avery Monsen. Together they took the visual language of a simple picture book and pointed it straight at grown ups who like their jokes a little bleak.

The series begins with All My Friends Are Dead, a small, hardback book that looks like something you might read at bedtime but is really a string of punchlines about loneliness, change, and the end of everything. A dinosaur, a tree, a cassette tape, a clown, and a parade of other characters each get a chance to announce the sad state of their social lives, usually in one very short line.

On the surface it is a collection of gags. Underneath, the humor comes from the gap between cheerful drawings and the blunt, almost childlike way the characters talk about being left behind. A houseplant complains that its friends keep dying, a sock has lost its only partner, a cassette tape has been outlived by the technology that replaced it. The book never turns into a lecture, but it quietly nudges readers to think about time, obsolescence, and the strange ways we connect to things.

All My Friends Are Still Dead continues in the same style, widening the cast of speakers to people, legendary creatures, and more inanimate objects. The tone stays dry and matter of fact. Each spread is basically one clean joke, but together they sketch out a whole little universe of characters who are just trying to make sense of how their worlds have changed.

These books are often described as “children’s books for adults.” They are short, heavily illustrated, and easy to flip through in a single sitting, which makes them popular as gifts and conversation pieces. At the same time, the jokes land best for readers who bring some life experience and a taste for gallows humor.

Across the series you can see some of the threads that run through John’s later work for younger audiences. There is the tight, economical writing, the willingness to sit with uncomfortable ideas, and the sense that even the silliest character has an inner life. Instead of talking animals working through their feelings, you get a dinosaur making peace with extinction or a tree realizing it has literally outlived its friends.

On this page you can follow the All My Friends... titles in order, dip into brief summaries, and see how these compact, odd little books connect to the rest of Jory John’s bibliography.