The National Endowment for the Arts chose Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? for the 20 Big Read programs.

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? is a New York Times 2014 Best Book of the Year, 2014 National Book Award Finalist, winner of the 2014 Kirkus Prize, and a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best books of 2014, the first time a graphic novel received the prize for autobiography. Using handwritten text, drawings, photographs, and her keen eye for the foibles that make us human, Chast addresses the realities of what it is to get old in America today – and what it is to have aging parents today - with tenderness and candor, and a good dose of her characteristic wit.

Her works are typically populated by hapless but relatively cheerful 'everyfolk,” and she addresses the universal topics of guilt, aging, families, money, real estate, and, as she would say, 'much, much more!' David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, has called her 'the magazine's only certifiable genius.'Ĭhast is the author of more than a dozen books for adults, including Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?(2014), a work that chronicles her relationship with her aging parents as they shift from independence to dependence.

Since joining The New Yorker in 1978, Roz Chast has established herself as one of our greatest artistic chroniclers of the anxieties, superstitions, furies, insecurities, and surreal imaginings of modern life.

Bring Me Home by Roz Alexander