Keynote Presenter
Tickets go on sale July 16th at 9 a.m.
Roz Chast
One of The New Yorker’s greatest artistic chroniclers of the anxieties, superstitions, furies, insecurities, and surreal imaginings of modern life, Roz Chast has used wit, humor, and illustrative flair to address universal topics for the publication since 1978, when she was added to the magazine’s roster at age 24.
The author of Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, a work in which Roz chronicles her relationship with her aging parents as they shift from independence to dependence, using handwritten text, drawings, photographs, and her keen eye for the foibles that make us human. Roz addresses the realities of what it is to get old in America today with tenderness and candor, and a good dose of her characteristic wit. This work was a New York Times 2014 Best Book of the Year, 2014 National Book Award Finalist, winner of the 2014 Kirkus Prize, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best books of 2014, and on the Kirkus list for the Best Books of the 21st Century (So Far). The National Endowment for the Arts chose Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? for the 2018, 2022, 2023, and 2024 Big Read programs.
Other titles by Roz include What I Hate: From A to Z, The Party After You Left, and I Must Be Dreaming. She has also lent her talents to children’s books and numerous literary collaborations. She is currently working on The Two Saddest Kitchens (Bloomsbury, October 6, 2026) with Jason Adam Katzenstein.
Roz grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design with studies in graphic design and painting. In addition to her contributions to The New Yorker, Roz has provided cartoons and editorial illustrations for nearly 50 magazines and journals, from Mother Jones to Town & Country. She lectures widely and has received prestigious awards, including honorary degrees from Pratt Institute and the Art Institute of Boston. Roz has received the Reuben Award, the Heinz Award, the Visionary Woman Award, the Best of Brooklyn Literary Award, the 2023 National Humanities Medal, and the first Thurber Prize in Cartoon Art. In addition, she has been inducted into the Society of Illustrators’ Hall of Fame, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is an Eisner Award 2025 Voters’ Choice Hall of Fame inductee.
Roz lives in Connecticut with her family and several parrots.
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A USA TODAY BESTSELLER
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Washington Post Best Graphic Book of the Year
Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award
#1 New York Times bestselling, award-winning New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast's new graphic narrative, exploring the surreal nighttime world inside her mind-and untangling one of our most enduring human mysteries: dreams.
Ancient Greeks, modern seers, Freud, Jung, neurologists, poets, artists, shamans-humanity has never ceased trying to decipher one of the strangest unexplained phenomena we all experience: dreaming. Now, in her new book, Roz Chast illustrates her own dream world, a place that is sometimes creepy but always hilarious, accompanied by an illustrated tour through “Dream-Theory Land” guided by insights from poets, philosophers, and psychoanalysts alike. Illuminating, surprising, funny, and often profound, I Must Be Dreaming explores Roz Chast's newest subject of fascination-and promises to make it yours, too.
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#1 New York Times Bestseller
2014 National Book Award Finalist
Winner of the inaugural 2014 Kirkus Prize in nonfiction
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of the 2014 Books for a Better Life Award
Winner of the 2015 Reuben Award from National Cartoonists Society
The #1 New York Times bestselling award-winning graphic memoir by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast about her parents' final years, now with the author's celebrated new epilogue.
In her first memoir, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents.
While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies--an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades--the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care.
An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant shows the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller.