Roz Chast was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her cartoons began appearing in the New Yorker in 1978 - since then more than a thousand of her cartoons have appeared in the magazine, as well as in Scientific American, the Harvard Business Review, Redbook, Mother Jones, and many others. Michiko Kakutani has described her work as taking place in �a parallel universe to ours, utterly recognizable in all its banalities and weirdnesses, but slightly askew." She has written or illustrated more than a dozen books, and much of her work is collected in Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons of Roz Chast, 1978-2006.