Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Friday, May 28, 2021

Great Books by Women Authors

On March 29, 2021 by Alexis Rossi posted the following in the Internet Archives, I thought it worth sharing. The books listed are only a small taste of what is on the links.

On March 8th New York Public Library’s Gwen Glazer published a wonderful list of books in celebration of International Women’s Day:365 Books by Women Authors to Celebrate International Women’s Day All Year.

In the spirit of continuing to celebrate female authors past the confines of Women’s History Month, the Internet Archive gathered some of these books into a special collection called Great Books by Women Authors to make it easier to find your next exceptional read. You will also find these books via Open Library as listed below. Happy reading!

 

GREAT BOOKS BY WOMEN AUTHORS

Leila Aboulela, The Kindness of Enemies

Susan Abulhawa, The Blue Between Sky and Water

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

Svetlana Alexievich, Voices From Chernobyl

Clare Allan, Poppy Shakespeare

Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

Karin Altenberg, Island of Wings

Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies

Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim

Natacha Appanah, The Last Brother

Chloe Aridjis, Asunder

Bridget Asher, All of Us and Everything

Margaret Atwood, Oryx & Crake

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Mariama Bâ, Scarlet Song

Toni Cade Bambara, Those Bones Are Not My Child

Gioconda Belli, The Inhabited Woman

Karen Bender, Refund

Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III

Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters

Lauren Buekes, The Shining Girls

NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Leonora Carrington, The hearing trumpet

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee

Susan Choi, American Woman

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Sonya Chung, Long for This World

Caryl Churchill, Top Girls

Lucille Clifton, Mercy

Simin Daneshvar, Sutra & Other Stories

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light

Meaghan Daum, Unspeakable

Dola de Jong, The Tree and the Vine

Grazia Deledda, After the Divorce

Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day

Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson

Joan Didion, Democracy

Rita Dove, On the Bus With Rosa Parks

Yasmine El Rashidi, Chronicle of a Last Summer

Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood

Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

Lauren Francis-Sharma, Til the Well Runs Dry

Ru Freeman, On Sal Mal Lane

Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances

Mary Gaitskill, The Mare

Petina Gappah, The Book of Memory

Elena Garro, First love ; &, Look for my obituary

Louise Gluck, Faithful and Virtuous Night

Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist

Jorie Graham, Erosion

Linda LeGarde Grover, The dance boots

Paula Gunn Allen, America the Beautiful: Last Poems

Marilyn Hacker, Names

Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

Eve Harris, The Marrying of Chani Kaufman

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

Bessie Head, The Collector of Treasures

Amy Hempel, Reasons to Live

Cristina Henriquez, The Book of Unknown Americans

Christine Dwyer Hickey, The Cold Eye of Heaven

Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift

Alice Hoffman, Survival Lessons

Sara Sue Hoklotubbe, Deception on All Accounts

bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

Keri Hulme, The Bone People

Dương Thu Hương, Paradise of the Blind

Hồ Xuân Hương, Spring Essence

Ulfat Idilbi, Grandfather’s Tale

Elfriede Jelinek, Women As Lovers

Han Kang, The Vegetarian

Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club

Kazue Kato, Blue Exorcist

Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey

Porochista Khakpour, The Last Illusion

Vénus Khoury-Ghata, A House at the Edge of Tears

Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us

Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

Natsuo Kirino, Out

Sana Krasikov, One More Year

Jean Kwok, Girl in Translation

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

Laila Lalami, Secret Son

Nella Larsen, Passing

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family

Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

Yiyun Li, Kinder Than Solitude

Gloria Lisé, Departing at Dawn

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

Inverna Lockpezer, Cuba: My Revolution

Alia Mamdouh, The Loved Ones

Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess

Ronit Matalon, The Sound of Our Steps

Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

Eimear McBride, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

Ai Mi, Under the Hawthorn Tree

Gabriela Mistral, Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral

Nadifa Mohamed, Black Mamba Boy

Lorrie Moore, Bark

line.

Monday, May 20, 2019

Love of Books

“In each word, all words. — Yet, speaking, like writing, engages us in a separating movement, an oscillating and vacillating departure.”  Maurice Blanchot

My grandson is 8 and he is a reader. My wife believes that if a child can read, they can do, almost anything. I agree. I have always been a reader since I could remember and when I was his age, I loved books just as much as I hope he does. In the 1950s there was no World Wide Web, no Instagram, no instant communications, nor was there Facebook. We did not have a TV, so we could only learn about the world from our parents, the radio, our friends or from printed books.

