children’s books

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Green Branch Library to Branch Out with Bookmobile

    The Green Branch Library has done amazing work providing books and other materials about social and environmental justice to kids in Oakland. Now they’re hoping to expand their reach to kids all over the Bay Area with a a bookmobile!…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…