Roz Chast: While You Were Sleeping

Tom Barbash is the author of four books as well as reviews, essays, and articles for publications such as McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Believer, Narrative Magazine, ZYZZYVA, and The New York Times. His short story collection Stay Up With Me was nominated for the Folio Prize and picked as a Best Book of the Year by the Independent of London, NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News. His most recent book, the novel The Dakota Winters, was a national bestseller and named as an Editors Choice by The New York Times Book Review. He teaches in the writing program at California College of the Arts.

Roz Chast is a founding member of the power duo Ukelear Meltdown. Her cartoons began appearing in The New Yorker in 1978, where she has since published more than one thousand of her drawings. She is the author of the graphic memoirs Going Into Town, which won the New York City Book Award; the #1 New York Times bestseller Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize winner and finalist for the National Book Award; What I Hate: From A to Z; and her cartoon collections The Party, After You Left, I Must Be Dreaming, and Theories of Everything, among others. In October 2024, she was awarded a National Humanities medal by President Biden in a ceremony at the White House. Chast’s latest work, The Two Saddest Kitchens: A Comics Conversation, co-written with Jason Adam Katzenstein, will be forthcoming in October 2026.

John Fugelsang is a comedian, actor, and broadcaster on SiriusXM. He's been killed on CSI, picketed by Westboro Baptist Church, was the host of America’s Funniest Home Videos, and has appeared frequently on news commentary shows on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR. He appears in the features The Girl on the Train, Coyote Ugly, and The Whole Truth. In 2016, his film Dream On was named Best Documentary at the New York Independent Film Festival. His first book, Separation of Church and Hate—A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds, was published in 2025.

Tessa Hadley is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction, including the critical study Henry Jamesand theImagination of Pleasure, the short story collections Married Love,After the Funeral, and Bad Dreams, which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and the novels Accidents in the Home, Everything Will Be Alright, Clever Girl, The Past, Late in the Day, and Free Love. Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker and Granta. Hadley has been honored with the O. Henry Award, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, among others. She teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University in England. Hadley’s latest novel, The Party, was published in 2024.

Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Personal Days, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His debut story collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, was published in 2025. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, TheNew York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Bookforum, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former literary editor of The Village Voice, and has worked in newspapers and book publishing. In 2025, Park received the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Deborah Pease Prize from A Public Space. His memoir, Three Tenses, is forthcoming in August 2026, followed in the fall by The Repairer of Reputations, a work of weird horror bound in a special edition with the 1895 Robert W. Chambers classic of the same title.

Jason Ralph recently co-starred as a series regular on the last season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Three Women opposite Shailene Woodley. Previously he starred as Quentin Coldwater in Syfy’s The Magicians. He has recurred on the Paramount series Younger, NBC’s Aquarius, WGN’s Manhattan, and the CBS series Madam Secretary. Additional notable credits include Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things; J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year opposite Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac, HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness, The Night Of, Looking, Netflix’s Grace and Frankie, and the CW series Gossip Girl. On stage, Jason starred in the New World Stages/Off-Broadway cast of Peter and the Starcatcher directed by Alex Timbers and Roger Reese. He was also seen as Chris Conrad in On the Head of Pin written and directed by Frank Winters. He is a founding member and former Artistic Director of the Strangemen Theater Company in New York City.

Rita Wolf was featured in Richard Nelson's The Michaels and What Happened? The Michaels Abroad, at The Public Theater. Additional theater credits include An Ordinary Muslim at New York Theatre Workshop, The American Pilot at Manhattan Theatre Club, for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, and the World Premiere of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul at New York Theatre Workshop and BAM. She appeared in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance with the Transport Group and Out of Time at The Public Theater, both co-productions with The National Asian American Theatre Company, and was a recent Beinecke Fellow at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale while appearing in Caryl Churchill's Escaped Alone at Yale Rep. She appeared in Stephen Frears/Hanif Kureishi's film My Beautiful Laundrette filmed for Channel 4 in the UK, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary and has been re-released in cinemas worldwide.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among other novels. A musical of The Interestings is in development. Wolitzer was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and also writes books for young readers. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a yearlong intensive for emerging novelists.

CREDITS

“The Wife on Ambien,” by Ed Park, as published in The New Yorker (July 16, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Ed Park. Used by permission of the author.

“Bad Dreams,” by Tessa Hadley, from Bad Dreams and Other Stories (Harper, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Tessa Hadley. Used by permission of the author.

“Stay Up With Me,” by Tom Barbash, from Stay Up With Me (Ecco, 2013). Copyright © 2013 by Tom Barbash. Used by permission of the author.

Excerpts from I Must Be Dreaming, by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023). Copyright © 2023 by Roz Chast. Used by permission of the author.