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Take a look at Publishers Weekly (PW) editors' choices of 2015 best books to discover outstanding new titles. The lists include picture books, middle-grade, and young adult books.

The picture books range from well-known authors such as Drew Daywalt (The Day The Crayons Came Home) and Dave Eggers (This Bridge Will Not Be Gray) and Mordicai Gerstein (The Night World) to debut authors such as Guojing (The Only Child), who writes about growing up under China's one-child policy.

Middle-grade books include bestselling author Jodi Lynn Anderson (My Diary from the Edge of the World) and the amazing Brian Selznick (The Marvels).

Young adult titles range from a nonfiction title by M. T. Anderson (Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad) to Chicago-area writer Laura Ruby's new novel (Bone Gap). 

For more information visit PW or click on any of the above links.

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When I was a teenager in Colorado during the late '90s, I liked to climb 14ers — 14,000-foot mountains. I'd often hike with friends, and at the top we'd take a photograph of ourselves standing on the summit. We'd set the camera on a rock and use the timer function, or, if another hiker happened [...]

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The executives behind McSweeney’s intends to transform the company into a nonprofit. The independent publishing house was launched in 1998 as a for-profit business.

In an interview with SFGate, founder Dave Eggers explained why the company is heading in this direction: “We’ve always been a hand-to-mouth operation, and every year it gets just a little harder to be an independent publisher. An independent literary title that might have sold 10,000 copies 10 years ago might sell 6,000 now, for example…It just seemed that increasingly so many of the things that we wanted to do were nonprofit projects and were not really things that you could reasonably expect to break even on.”

This plan will be set in motion by next month with the hope of transitioning into a 501(c)(3) organization within a year. There will be no changes made to the editorial team. Once the switch takes place, the staff can actually take on projects that were put on hold including an expanded poetry series, a fiction anthology written by South Sudanese women, and the Collins Library.

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OR Books will publish an anthology focusing on income inequality within New York City called Tales of Two Cities: The Best & Worst of Times in New York. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to Housing Works.

How to Read a Novelist author John Freeman served as the editor for this book and wrote one of the pieces. Some of the other contributors include Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz, The Circle author Dave Eggers, and White Teeth author Zadie Smith.

Artist Molly Crabapple created five illustrations for this project. Follow this link to see photos of the book’s interior artwork. Freeman, Crabapple, and a few writers will appear at a launch party event in New York City on October 13th.

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The  2014 Brisbane Writers Festival had an inspiring launch on Thursday night when author/publisher Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What is the What – about the lost boys of Sudan) told a full tent  about the genesis of McSweeney’s publishing company and its 826 Valenica Writing Centres. The tutoring behind these pirate, […]

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This book is a series of conversations — dialogue only — between a guy and the various people he has kidnapped and shackled in separate buildings. Slowly you discover who he is and why he's done what he's done. Weird and intriguing, it's one of the most thought-provoking and engaging books I've read in a [...]

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National Book Award nominated author Dave Eggers has a surprise book coming out June 17th. The new book from Knopf is called Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? 

Amazon already has the book available for presale. Check it out:

In a barracks on an abandoned military base, miles from the nearest road, Thomas watches as the man he has brought wakes up. Kev, a NASA astronaut, doesn’t recognize his captor, though Thomas remembers him. Kev cries for help. He pulls at his chain. But the ocean is close by, and nobody can hear him over the waves and wind. Thomas apologizes. He didn’t want to have to resort to this. But they really needed to have a conversation, and Kev didn’t answer his messages. And now, if Kev can just stop yelling, Thomas has a few questions.

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Patricia Hruby Powell danced throughout the Americas and Europe with her dance company, One Plus One, before becoming a writer of children's books. She is the author of Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker, an extraordinary portrait of the passionate performer and civil rights advocate Josephine Baker written in exuberant verse. She lives in Champaign, Illinois. You can visit her online at talesforallages.com.

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The Best American Nonrequired Reading is out this week, collecting “the country’s best fiction, journalism, essays, comics, and humor” for readers of all ages. Below, we’ve collected all the information you need to submit your work to the anthology.

A group of high school students in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the Bay Area help choose the stories and edit alongside Dave Eggers. The editorial team also includes managing editor Daniel Gumbiner and assistant managing editors Henry W. Leung and Jia Tolentino. Check it out:

The Best American Nonrequired Reading committee —comprising students from dozens of different high schools —meets nearly every week of the year to read, debate, and compile this offbeat but vital anthology. Want to say something to us? Contact the BANR committee at nonrequired [@] gmail [dot] com. We’ll read everything you send us.

