Publications about books for children and young adults
(art by Hanna Friederichs). We saw The Avengers last night–kinda long and the special effects in the last third of the movie too easily betrayed their origins, but it was diverting. I liked Thor more. As a child, I found the Marvel Comics universe a cooler and harsher place than Superman’s DC world, and on [...]
We remember the incomparable Maurice Sendak, longtime Friend of The Horn Book, with these articles about, interviews with, and writings and illustrations by the great man, along with select reviews of his books. It’s My Party: An Interview with Maurice Sendak by Leonard S. Marcus, from the September/October 2011 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. [...]
Maurice Sendak died last night at the age of 83. There will be many forthcoming tributes to this great artist, including quite a lot of material by and about him from The Horn Book Magazine, which we will be posting on our website for you as we can. But I wanted to take a minute [...]
“This is a very good start, really. Now, you might want to move that line just a tad to the left, and think a bit about your colors.”
I was of course kidding when I characterized the Sendak Fellowship as a reality show, but there are some aspects of it that are similar. Four people whose only things necessarily in common are talent and an interest in creating picture books share a large house for a month. They also share access to an [...]
Loosely based on a two-minute animation Sendak created with Jim Henson for Sesame Street in 1971, Bumble-Ardy revisits his long-standing preoccupations with childhood outsider-hood and saving-grace resilience, but with a new twist of extravagance taken straight from the operatic playbook of Giuseppe Verdi. We talked about all this at the artist’s kitchen table in a conversation recorded on May 12, 2011.
Bumble-Ardy made its first appearance back in 1971 as an animated short on Sesame Street featuring a boy who invited pigs to his ninth birthday party. Forty years later, the story makes its picture book debut, and Sendak has made some significant changes: all the characters are now pigs, and a prologue describes how Bumble-Ardy’s family neglected him for his first eight years and then “gorged, and got ate.”