We were poor by today’s standards when I was his age and buying a book was not an option, but belonging to the library was an option. So, most of what I read came from our library. Every two weeks we would go to the library and while my mom picked out her books, I would browse the shelves reading covers and opening up books to sneak a quick read of a few pages. I wanted to spend hours grazing on the feast that was there for us, but time was always too short. I would pick out about 5 or 6 books that would capture my attention for the next two weeks.

Books are special, there is something magical about a book — the texture of it in your fingers and the way it looks on the stand by your bed or snuggled in with others in the bookshelf.

During the day, after school I had chores, so the only time I could read was when I went to bed. That's when a new world would open up to me in the books I loved to read. When my mom would come in and say lights out I would read under the bedclothes with a flashlight. I was always a bit nervous that I would be caught and the book hauled away, but I never was caught. 

I read stories of exotic places and I imagined I was there.  I read about Tarzan of the Apes, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Fin and found the genre of Science Fiction and Mystery which I still read today. And the more I read, the more I wanted to read.

Reading set my imagination on fire, I remember watching the story of Tom Sawyer on TV when I was about 16 and I thought, he doesn't look like the person I saw when I read the book. 

Why do we read?  We read to remember. We read to forget. We read to make ourselves and remake ourselves and save ourselves. “I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life,” Mary Oliver wrote in looking back on how books saved her. 

I read and it helped define me as I grew up; many of us read to understand who we are and why we are here. We read to become selves. The gift of reading is that books can become both the oxygen to keep you from suffocating and the very wind that sculpts the canyons of your life, turning it in this direction or that, crossing great distances and opening new territories of being, cutting through even the toughest foundation. 

Hermann Hesse wrote in his visionary 1930 meditation on “the magic of the book” and why we will always remain under its generous spell, no matter how the technologies of reading may change.

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Wednesday, December 18, 2013

13 best children's books of 2013 part 2

I subscribe to a great weekly Newsletter called Brain Pickings. Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, who has also written for Wired UK, The New York Times, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, and The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. In the latest post Maria lists the 13 Best Childrens books of 2013. The first six I published yesterday, here are the rest. Her list is interesting and well worth the read. For the entire newsletter and to subscribe, go here. 


7. THE MIGHTY LALOUCHE

The more you win, the more you win, the science of the “winner effect” tells us. The same interplay of biochemistry, psychology and performance thus also holds true of the opposite — but perhaps this is why we love a good underdog story, those unlikely tales of assumed “losers” beating the odds to triumph as “winners.” Stories like this are fundamental to our cultural mythology of ambition and anything-is-possible aspiration, and they speak most powerfully to our young and hopeful selves, to our inner underdogs, to the child who dreams of defeating her bully in blazing glory.

That ever-alluring parable is at the heart of The Mighty Lalouche (public library), written by Matthew Olshan, who famously reimagined Twain’s Huckleberry Finn with an all-girl cast of characters, and illustrated by the inimitable Sophie Blackall, one of the most extraordinary book artists working today, who has previously given us such gems as her drawings of Craigslist missed connections and Aldous Huxley’s only children’s book. It tells the heartening story of a humble and lithe early-twentieth-century French postman named Lalouche, his profound affection for his pet finch Geneviève, and his surprising success in the era’s favorite sport of la boxe française, or French boxing.

8. GOBBLE YOU UP

For nearly two decades, independent India-based publisher Tara Books has been giving voice to marginalized art and literature through a collective of artists, writers, and designers collaborating on beautiful books based on regional folk traditions, producing such gems as Waterlife, The Night Life of Trees, and Drawing from the City. A year after I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail — one of the best art books of 2012, a magnificent 17th-century British “trick” poem adapted in a die-cut narrative and illustrated in the signature Indian folk art style of the Gond tribe — comes Gobble You Up (public library), an oral Rajasthani trickster tale adapted as a cumulative rhyme in a mesmerizing handmade treasure released in a limited edition of 7,000 numbered handmade copies, illustrated by artist Sunita and silkscreened by hand in two colors on beautifully coarse kraft paper custom-made for the project. What makes it especially extraordinary, however, is that the Mandna tradition of tribal finger-painting — an ancient Indian art form practiced only by women and passed down from mother to daughter across the generations, created by soaking pieces of cloth in chalk and lime paste, which the artist squeezes through her fingers into delicate lines on the mud walls of village huts — has never before been used to tell a children’s story.

And what a story it is: A cunning jackal who decides to spare himself the effort of hunting for food by tricking his fellow forest creatures into being gobbled up whole, beginning with his friend the crane; he slyly swallows them one by one, until the whole menagerie fills his belly — a play on the classic Meena motif of the pregnant animal depicted with a baby inside its belly, reflecting the mother-daughter genesis of the ancient art tradition itself.