You can also mail print submissions (“whole periodicals or specific pieces”) to this address:

Best American Nonrequired Reading
826 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94117

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Trip City Presents “You’ll Have to Save That For Another Time” by best selling author (and McSweeny’s editor) Dave Eggers and artist Noah Van Sciver (The Hypo).

It is excellent. Read the whole thing in the link.

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Junot Diaz, Dave Eggers, and Louise Erdrich led the list of fiction finalists for the National Book Awards this year.

Follow the links below to read free samples of the finalists in every category–who is your favorite?

The finalists were announced on MSNBC this year, a new twist for the prestigious award. The winners will be revealed at a gala ceremony on November 14 in New York City at Cipriani Wall Street.

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Ray Bradbury died today, but writers around the world are reflecting on this great author’s legacy. William Morrow will publish Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury in July, a tribute to this great science fiction writer.

In a spooky coincidence, Neil Gaiman recorded the audiobook version of his contribution yesterday, “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury.”  The book also includes work by Dave Eggers, Joe Hill, Audrey Niffenegger, Margaret Atwood and Alice Hoffman.

Sam Weller, one of the book’s editors and the author of The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury posted this message: “I’ll never see you again. I’ll never see you again. I’ll never see you again. The problem with death, you once said to me, is that ‘it is so damned permanent.’ I will miss you dear man, mentor, father, friend. I type these words through heavy tears. I thank you for 12 glorious years of life, learning and laughter. You have blessed me and my family beyond measure, and for that, I thank you. I LOVE YOU.”

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Stephen Elliot, author of the books Happy Baby and The Adderal Diaries, is the founding editor of the online literary magazine, The Rumpus. He hopes in the age of email, twitter and texting, that people will still like to receive a letter now and again or “snail mail.”

Letters in the Mail is his new venture, in which for $5 a month, subscribers will receive three to four letters from people like author Dave Eggers, comedian Margaret Cho, graphic novelist Dean Haspiel and novelist and TV producer, Jonathan Ames. The first letter comes from Elliot himself.

But what’s inside these letters are actually very short stories. Already 1,500 people have subscribed in a matter of weeks. Elliot was inspired by the Brooklyn outfit One Story, which send one story per week for $21 a year.

The letters are made to look authentic by having doodles, real signatures and return addresses. Just sign up and they’ll be in a mailbox near you.

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While accepting the Mason Prize at George Mason University this weekend, novelist Stephen King gave fans a peek at a sequel to his classic novel, The Shining.

Above, we’ve embedded a short video clip from the event. Follow this link to read more about all the topics King discussed while receiving the award–past recipients included Chinua Achebe, Dave Eggers and Greg Mortenson.

Here’s more about the reading: “Doctor Sleep, his upcoming novel about a grown-up Danny Torrance from The Shining. In the book, Danny is a hospice worker who uses his powers to help ill patients to pass away without pain. Unfortunately, he runs afoul of a gang of wandering psychic vampires who feed on people’s energy.” (Via Matt Staggs)

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On September 6th, Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak will release Bumble-Ardy. This picture book will be the first publication Sendak has written and illustrated completely on his own since Outside Over There (1981).

Writer Dave Eggers profiled the 83-year-old Sendak for a piece in Vanity Fair (Eggers wrote The Wild Things, a novel loosely based on Where the Wild Things Are). According to the article, Sendak has spent the last three decades illustrating books and designing operas. 

Here’s more from the article: “Like all Sendakian rumpuses, it [Bumble-Ardy] gets out of hand, and for 10 pages we’re treated to the most bizarre tableau of celebrants, all in costume: pigs dressed as monsters, pigs dressed as cowboys and Indians, pigs dressed as old ladies painted garishly. As with any Sendak book, the pictures are full of references and echoes. One pig is reading a newspaper that says, WE READ BANNED BOOKS. A sheriff’s yellow badge calls back to the Warsaw Ghetto. Messages are written in Hebrew, Italian, Russian.” (via The Guardian)

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I'm not quite sure who this lovely lady is—Dionysus, I'm guessing—but I found her standing tall within a Philadelphia street festival, utterly and peaceably alone above the crowds (she was stilts-assisted). I return to her on this rainy morning because I feel her mood. Because I have looked out upon my pile of unread books and determined my short-term future.

