The New Yorker: From Cover to Cover with Francoise Mouly and Roz Chast

A century of New Yorker covers, from the person who has chosen them since 1993.

Francoise Mouly has been the art editor of The New Yorker for more than thirty years, and she has overseen more than sixteen hundred covers in that time, many of them named cover of the year by the American Society of Magazine Editors. Her book The New Yorker: From Cover to Cover is the Library's gift book selection for 2026. She charts the magazine's cover imagery decade by decade, picks out the illustrators who defined its identity, and returns to the covers that defined their moment: Steinberg's View of the World From 9th Avenue, the black-on-black silhouette of the towers in 9/11/01 that she conceived with Art Spiegelman and drew herself, and Barry Blitt's The Politics of Fear.

She will be in conversation with Roz Chast, whose cartoons and covers have appeared in the magazine continuously since 1978. Chast's 2014 memoir about caring for her aging parents, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, was the first graphic novel named a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Award, and it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography that year.

There is time for questions after the presentation, then a book signing. The program is cosponsored by Darien Library.

Good to know. Free, and registration is required. Register online or call 203-762-6334; registration closes at 5pm on the day of the talk. Elm Street Books will be on site selling From Cover to Cover and Chast's latest, The Two Saddest Kitchens, written with Jason Adam Katzenstein, and a portion of the proceeds goes to the Library.