A Celebration of "The New Yorker" cartoons Thursday, November 9, 2017

ALBANY, NY (10/30/2017) (readMedia)-- The NYS Writers Institute will present "A Celebration of The New Yorker Cartoons" featuring Roz Chast and Bob Mankoff on Thursday, November 9, at 8 p.m. in the Huxley Theatre, NYS Museum, Cultural Education Center, in Albany. Earlier that same day at 4:15 p.m., Chast and Mankoff will offer an informal seminar in the Standish Room, Science Library on the UAlbany uptown campus. Both events are free and open to the public.

Roz Chast has published more than a thousand cartoons in The New Yorker since 1978. Her frantic and disheveled characters have become icons of American humor. Michiko Kakutani, formerly of The New York Times, said, "Roz Chast feels -- and draws -- our pain. Our neurotic worries and genuine fears, our mundane and existential anxieties, our daydreams, nightmares, insecurities and guilty regrets." Her 2014 memoir in cartoons about caring for her aging parents, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, spent more than 100 weeks at #1 on The New York Times Bestseller List. Her new book of cartoons is Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York (2017).

In a profile published in The New York Times on October 11 of this year, Chast was described as: "exactly what you'd expect from her cartoons: a little neurotic, a lot New Yorky, openly phobic, smallish, with chunky glasses and a Brooklyn accent that could probably be traced to a single census tract in Flatbush. She loves the suburbs, she hates the suburbs, she loves the crowded city where you can be alone, and the Upper West Side, where the schleppy old guys of old have given way to the schleppy old guys of now."

Bob Mankoff, cartoonist and influential cartoon editor for The New Yorker, submitted more than 500 of his own cartoons to that publication before getting his first acceptance in 1977. He became cartoon editor in 1997, and is credited with nurturing a new generation of talent before retiring this past April. He currently serves as the Humor and Cartoon Editor at Esquire. He is the author of the memoir, How About Never -- Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons (2014), which The New York Times called "lucid, illuminating, and encouraging."

In an interview broadcast on PBS NewsHour, Mankoff spoke of the hold that cartoons have on us: "Part of what is wonderful about cartoons is, they're a little stupid, and they connect us with the stupidity of our own consciousness in life. We are ribbing ourselves, our own pretensions, our own middle class. And in doing that, of course, we become connoisseurs of unhappiness."

The event is cosponsored by the NYS Writers Institute, the New York State Office of Cultural Education and the Friends of the New York State Library.

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at www.nyswritersinstitute.org.