For instance, he mentions the critic Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia to say it came to him 'highly recommended. One scholarly book about fairy tales I recently came across was full of sentences such as this one: 'With oral, polyphonic folkloric forms serving as hypotext to multivocal, multimedia hypertextual versions of fairy tales, the cumulative and communal aspects of oral culture (granted an idealized one) can flourish.' Well, thank goodness for that.īruce Handy's generous, warm voice is just the kind you would want reading you bedtime stories. Academic books in particular often seem like surgeries, in which each pocket of joy or whimsy is carefully located and then drained. 'I'm in the milk and the milk's in me,' as Sendak's Mickey says in In the Night Kitchen.īecause of that special emotional resonance, bad writing about children's books can feel not just unhelpful but like a betrayal. That anecdote feels so right, so just, and so satisfying because it implies something true about the way children's books we have loved feel internal - cellular, almost - as if we've integrated them into our bodies. I mean, that's how primal, that's how animalistic, that's how passionate we are as small people,' Sendak said in a 1991 interview with Larry King.

Wild Things, Bruce Handy's new book about 'the joy of reading children's literature as an adult,' recounts a famous Maurice Sendak anecdote: After sending a young fan a drawing, Sendak got a letter back from his mother saying that the child had loved it so much that he ate it. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Wild Things Subtitle The Joy of Reading Children's Literature As an Adult Author Bruce Handy

Wild things by bruce handy