We stayed up past our bedtime to experience New Yorker contributors Patricia Marx and Roz Chast, previous collaborators on You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time and their ukulele band Ukelear Meltdown, in conversation about their new hilarious children’s book, Tired Town. Starring Nellie Bee Nightly—who is wide awake and not tired at all—this hilarious book is sure to have both kids and adults giggling, imbued with writer and humorist Marx’s wit and charm, and illustrator Chast’s bright colors and expressive characters—which looked amazing on our auditorium screen! Marx and Chast came together for a lighthearted conversation about children’s literature, art and illustration, and, of course, the importance of getting plenty of sleep.
Featured Book
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Tired Town
By Patricia Marx & Roz Chast
Published by Roaring Brook Press
This is the story of Nellie Bee Nightly, who is not tired at all. And swears she never will be!
The popcorn is too pooped to pop, and the nightstand is too tired to stand up straight and must lie down—but Nellie? Nope, she’s wide awake, and not ready for bedtime AT ALL. Instead, she gives her goldfish a mustache and hangs her bed from the ceiling so that she can install a swimming pool in her room. Nellie, after all, went to sleep last night, and shouldn’t that be enough sleep to last a lifetime?
Wonderfully quirky, subversively sweet, and effortlessly classic, Tired Town is a brilliant new bedtime story from humorist Patricia Marx and Roz Chast, the #1 New York Times-bestselling and award-winning creator of Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir and I Must Be Dreaming.
In Conversation
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Patricia Marx
Patricia Marx
Patricia Marx has been contributing to the New Yorker since 1989. She is a former writer for Saturday Night Live and Rugrats, and is the author of several books, including Let’s Be Less Stupid, Him Her Him Again the End of Him, and Starting from Happy. Marx was the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon. She has taught at Princeton, New York University, and Stonybrook University. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Photo Credit: Catherine Chalmers
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Roz Chast
Roz Chast
Roz Chast grew up in Brooklyn. Her cartoons began appearing in the New Yorker in 1978. Since then, she has published more than one thousand cartoons in the magazine. She has written and illustrated many books, including What I Hate: From A to Z, and the collections of her own cartoons The Party After You Left and Theories of Everything. She is the editor of The Best American Comics 2016 and the illustrator of Calvin Trillin’s No Fair! No Fair! and Daniel Menaker’s The African Svelte, all published in Fall 2016.
Photo Credit: Bill Franzen