Having just left Cleopatra (Stacy Schiff) in her tragic, epic Alexandria, I turn toward next titles. Some of them I've read before and will be re-reading. Some are brand-new both to the world and to me. Some are written by friends or friends of friends, one by a Pulitzer Prize winner who once surprised me with a glorious response to my Chicago Tribune review of her March, some by people I doubt I'll ever meet; two were gifts. I feel decadent, to be honest, to have found this time to read. But I have it; I'm claiming it; it will be forever mine.

My au courant (can I use that term this way?) book list, then:

Sweet Dreams, DeWitt Henry
When We Danced on Water, Evan Fallenberg (a Kindle book—about dance! about Berlin! Becca recommended!)
Dreamland Social Club, Tara Altebrando
Caleb's Crossing, Geraldine Brooks
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
The Origin of Stories, Brian Boyd
Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf
The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
Touchy Subjects, Emma Donoghue
The Blue Flower of Forgetfulness, Cyrus Samii
The Boneshaker, Kate Milford

Stay tuned for my responses.

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On March 5, 2011, 20,000 givers will help donate one million books to U.K. readers for World Book Night.

Jamie Byng, Canongate Books managing director and World Book Night committee chairman, conceived the event back in 2009. A group of booksellers, librarians, authors, broadcasters and others have chosen a list of 25 books to give away (the complete list follows below). Only 20,000 people will be invited to give away books for the program. Prospective givers have until January 4th to sign up–they can go to the World Book Night website and explain in 100 words or less why they want to participate.

John Le Carré‘s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold made the cut, and he had this statement: “No writer can ask more than this: that his book should be handed in thousands to people who might otherwise never get to read it, and who will in turn hand it to thousands more. That his book should also pass from one generation to another as a story to challenge and excite each reader in his time–that is beyond his most ambitious dreams.”

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Author Dave Eggers has been sketching and writing about the World Series this year for San Francisco’s Bay Citizen .

Egger’s home team, the San Francisco Giants, are seeking their first World Series win since 1954. They have won the first two games of the series against the Texas Rangers. Above, we’ve embedded one of Egger’s sketches. Follow this link to see the rest.

Here’s more from the Bay Citizen: “We invited San Francisco author and artist Dave Eggers, founder of McSweeney’s literary journal and the nonprofit writing center 826 Valencia, to the first game of the World Series. He spent the afternoon and evening with a sketchbook at AT&T Park; here is some of what he saw.”

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Dignity is a word I have long associated with Darin Strauss.  His refined mind and sensibilities were on display in novels like Chang and Eng.  A certain quietude pervaded interviews.  When I learned that Strauss was sending a memoir into the world, a memoir entrusted to McSweeney's (and hence, in some fashion, to the multiply talented and deeply generous Dave Eggers), I knew for certain what I'd be reading next.

I read Half a Life this morning, grateful for every white-steeped page.  It is, as you must have heard by now, the story of an accidental death—the story of what happened one day when Strauss set out to play some "putt putt" with his high school friends.  He was 18, behind the wheel of his father's Oldsmobile.  On the margin of the road, two cyclists pedaled forward.  Of a sudden, there was a zag, a knock, an "hysterical windshield." A cyclist, a girl from Strauss's school, lay dying on the road. She'd crossed two lanes of highway to reach Strauss's car.  He braked, incapable of forestalling consequences.

It was forever.  It was always.  A girl had died.  A boy had lived.  Strauss spent his college years, his twenties, his early thirties incapable of reconciling himself to the facts, of entrusting them to friends.  There's much he can't remember perfectly.  There are gaps, white space, breakage—all of which, in this McSweeney's production, is rendered with utmost decency—the thoughts broken into small segments, big breaths (blank pages) taken in between.  There is knowing here, not shouting.  There is an exploration of guilt, and no bravado. 

Half a Life sits now, on my shelf, beside Gail Caldwell's Let's Take the Long Way Home—two memoirs that transcend precisely because they are so quiet, so well considered, so honorable. These books, along with Rahna Reiko Rizzuto's Hiroshima in the Morning, give me hope that memoir, the form, is finding its center again.  There may not be any sure-fired truths, but there are consequences.  There may be stories, but they are always tangled.  There may be ache, but there is solace, too.  There may be drama, but in drama's wake, we stand.  In need of understanding.  In need of one another.

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One of the paradoxes of the teaching life is how much students can teach the teacher!  Not long ago, a creative writing student introduced me to the work of writer Dave Eggers and  his involvement in the formation of 826 Valencia — a writing centre for kids in the Mission district of San Francisco.  Colleague Aline has written about this centre in a previous post well worth checking out.

