Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein at The Brattle Theatre

Harvard Book Store welcomes Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein—beloved and longtime New Yorker cartoonists—for a discussion of their highly anticipated new graphic novel, The Two Saddest Kitchens: A Comics Conversation, a hilarious and all-too-relatable take on kitchen anxiety. They will be joined in conversation by Hillary Chute—Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University and author or editor of several titles on comics.

Tickets include admission for one and one hardcover copy of The Two Saddest Kitchens, pre-signed by Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein.

Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.

The New Yorker cartoonist duo, #1 New York Times bestselling author Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein, team up to pull back the curtain on our hilarious, all-too-relatable kitchen realities.

The kitchen is the “heart of the home,” or at least it’s supposed to be. But even when the countertops look tidy, there’s often madness lurking at the back of the refrigerator . . .
When celebrated New Yorker cartoonists Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein admitted to each other that their kitchens were far from shiny beacons of homemaking, they knew they couldn’t be the only ones who left the dishes to soak for a little too long.
In The Two Saddest Kitchens, Roz and Jason combine their hilarious cartoon sensibilities to take stock of what’s really going on in our kitchens—from Tupperware Drawer Tetris to the cabinet over the fridge where the forgotten yard-sale ice bucket and stale marshmallows go to die—filling each laugh-out-loud page with a new perspective on optimizing our kitchens and our cooking skills as they ponder the fancy utensils that will never be used, the recipes that will never be followed, and the people they will never be.
If you’ve ever found yourself hungrily wandering into the kitchen only to find too-ripe-even-for-banana-bread bananas and expired cheese, rest assured that Roz and Jason have already been there too—and this book is for you.

Roz Chast‘s cartoons began appearing in the New Yorker in 1978. She is the author of the graphic memoirs Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a #1 New York Times bestseller (100 weeks), a National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Kirkus Prize winner and finalist for the National Book Award; national bestseller I Must Be Dreaming; Going Into Town (Winner of the New York City Book Award); What I Hate: From A to Z; and her cartoon collections The Party, After You Left, and Theories of Everything, among others. She was awarded the Harvey Hall of Fame Award, and in 2024 was awarded the National Humanities Medal. She lives in Connecticut and New York. Photo Credit: Bill Hayes

Jason Adam Katzenstein is a cartoonist and comedy writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and MAD Magazine. He is the author and illustrator of the graphic memoir Everything Is an Emergency. He lives in New York. Photo Credit: Lauren_Roche

Hillary Chute is the Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University. Her work focuses on comics and graphic novels, contemporary fiction, visual studies, American literature, gender and sexuality studies, literature and the arts, critical theory, and media studies. She is the author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia University Press, 2010), Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard University Press, 2016), and Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (Harper, 2017). Her book Maus Now: Selected Writing, an edited volume, appeared from Pantheon in 2022. She is also associate editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011), which won a National Jewish Book Award, among other prizes. Chute serves on the Executive Committee of Northeastern’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. In 2024, she won the CAMD High Impact Teaching Award.