Alison Lurie on Maurice Sendak

Alison Lurie, a scholar and champion of literature for children, and our new State Author, memorializes the late Maurice Sendak in the New York Review of Books:

"Only a few people have been both great writers and great illustrators of children’s books. In the nineteenth century there was Edward Lear, and in the twentieth Dr. Seuss and—perhaps the most gifted of them all—Maurice Sendak, who died in May at the age of eighty-three."

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John Sayles on "The Black Stallion"

John Sayles offers some close analysis of the 1941 children's novel, The Black Stallion, in a videotaped Writers Institute interview partially available on YouTube.

He credits the novel, which he read at the age of 10, with making him aware of how to structure plot.

Sayles visited the Writers Institute on February 27, 2012.

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Real Bedtime Stories

Sunday's New York Times Business Day had an article about the preference of parents for print-and-paper children's books....

"Print books may be under siege from the rise of e-books, but they have a tenacious hold on a particular group: children and toddlers. Their parents are insisting this next generation of readers spend their early years with old-fashioned books."

This is the case even with parents who themselves are die-hard downloaders of books onto Kindles, iPads, laptops and phones. They freely acknowledge their digital double standard, saying they want their children to be surrounded by print books, to experience turning physical pages as they learn about shapes, colors and animals." More.

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