I had the distinct pleasure of visiting 826 Valencia while in San Francisco a few weeks ago.  While browsing in the brilliantly conceived and designed Pirate Store, I also got a chance to pick up a packet of student publications produced by the centre’s students.  Available to educators at a ten percent discount (another enlightened perk), the packet contained a newsletter called Straight-Up News by the kids of Everett Middle School, a Dictionary of New Words called FrisCoSWim, PizZinNeR, SKamissSioN, GirAfFEGheTti, SEeksIstEr and Other Words We Need to Write About Our Summer, a multi-authored booklet called 2 Seconds Plus: A Mixture of Thoughts and Images, a recipe booklet called The Kid’s Table, Issue No. 4 of Parasol and Paroxysm: The Journal of the Writing and Publishing Apprentices and Vol. 4 of Look Closer, a book of short student writings in Spanish and English.

As these titles indicate, the assembled array of print writings in forms of booklets, magazines, newspapers and dictionaries cover the gamut in the way kids can express themselves in words.  Did you know that a chinburrito, for example, is ‘Chinese food in a burrito’? (dictionary)  Or that ‘femcee’ is the term used to describe female voices in the art of spoken poetry? (Straight-Up News)  Or that Sienna Park is looking for her housecat sister Heather, who can talk in three languages — Catish, Korean and English? (2 Seconds Plus)  And that Margot learned to like the ‘brown thingy-ma-bobs’ on her pizza that turned out to be mushrooms? (The Kids Table)

I enjoyed reading the writing of the students of 826 Valencia.   Their energy and creativity are inspiring to me as a writing teacher.  Do you get inspiration from your students?  What interesting things have they written about?  If you can share, please do!

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Inculcating a Love for Reading
The Wall Street Journal suggests children’s books that might help repel the armies of electronic distraction.

“Leave a Mark” online auction – If I Stay by Gayle Forman
The latest offering in the “Leave a Mark” auctions benefiting First Book is a marked-up copy of Gayle Forman’s If I Stay. Bids are accepted online through 11:59 PM ET on Sunday, November 15 – cast your bid today!

Unlikely Word Origins Defined In Anonyponymous
How many words do you know that are named after real people? These words, called eponyms, fill a new book called Anonyponymous: The Forgotten People Behind Everyday Words. Read and listen to the review at NPR.org.

Q&A: ‘Literarian’ Dave Eggers talks about the writing life
Read the interview with Dave Eggers, best-known for his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, who will be honored November 18 at the National Book Awards.

Gift Books 2009, Part 1
Looking for great gift books for the  holidays? Shelf Awareness shares book suggestions on topics including: secrets of mysterious lives, travel books for the adventurous and Obamamania.

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After nearly a year of blogging your ears off about the Spike Jonze helmed adaptation, yesterday I finally saw "Where The Wild Things Are." I left the theater content and teary-eyed, and judging from a quick glance at the crowd, mostly in their 20s... Read the rest of this post

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Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he holds the title of Distinguished Scholar.  His newest book, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters-how they have evolved over time, what functions they serve, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future.  It is with this monstrous perspective (sorry I know it is an awful pun) that Asma looks at Where the Wild Things Are in honor of its release this weekend.

With hindsight it seems fitting that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) first appeared in cultural space somewhere between Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Where the Wild Things Are is a rock’n’roll story, about being misunderstood, rebelling against authority, letting your hair down, and generally indulging in the Dionysian rumpus. It’s not surprising, then, that the new film version (Warner Brothers) is brought to us by skateboarding music-video director Spike Jonze and literary mega-hipster Dave Eggers.

As the movie’s trailer reminds us, “Inside all of us is a wild thing.” And in our therapeutic era, we generally accept that it is good and healthy to visit our wild things –to let them off their chains, let them howl at the moon. You can also taste some of this Romanticism in the recent relish of the Woodstock anniversary, with its celebration of noble primitivism. But the hippy view of “the wild” is quite sunny, whereas Sendak (who lost family during the Holocaust) wanted to acknowledge some of the darker aspects of uncivilized life (even, or especially, through the eyes of a child). Despite these darker notes, however, Where the Wild Things Are still affirms the idea that danger, at least in small doses, is good for you. And this latest fascination with beasties, together with the approach of Halloween, reminds us that we have a love/hate relationship with monsters generally. We are simultaneously attracted and repulsed by them.