9. BALLAD

The best, most enchanting stories live somewhere between the creative nourishment of our daydreams and the dark allure of our nightmares. That’s exactly where beloved French graphic artist Blexbolex transports us in Ballad (public library) — his exquisite and enthralling follow-up to People, one of the best illustrated books of 2011, and Seasons.

This continuously evolving story traces a child’s perception of his surroundings as he walks home from school. It unfolds over seven sequences across 280 glorious pages and has an almost mathematical beauty to it as each sequence exponentially blossoms into the next: We begin with school, path, and home; we progress to school, street, path, forest, home; before we know it, there’s a witch, a stranger, a sorcerer, a hot air balloon, and a kidnapped queen. All throughout, we’re invited to reimagine the narrative as we absorb the growing complexity of the world — a beautiful allegory for our walk through life itself.



10. THE DARK

Daniel Handler — beloved author, timelessly heartening literary jukeboxer — is perhaps better-known by his pen name Lemony Snicket, under which he pens his endlessly delightful children’s books. In fact, they owe much of their charisma to the remarkable creative collaborations Snicket spawns, from 13 Words illustrated by the inimitable Maira Kalman to Who Could It Be At This Hour? with artwork by celebrated cartoonist Seth. Snicket’s 2013 gem, reminiscent in spirit of Maya Angelou’s Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, is at least as exciting — a minimalist yet magnificently expressive story about a universal childhood fear, titled The Dark (public library) and illustrated by none other than Jon Klassen.

I think books that are meant to be read in the nighttime ought to confront the very fears that we’re trying to think about. And I think that a young reader of The Dark will encounter a story about a boy who makes new peace with a fear, rather than a story that ignores whatever troubles are lurking in the corners of our minds when we go to sleep.

11. JANE, THE FOX AND ME

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality,” Nora Ephron wrote. “If I can’t stand the world I just curl up with a book, and it’s like a little spaceship that takes me away from everything,” Susan Sontag told an interviewer, articulating an experience at once so common and so deeply personal to all of us who have ever taken refuge from the world in the pages of a book and the words of a beloved author. It’s precisely this experience that comes vibrantly alive in Jane, the Fox, and Me (public library) — a stunningly illustrated graphic novel about a young girl named Hélène, who, cruelly teased by the “mean girls” clique at school, finds refuge in Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre. In Jane, she sees both a kindred spirit and aspirational substance of character, one straddling the boundary between vulnerability and strength with remarkable grace — just the quality of heart and mind she needs as she confronts the common and heartbreaking trials of teenage girls tormented by bullying, by concerns over their emerging womanly shape, and by the soul-shattering feeling of longing for acceptance yet receiving none.

Written by Fanny Britt and illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault — the artist behind the magnificent Virginia Wolf, one of the best children’s books of 2012 — this masterpiece of storytelling is as emotionally honest and psychologically insightful as it is graphically stunning. What makes the visual narrative especially enchanting is that Hélène’s black-and-white world of daily sorrow springs to life in full color whenever she escapes with Brönte.

12. MY FIRST KAFKA

Sylvia Plath believed it was never too early to dip children’s toes in the vast body of literature. But to plunge straight into Kafka? Why not, which is precisely what Brooklyn-based writer and videogame designer Matthue Roth has done in My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs (public library) — a magnificent adaptation of Kafka for kids. With stunning black-and-white illustrations by London-based fine artist Rohan Daniel Eason, this gem falls — rises, rather — somewhere between Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak, and the Graphic Canon series.

The idea came to Roth after he accidentally started reading Kafka to his two little girls, who grew enchanted with the stories. As for the choice to adapt Kafka’s characteristically dark sensibility for children, Roth clearly subscribes to the Sendakian belief that grown-ups project their own fears onto kids, who welcome rather than dread the dark. Indeed, it’s hard not to see Sendak’s fatherly echo in Eason’s beautifully haunting black-and-white drawings.

Much like Jonathan Safran Foer used Street of Crocodiles to create his brilliant Tree of Codes literary remix and Darwin’s great-granddaughter adapted the legendary naturalist’s biography into verse, Roth scoured public domain texts and various translations of Kafka to find the perfect works for his singsong transformations: the short prose poem “Excursion into the Mountains,” the novella “The Metamorphosis,” which endures as Kafka’s best-known masterpiece, and “Josefine the Singer,” his final story.

“I don’t know!”
I cried without being heard.

“I do not know.”

If nobody comes,
then nobody comes.

I’ve done nobody any harm.
Nobody’s done me any harm.
But nobody will help me.

A pack of nobodies
would be rather fine,
on the other hand.

