for not buying this sooner: The Party, After You Left, the latest collection by Roz Chast. A cartoon by her always improves the magazine by a good ten percent, so a whole book of them...it's delightful.

One of the things I like about Chast is that she can be nonchalantly naughty even within, say, her household-of-neurotics model; in Dream Remote, it's no surprise to see "Comb your hair" and "Change that awful shirt," but why "Faster" and "Slower"? Hmm, I wonder. She also cartoons about death a lot more often than you'd think, considering how funny she makes it (she says Charles Addams was a major early influence, and it shows). Chast works somewhere between Ed Koren and Lynda Barry/Matt Groening, maybe with a dash of the underworshipped Sandra Boynton thrown in for dry but zesty wit.

She gives a witty interview, too; from a conversation with Adam Wasserman in MediaBistro a few years back:

I got some weird responses to a "Written Test on Gun Control" that ran on The New Yorker's back page—multiple-choice questions and essay questions, like, "When I have a gun in my hand, I feel..."

There were a few people who filled it out for real with some pretty horrible things, like [in a heavy Southern drawl], "I feel like blowing the head off of every cocksucker I see!" [Laughs.] It was just unbelievable. People were crawling out of the woodwork and you think, "Why are they reading The New Yorker?"

Read more of that. There's good stuff about the magazine's famously scarring art meetings, and this about one of her "Mixed Marriage" riffs, several of which are printed in The Party, After You Left:

What is your favorite cartoon that never got published?

I've got a few that I have submitted over and over again. I don't know if I have one favorite. I have one that is basically a mixed marriage one. It's about a bathing suit. A wife is showing the husband this bathing suit, and he makes a comment about it being gaudy and not liking it. They've never published it, but I hope that someday they will. Some I've submitted four or five times. I know they have seen it before. I just hope that they will just suddenly see it in this brand new hilarious way or they will buy it and it will never be seen again. [At least] to pay me off. Some hush money.

I also—blissed out on inky nostalgia from being in Coliseum Books (even if it was the newer 42nd St. one)—got New York: The Movie Lover's Guide, by Richard Alleman. It is very, very well done, nicely put together, crisply written, and so far I've seen only one inconsequential error in the update from the '88 edition (Kim's Video on Bleecker is, semi-sadly, no more; it had an even sillier ordering system than the other one, but I miss it anyway). This is a book you'll want. Buy both.

"The Party After You Left" by Roz Chast (Bonus Audio!) [Andertoons]
The Art of Pysanka [Chast demonstrating gorgeous egg-painting; NYT via Suite101]
Roz Chast [Planet Cartoonist; cool profile]
Roz Chast is my personal savior [BookofJoe, via Blogcritics; actually about Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz]

[A note on the Cartoon Bank: Sometimes they let you blow up images so you can actually read the text on them, which is essential to enjoying a Chast cartoon. The two images linked above are not readable, and only "Dream Remote" has a staffer's caption. I hope they're working on this; it's a real hindrance.]

Categories: NYer, Chast, Cartoons, Books, Movies