Sad Stuff on The Street

Featuring photographs and short essays from Lin-Manuel Miranda, Amy Sedaris, Salman Rushdie, Miranda July, Michael Chabon, Ben Gibbard, Jesse Eisenberg, and by other sad stuff spotters across the globe, this collection chronicles the cast-offs of our daily lives and speculates on their origin and on their demise. Genuine sadness, however, is no laughing matter. Therefore, 100% of proceeds will go to NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. NAMI is the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness.

This project came about in early 2011, when a man (San Francisco resident Greg Larson) and a woman (New York resident Sloane Crosley) broke up after a year of dating. But both of them harbored an actual desire to stay friends. So they kept communication alive by sending each other photos of so-sad-it’s-funny objects they spotted on their respective streets. Eventually they decided to share their habit with the world and sadstuffonthestreet.com was born. For the past six years, humanity’s single shoes, abandoned toys, and outdated television sets have found a home online.

Sloane Crosley is a New York Times bestselling author and contributing editor at Vanity Fair.