Sendak’s monsters are just repulsive enough to be alien, foreign, and mysterious, but they’re also vaguely cute and familiar enough for us to identify with them and recognize our emotional selves in them. Sendak claimed in later interviews that the monsters were based loosely on his boyhood perceptions of his frightening aunts and uncles. Like a distant relation, our uncanny monsters are alien aspects of our own identity –they are parts of who we are, unfamiliar aspects of our psyches. This common way to read monsters –as primitive, uncivilized versions of ourselves –is obvious in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or the forthcoming Universal Pictures remake The Wolfman, starring Anthony Hopkins and Benicio del Toro. Monster stories have a cathartic function, in the sense that they give our tamed, repressed impulses a brief holiday of Bacchanalian revelry. And after these virtual trips to our own hearts of darkness, we can better return to our everyday social world of compromise, accommodation, and compliance. On this account, the monster story is the favorite genre of our reptilian brains (the real home where the wild things are).

However, every era has its own uses and abuses of monsters. The lesson of Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is often taken as a liberal lesson in tolerance: we as a society must not create outcasts, or persecute those who are different. Or consider that the medieval mind was obsessed with giants and mythical creatures as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. And the medieval period also began the Church’s long fascination with demon possession. For the Greeks and Romans, monsters were prodigies –warnings of impending disaster.

Besides the cuddly monsters of Where the Wild Things Are, our present day fascination seems dominated by zombies, vampires, and serial killers. Why are we so entranced by these specific creatures –why do we love to hate them?

Not only are there more zombies around these days, but they seem to be getting faster and more aggressive. Gone are the slow lumbering goons of the George Romero-era zombies, and in their stead we have lightning fast undead predators. Zombies, just like vampires, serial killers and most other monsters are terrifying because you cannot really reason with them. Unlike your other enemies, you cannot appeal to monsters to recognize that you’re a good hearted person, or you’ve got kids, or you really understand their pain, or you only want to understand them in the name of science. They’ll pummel you and eat you anyway. There’s not much common ground, in terms of rationality or emotional solidarity. One suspects there is a link between a decade of American fear of terrorists, and a rise in zombie monsters that do not respond to negotiation.

But zombies also have unique qualities that trigger the dynamic of love/hate, attraction/repulsion. Everybody wants to live forever. That’s a given. If you can’t remember wanting to live forever, then you’re probably a successful and functional adult. But the inner narcissist –the one that thinks he’s God and wants to live forever –is still in you somewhere, buried deep. The zombie, like the vampire, is a kind of immortal: chop his leg off, he’s still coming; blow a hole in his chest, he’s still coming. His life span is indefinite and he’s indestructible. So the little narcissist inside us really likes the immortal aspect of the zombie and the vampire. We unconsciously crave that kind of staying power and durability, but our narcissistic desire to cheat death is impossible to sustain in the face of mature experience. Reality regularly reminds us, as we are growing up, that we will not cheat death. No one actually cheats death. To carry on in the fantasy world of the narcissistic inner-child is impossible given the brute facts of our animal mortality. So the universal urge to live forever must be repressed, as we grow up. This repression means that the desire must be transformed from positive to negative –from something we like, to something disgusting (just like in potty training).

We love to hate zombies because they simultaneously manifest our craving for immortality, and our more mature realization that the flesh always decays. As “living dead,” all zombies elicit those conflicting impulses in our psyche. The more disgusting they are, the more we are reminded of our inevitable decomposition, but the more they keep getting up and chasing, the more we are delighted by the promise of immortality. The psyche seems to carry out an unconscious vacillation: the zombies live on forever, those lucky sods, but wait…they’re disgusting and repellent and…and…run!

Vampires are a much more glamorized and sexualized version of the attraction/repulsion dynamic. From Polidori’s original Vampyre, to Stoker’s Dracula, to today’s teen vampires of Twilight, the blood drinkers are, generally speaking, totally hot. The play of sexual taboos in vampire stories is well appreciated. But in addition to the always titillating presence of neck-kissing and the exchange of bodily fluids, we have to recognize that vampires are romantic monsters. They are incarnations of the irresistible but damaging femme fatal for boys, and the “bad boy” or cad for girls. A vampire is frequently an archetype of the charismatic, handsome, man, who seduces women by his very indifference toward them. Women find him alluring and seek chase, only to discover too late that they are broken upon his heartless unmovable nature. The vampire holds out the promise of love, but alas lacks even humanity.

