Colin McEnroe Show: Cartooning With Roz Chast

Roz will be signing WHAT I HATE at Books on the Common in Ridgefield, CT Saturday, October 22 at 2 p.m.

In 1978, Roz Chast published her first New Yorker cartoon and one could argue that many things were never the same again. The magazine had never had a superstar woman cartoonist, but Chast grew into the role. And no New Yorker cartoonist had ever messed so boldly with the basic format of a cartoon.

Chast's work expanded quickly into heavily lettered narratives and charts. The man in a suit sitting at a lunch table with another man in a suit, one of whom was saying something dryly funny, was nowhere to be found. In their place was a universe of neurotics and children existentially adrift and absurd explorations of stock phrases. If there was a holy cow, could there be unholy ones? What would an actual cat's pajamas look like. If there was rapture of the deep, could there be rapture of the flat, of the tiny, of the neat? We asked Chast, on the occasion of her latest book, "What I Hate," to explain it all to us.

Leave your comments below, e-mail colin@wnpr.org, or Tweet us @wnprcolin.