children’s books
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Wimpy Bookstore with Strong Ideas
How does a child experience a book? It’s such a different experience reading on a tablet or a smartphone. A physical book has a heft, a permanence that you don’t get digitally. So our hope is that the bookstore will…
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Buy the Books
The lack of people of color in children’s book is stifling, but what’s even scarier is a generational staying of the trend. Kathleen Horning examines this stagnancy for the School Library Journal: If we want to see change, if we…
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Grimm Fairy Tales Just Got Grimmer
British art giant David Hockney is best known for pop-art paintings like A Bigger Splash, but he has also worked in many other mediums—including, it seems, illustrations for children’s books. Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova highlights a recently reissued collection…
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A Helpful Guide to Writing Children’s Books
If it’s always been your secret ambition to write a children’s picture book, Buzzfeed Books can help you get started with this handy-dandy thirteen-step guide, illustrated by the Rumpus’s own Jason Novak (with a little help from his daughter Gertie). There’s some golden advice…
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Children’s Books Still Dominated by White Boys
We’ve blogged before about the issue of representation in children’s and young-adult literature. This post by Soraya Chemaly looks at the numbers and finds that kid-lit books feature twice as many male protagonists as female ones (three times as many…
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The Wild Thing With People Feet Was My Favorite
The one with people feet, I thought, had once been human, but had changed. He grew wild. Everyone grew wild at times…
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Surprising Children’s Book Authors
Sylvia Plath wrote a children’s book…and apparently Jim Carrey is going to as well? Brain Pickings has scans of the text and charming illustrations of Plath’s book, a story about young Max Nix and his bright yellow It Doesn’t Matter…
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Biting the Hand That Stamps Your Library Book
Last week, British children’s author Terry Deary (famous for his Horrible Histories series) declared that public libraries are unnecessary relics of a past age; they cheat authors of their rightful earnings and “are doing nothing for the book industry.” A…
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The Sensible Nonsense Project
What was your favorite book as a child? The Phantom Tollbooth? Little House on the Prairie? Something by Roald Dahl that was kind of grotesque and frightening but also a complete immersion in delight? The Sensible Nonsense Project collects short…
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The Latest in Superhero Stories
Michael Chabon knows how to turn a phrase. Complex language is part of what makes his work so idiosyncratically his and his veteran wordsmith tendencies are widely applicable and translatable over different mediums (he’s co-writing an HBO series with his…
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Twain in Pictures
Mark Twain’s humor is post-age. His children’s book, Advice to Little Girls was published in 1865 and was a comedic gem amongst the moralizing, heavy-on-the-role-models books of the genre. His story is recast as a slideshow of illustrations by the…