Vampires and zombies share another well-spring of horror: you could easily become one. You or your loved one is just a little bite away from contracting the disease. In the age of AIDS, swine flu, SARS, and myriad pandemic anxieties, it’s easy to see why monsters who transmit their monstrosity through bites (both sexual and gustatory) are especially frightening. In the medieval mind, monsters and demons were metaphysically different from you and I, and in the unlikely event that you were transformed into one you could be sure it was the result of serious sin. Nowadays, however, casual, accidental contact can make you “one of them.”

One suspects that losing one’s humanity, or becoming one of them, is also at play in our dread fascination with serial killers –real and imagined monsters. We have extensive media coverage, and corresponding public appetite, for real serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, as well as the popular fictional characters Norman Bates, Sweeney Todd, Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, Michael Myers, and so on. Why are so many of us repelled, disgusted, and morally outraged, but also willing to lay out cash to see psychotic murderers hang people on meat hooks, sever limbs, and of course eat their innocent victims?

Before the 1950s, very few people would have suggested that a serial killer was anything like you, or I, or churchgoing folks. And yet, now it is commonplace for people to think of psychopaths as just slight (albeit horrifying) deviations on the otherwise normal brain or psyche. A murdering psychopath is not a demon-possessed creature or an offspring of Cain, but a guy who failed to develop normal levels of human compassion. Most of us believe that the exact causes of monstrous serial killing will be found eventually in brain science or developmental psychology or some combination, but we don’t think that Gacy, Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter, or Leatherface, are metaphysically different from us. We have secularized the evil of such psychopaths only recently, and maybe this is one reason why we love to hate them.

Just as Sendak’s monsters give us a kind of Rousseauian view of going “back to the wild” (wherein the authentic self is discovered, uncorrupted by society), so too Leatherface and similar monsters of “torture porn” give us a kind of Freudian view of going native. We’re attracted to serial killers because they lack conscience, hurt their enemies with impunity, and feel very little. They do the stuff we might do, if we had not been socialized properly. We’re attracted to their animalistic primitive powers. But we’re simultaneously repulsed by them because they lack the precise qualities that make us human.

If Rousseau and the hippies are right, then our inner primitive monsters will be more like Sendak’s beasties; weird, a little dangerous, but ultimately helpful. If, however, Freud is right about the kinds of monsters inside us, then we shouldn’t go too often or too long to where the wild things are.

Like rock’n’roll, the wild primitivism of monsters is tempered by bourgeois (and simply human) needs for security, safety and stability. Howlin’ Wolf is sanitized into Elvis, the “long haired” Beatles have to wear suits, the mud-soaked Woodstock kids are ready to go home after the weekend, and Sendak’s little “Max” misses his mom and leaves his monsters to return to “his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him, and it was still hot.”

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Missed this at the time, but the New Yorker has a short selection from the Dave Eggers novelisation of Where the Wild Things (written after his work on the screenplay). The story, "Max at Sea," is online here and you can also read an interview with Eggers here. Required reading for both my Children's Writing and my Screenwriting students.

Here's a sampling of what he has to say:

The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there’s less pressure to figure all that out. So it was a matter of probing deeper into who Max is, what he wants, what his life is like at home and at school. And on the island, looking deeper into who the Wild Things are and what they want from Max, his life as their king, and why he leaves. From the beginning, though, Maurice was clear that he didn’t want the movie or the book to be timid adaptations. He wanted us to feel free to push and pull the original story in new directions.

And, oh my sweet heaven, take a look at this:



Eggers came up with the idea for this special edition, which unlike Margaret Wise Brown's original edition of The Fur Family uses artificial fur.

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It has been walking-and-sitting-outside weather, but I've been inside, piled high with work, feeling sunk beneath innumerable pressures. I'm in the final leg of a major edit of the Centennial novel, finishing up a client project, trying desperately to get the house in order, looking for time to get myself in order, too, before the academic year begins at Penn.

And I am missing books. I am missing easy strolls through bookstore aisles and time spent hovering over recommended reading tables. I am missing time on my deck, a book in my lap.

I am ten pages into Graceling; I'll finish that when some of this work clears. After that, I am headed to the bookstore to find out whether books like A Gate at the Stairs (Lorrie Moore) and Crow Planet (Lyanda Lynn Haupt) and Parallel Play (Tim Page) and Zeitoun (Dave Eggers) and Border Songs (Jim Lynch) and I'm So Happy for You (Lucinda Rosenfeld) are for me. I'll likely come home with some of those; no doubt I'll find and revel in the unexpected, too.

In the meantime, a big hug to Bermudaonion, for her deeply kind review of Undercover today. Bermudaonion has a lot in common, it seems, with my protagonist, Elisa. Which means she has a lot in common with me.

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