I’d love to go on a trip — why not? –
with a pack of nobodies.

Into the mountains, of course.
Where else?


13. MY FATHER’S ARMS ARE A BOAT

The finest children’s books have a way of exploring complex, universal themes through elegant simplicity and breathless beauty. From my friends at Enchanted Lion, collaborators on Mark Twain’s Advice to Little Girls and makers of some of the most extraordinary picture-books you’ll ever encounter, comes My Father’s Arms Are a Boat (public library) by writer Stein Erik Lunde and illustrator Øyvind Torseter. This tender and heartening Norwegian gem tells the story of an anxious young boy who climbs into his father’s arms seeking comfort on a cold sleepless night. The two step outside into the winter wonderland as the boy asks questions about the red birds in the spruce tree to be cut down the next morning, about the fox out hunting, about why his mother will never wake up again. With his warm and assuring answers, the father watches his son make sense of this strange world of ours where love and loss go hand in hand.

Above all, My Father’s Arms Are a Boat is about the quiet way in which boundless love and unconditional assurance can lift even the most pensive of spirits from the sinkhole of existential anxiety.

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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

13 Best Childrens books of 2013

I subscribe to a great weekly Newsletter called Brain Pickings. Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, who has also written for Wired UK, The New York Times, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, and The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. In the latest post Maria lists the 13 Best Childrens books of 2013. Her list is interesting and well worth the read. For the entire newsletter and to subscribe, go here. I will post the rest of her list tomorrow. The hard to please child will love anyone of these books.

This is The 13 Best Children’s, Illustrated, and Picture Books of 2013  by Maria Popova

Young Mark Twain’s lost gem, the universe in illustrated dioramas, Maurice Sendak’s posthumous love letter to the world, Kafka for kids, and more treats for all ages.

“It is an error … to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large,” J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in his superb meditation on fantasy and why there’s no such thing as writing “for children,” intimating that books able to captivate children’s imagination aren’t “children’s books” but simply really good books. After the year’s best books in psychology and philosophy, art and design, and history and biography, the season’s subjective selection of best-of reading lists continue with the loveliest “children’s” and picture-books of 2013. (Because the best children’s books are, as Tolkien believes, always ones of timeless delight, do catch up on the selections for 2012, 2011, and 2010.)

1. ADVICE TO LITTLE GIRLS

In 1865, when he was only thirty, Mark Twain penned a playful short story mischievously encouraging girls to think independently rather than blindly obey rules and social mores. In the summer of 2011, I chanced upon and fell in love with a lovely Italian edition of this little-known gem with Victorian-scrapbook-inspired artwork by celebrated Russian-born children’s book illustrator Vladimir Radunsky. I knew the book had to come to life in English, so I partnered with the wonderful Claudia Zoe Bedrick of Brooklyn-based indie publishing house Enchanted Lion, maker of extraordinarily beautiful picture-books, and we spent the next two years bringing Advice to Little Girls (public library) to life in America — a true labor-of-love project full of so much delight for readers of all ages. (And how joyous to learn that it was also selected among NPR’s best books of 2013!)

While frolicsome in tone and full of wink, the story is colored with subtle hues of grown-up philosophy on the human condition, exploring all the deft ways in which we creatively rationalize our wrongdoing and reconcile the good and evil we each embody.

Good little girls ought not to make mouths at their teachers for every trifling offense. This retaliation should only be resorted to under peculiarly aggravated circumstances.

If at any time you find it necessary to correct your brother, do not correct him with mud — never, on any account, throw mud at him, because it will spoil his clothes. It is better to scald him a little, for then you obtain desirable results. You secure his immediate attention to the lessons you are inculcating, and at the same time your hot water will have a tendency to move impurities from his person, and possibly the skin, in spots.

2. YOU ARE STARDUST

“Everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was … lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” Carl Sagan famously marveled in his poetic Pale Blue Dot monologue, titled after the iconic 1990 photograph of Earth. The stardust metaphor for our interconnection with the cosmos soon permeated popular culture and became a vehicle for the allure of space exploration. There’s something at once incredibly empowering and incredibly humbling in knowing that the flame in your fireplace came from the sun.

That’s precisely the kind of cosmic awe environmental writer Elin Kelsey and Toronto-based Korean artist Soyeon Kim seek to inspire in kids in You Are Stardust (public library) — an exquisite picture-book that instills that profound sense of connection with the natural world. Underpinning the narrative is a bold sense of optimism — a refreshing antidote to the fear-appeal strategy plaguing most environmental messages today.

But rather than dry science trivia, the message is carried on the wings of poetic admiration for these intricate relationships:

Be still. Listen.

