In our cartoonists getting plaudits corner this week, Roz Chast has made the five book short list for the National Books Awards for her exemplary Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? which deals with the twilight years of her hilarious, annoying and lovable parents. She is entered in the non-fiction category and it is the first adultcomic, and only the third graphic novel over all to ever make the NBA lists. The entire category:

Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury)
Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes (Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt and Company)
John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (W.W. Norton & Company)
Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence (Liveright Publishing Corporation/ W.W. Norton & Company)

Sounds hard to beat a book with a title like the last one, but go Roz!

womanrebel-cover

Peter Bagge (Hate, Woman Rebel) is one of 34 winners of the USA Artists fellows program which includes a $50,000 grant.

The unrestricted awards, announced Monday, are from the United States Artists program, a grant-making organization funded by philanthropic foundations and individuals to support creativity. The 16 women and 18 men were selected by experts in their fields and were among 116 nominated artists living in the United States.

 

Among the other winners, singer Meshell Ndegeocello, artist Edouard Duval-Carrié and so on. Bagge won the Rockefeller fellow grant, which given that he is a cartoonist is…awesome. According to his bio on the page he’s working on cartoon biographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Rose Wilder Lane, also awesome.