Roz Chast Books In Order

Publication Order of Marco Books

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Steve Martin's Children's Books

Publication Order of Allia Zobel Nolan Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Andy Borowitz Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Anthologies

Roz Chast
Rosalind Chast was born November 26, 1954 in Brooklyn, New York. She grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the only child of Elizabeth (an assistant principal in an elementary school) and George Chast (a high school Spanish and French teacher). Her Jewish parents were kids during the Great Depression, and she’s spoken at length about their extreme frugality.

Roz graduated from Midwood High school in Brooklyn, and went to Kirkland College. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and received her BFA in painting in the year 1977. She also holds honorary doctorates from Dartmouth College, Pratt Institute, and the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, and she’s a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Her subjects often deal with family and domestic life. She revealed that she enjoys drawing interior scenes, often involving accentuated wallpaper and lamps, to serve as the backdrop for her comics. Her comics reflect a conspiracy of inanimate objects, which is an expression that she credits to her mom.

Roz’s first New Yorker cartoon, called “Little Things”, was sold to the magazine in April of 1978. The cartoon, which shows a tiny collection of “Little Things”, oddly shaped and strangely named small objects like “spak”, “chent”, and “tiv”.

Her New Yorker cartoons began as small black-and-white panels, but increasingly used more color and often appear over several pages. Her first cover for The New Yorker was the August 4, 1986.

One characteristic of her books is that the author picture is always a cartoon that Roz draws, presumably, of herself. The title page, which includes the Library of Congress cataloging info, is also hand lettered by Roz.

She is married to Bill Franzen, a humor writer, and they have two children together.

She received the 2012 NYC Literary Honor in Humor and she was inducted into Harvey Award Hall of Fame in 2018. In 2015 she won the Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year from the National Cartoonists Society. That same year, she received the 20th Annual Heinz Award for the Arts and Humanities. “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” won both the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography).

“The Party After You Left” is a cartoon collection that was released in 2004. This book brings together the previous nine years of Roz Chast’s cartoons. Together, each of these drawings, which appeared in Scientific American, Redbook, the New Yorker, as well as other places, constitute a spot-on record of our always increasingly absurd existence.

While the twenty-first century starts, we can just be grateful that Roz Chast is here to tackle some of the tougher themes of our times. Like birthday parties from hell, genetically altered mice, and comfort drinks in the age of insecurity.

“What I Hate: From A to Z” is a cartoon collection that was released in 2011. The pages of The New Yorker are hallowed ground for cartoonists. And for the past thirty years, Roz has helped set the magazine’s cartooning standard, as she created pieces which are unmistakably hers, characterized by her ecstatic way with words, her shaggy lines, and her characters’ histrionic masks of suburban and urban anxiety, elation, and bedragglement.

This book, of everyday unpleasantness and epic horrors, including but certainly not limited to tunnels, rabies, abduction, and the triple layered terror of Jell-O 1-2-3. With never before published, full page cartoons for each letter, and supplemental text to make sure the proper fear gets instilled in each and every heart, Roz’s alphabetical compendium is going to resonate with anybody well versed in the art of avoidance, and make an instructive gift for anybody that may be approaching life with unhealthy unconcern.

“Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2014. Roz, in her first memoir, brings her signature wit to the subject of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through family photos, four-color cartoons, and documents, and a narrative just as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Roz’s memoir is both comic relief and comfort for anybody experiencing the life altering loss of elderly parents.

Roz held to the practices of avoidance, denial, and distraction when it came to her elderly dad and mom. However when Elizabeth Chast climbed up a ladder to find an old souvenir from the “crazy closet”, with predictable results, the tools which had served Roz well through her parents’ seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties couldn’t be deployed anymore.

While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies, an anxious dad that relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and an ex-assistant principal mom whose overbearing personality sidelined Roz for decades, the themes are universal. Aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution, managing logistics, adult kids accepting a parental role, dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies, and hiring strangers to provide strangers to provide the most personal of care.

One amazing portrait of two lives at their end and the only child coping as best as she can, this will show the full range of Roz’s talents as a storyteller and cartoonist.

The book was a National Book Award Finalist and a #1 New York Times Bestseller.

“Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2017. Roz, a native Brooklynite turned suburban commuter deemed the quintessential New Yorker, has always been intensely alive to the glorious spectacle that is Manhattan, the daily clash of sidewalk racers and dawdlers, the nutty and priceless outbursts of souls from all walks of life, and the fascinating range of dress codes.

For Roz, adjusting to life outside of the city was surreal (you have to drive? You can actually own trees?), however she recognized that the reverse was true for her kids. On their trips into town, they’d marvel at the odd visual world of Manhattan, its blackened sidewalk gum-wads, fire escapes (those “West Side Story” things), and its crazily honeycombed grids and systems.

Told through Roz’s own laugh out loud, zany, touching, and true cartoons, this is part New York stories (the overseen and overheard of the island borough), part practical and personal guide to talking, walking, venting, and renting, and is a one of a kind and irresistible love letter to the city.