Like you, the Earth breathes.

Your breath is alive with the promise of flowers.

Each time you blow a kiss to the world, you spread pollen that might grow to be a new plant.

The book is nonetheless grounded in real science. Kelsey notes:

3. THE HOLE

The Hole (public library) by artist Øyvind Torseter, one of Norway’s most celebrated illustrators, tells the story of a lovable protagonist who wakes up one day and discovers a mysterious hole in his apartment, which moves and seems to have a mind of its own. Befuddled, he looks for its origin — in vain. He packs it in a box and takes it to a lab, but still no explanation.

With Torseter’s minimalist yet visually eloquent pen-and-digital line drawings, vaguely reminiscent of Sir Quentin Blake and Tomi Ungerer yet decidedly distinctive, the story is at once simple and profound, amusing and philosophical, the sort of quiet meditation that gently, playfully tickles us into existential inquiry.

What makes the book especially magical is that a die-cut hole runs from the wonderfully gritty cardboard cover through every page and all the way out through the back cover — an especial delight for those of us who swoon over masterpieces of die-cut whimsy. In every page, the hole is masterfully incorporated into the visual narrative, adding an element of tactile delight that only an analog book can afford.

4. MY BROTHER’S BOOK

For those of us who loved legendary children’s book author Maurice Sendak — famed creator of wild things, little-known illustrator of velveteen rabbits, infinitely warm heart, infinitely witty mind — his death in 2012 was one of the year’s greatest heartaches. Now, half a century after his iconic Where The Wild Things Are, comes My Brother’s Book (public library; UK) — a bittersweet posthumous farewell to the world, illustrated in vibrant, dreamsome watercolors and written in verse inspired by some of Sendak’s lifelong influences: Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, and the music of Mozart. In fact, a foreword by Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt reveals the book is based on the Bard’s “A Winter’s Tale.”

It tells the story of two brothers, Jack and Guy, torn asunder when a falling star crashes onto Earth. Though on the surface about the beloved author’s own brother Jack, who died 18 years ago, the story is also about the love of Sendak’s life and his partner of fifty years, psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn, whose prolonged illness and eventual loss in 2007 devastated Sendak

Indeed, the theme of all-consuming love manifests viscerally in Sendak’s books. Playwright Tony Kushner, a longtime close friend of Sendak’s and one of his most heartfelt mourners, tells NPR:
5. DOES MY GOLDFISH KNOW WHO I AM?

In 2012, I wrote about a lovely book titled Big Questions from Little People & Simple Answers from Great Minds, in which some of today’s greatest scientists, writers, and philosophers answer kids’ most urgent questions, deceptively simple yet profound. It went on to become one of the year’s best books and among readers’ favorites. A few months later, Gemma Elwin Harris, the editor who had envisioned the project, reached out to invite me to participate in the book’s 2013 edition by answering one randomly assigned question from a curious child. Naturally, I was thrilled to do it, and honored to be a part of something as heartening as Does My Goldfish Know Who I Am? (public library)

As was the case with last year’s edition, more than half of the proceeds from the book — which features illustrations by the wonderful Andy Smith — are being donated to a children’s charity.

The questions range from what the purpose of science is to why onions make us cry to whether spiders can speak to why we blink when we sneeze. Psychologist and broadcaster Claudia Hammond, who recently explained the fascinating science of why time slows down when we’re afraid, speeds up as we age, and gets all warped while we’re on vacation in one of the best psychology and philosophy books of 2013, answers the most frequently asked question by the surveyed children: Why do we cry?

6. LITTLE BOY BROWN

“I didn’t feel alone in the Lonely Crowd,” young Italo Calvino wrote of his visit to America, and it is frequently argued that hardly any place embodies the “Lonely Crowd” better than New York, city of “avoid-eye-contact indifference of the crowded subways.” That, perhaps, is what children’s book writer Isobel Harris set out to both affirm and decondition in Little Boy Brown (public library) — a magnificent ode to childhood and loneliness, easily the greatest ode to childhood and loneliness ever written, illustrated by the famed Hungarian-born French cartoonist and graphic designer André François. Originally published in 1949, this timeless story that stirred the hearts of generations has been newly resurrected by Enchanted Lion.


This is the story of a four-year-old boy living with his well-to-do mother and father in a Manhattan hotel, in which the elevator connects straight to the subway tunnel below the building and plugs right into the heart of the city. And yet Little Boy Brown, whose sole friends are the doormen and elevator operators, feels woefully lonely — until, one day, his hotel chambermaid Hilda invites him to visit her house outside the city, where he blossoms into a new sense of belonging.