“Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/12/05/111205crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1f1ZK9Cez

Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker article on fantasy touches on children’s fascination with other worlds.  Below a book on how children, ages 8-14, construct their own alternate realities and imaginary geographies.  The authors point out that these worlds are not compensatory, that is, they are not built by introverts or children who lack social skills.

David Cohen / Stephen A. MacKeith,: The Development of Imagination: The Private Worlds of Childhood

Click on the link below for the trailer:

Snow White and the Huntsman

Are those orcs in the battle scenes?

Animals have always been good to think with,and these three new picture books rework Aesop’s fables in interesting ways.  Below the link to my review of the books in the NYTBR.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/books/…

In 1484, William Caxton, the man credited with introducing the printing press to England, brought Aesop to English speakers — and we’ve been reading him ever since. Aesop has been a part of the nursery for so long it is hard to imagine a jailed Socrates, awaiting execution, deciding that nothing is more important than turning the Greek slave’s fables into poetry. Like the stories Plato called old wives’ tales, these fables have become part of the cultural bloodstream, passing wisdom from one generation to the next.

Here’s Alice Munro on H.C. Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”  In The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, I referred to Claire Bloom’s memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House.  There, Bloom confesses that she gave in to the Little Mermaid complex, embracing the view that love meant pain and suffering: “I believe that the stories my mother quite innocently passed on to me, The Snow Queen and The Little Mermaid, so innocently read to me years ago in a sunlit garden, stories of one young girl after another who had sacrificed herself at the altar of romantic love . . .  had given me an extremely distorted image of sexual relationships between men and women.”

Alice Munro tells a different story.  She read “The Little Mermaid” and was “appalled”:  “She didn’t have to be changed to foam on the sea.”  And so, Munro made up her own happy ending, because she had to “do something” about what she had found.

Even better, Munro tells us about her childhood fascination with beheadings.  It reminds me of my own childhood obsession with Michael Strogoff, fueled by its horrors, in particular the practice of burying people alive.

NYT has a wonderful essay by Norton Juster about the genesis of The Phantom Tollbooth.  And we now have a beautiful  Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, brilliantly edited by Leonard Marcus.  It’s wonderful to see the book in large format, with high production values that do justice to a work that derives its firepower from wordplay.

Not everyone in the publishing world of the 1960s embraced The Phantom Tollbooth. Many said that it was not a children’s book, the vocabulary was much too difficult, and the ideas were beyond kids. To top it off, they claimed fantasy was bad for children because it disorients them.

The prevailing wisdom of the time held that learning should be more accessible and less discouraging. The aim was that no child would ever have to confront anything that he or she didn’t already know.

But my feeling is that there is no such thing as a difficult word. There are only words you don’t know yet — the kind of liberating words that Milo encounters on his adventure.

 http://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141240217/…

Here’s hoping that Treehorn will make a comeback.  I was saddened to learn of the death of Florence Parry Heide, whose Treehorn trilogy was illustrated by Edward Gorey.

Her best-known book, “The Shrinking of Treehorn” (1971), was about a boy whose parents paid little heed to him, even as he began getting littler and littler, unable to reach familiar shelves, watching as his clothes seemed to grow on him. Its comic, macabre plotline appealed to the artist Edward Gorey, who illustrated it and two sequels, “Treehorn’s Treasure” (1981) and “Treehorn’s Wish” (1984).

 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/arts/f…

Erin Row just won the Canadian Children’s Literature Award for a book with a premise that has deep roots in adult literature.  Peter Schlemihl loses his shadow, as does Hans Christian Andersen’s learned man in “The Shadow,” along with Hofmannsthal’s Frau ohne Schatten.  And of course Peter Pan leaves his shadow in the Darling nursery and has to have it refastened.

Plain Kate, aimed at readers aged 11 and up, follows the adventures of an orphan who makes a deal with a stranger, trading her shadow for a chance to fulfil her deepest wish.

 http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2011/1…

There is a reason why there are (now) nearly 4 million hits for this video.  Thanks to the great Michael Sims for discovering  Peter Pan in Smithland and sending me the link.

6pm at Brattle Theater in Cambridge.  We will be discussing Annotated Peter Pan!