Maria Tatar's Blog
December 12, 2009
Pat Buchanan was already annoyed that Sonia Sotomayor had the temerity to read the classics of children's literature while a student at Princeton. He will have smoke coming out of his ears now that William Gleason is offering ENG 335: Children's Literature. The Daily Princetonian reports that the course was capped at 450, making it the largest offered in the spring term of 2010. Anyone have a course syllabus?
December 10, 2009
Lois Lowry's picture book Crow Call may be set in November, but it makes a perfect Christmas gift. Illustrated by the Russian artist Bagram Ibatoulline (The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and Thumbelina, among others), it follows father and daughter on a hunting expedition that takes them from home, through the woods, and back again. In the middle of those woods (and in the precise middle of the book), Lowry describes, with characteristic understatement, an encounter that transforms...
November 17, 2009
http://www.style.com/vogue/feature/2009_December_Hansel_And_Gretel/
Click to see the slide show of Annie Leibovitz's photographs of a fashion fairy tale.
November 16, 2009
Here's Maureen Dowd on the stunning film version of Andersen's "The Red Shoes." Pressburger and Powell's brilliant film brings Andersen's story into the twentieth century, with a doomed heroine torn between love and ballet. Here's Dowd on the Andersen story:
"The Red Shoes" is based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name about a little girl who becomes vain about her red shoes and gets confused about her priorities. As in the movie, the shoes force the girl to dance day...
November 10, 2009
The image is unsettling, but more disturbing is the first paragraph, which tells us about "one ancillary benefit" of research carried out by Charles A. Nelson III at Harvard. Nelson evidently outfoxed a Boston car salesman by reading his facial expressions and discovering that he was bluffing. (When was the last time you figured out that a car salesman was "bluffing"? Did you have to watch his eye movements and facial features to figure it out?)
I suppose that research of this kind might...
November 7, 2009
The Boston Globe reports the death of Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill. I don't think many locals imagined that Brother Blue had ever gone by any other name–he had become the spirit of storytelling, keeping traditional tales alive in a lively, street-smart way. I envision him now as one of those beautiful butterflies he wore when he told stories, and I feel sure that he is fluttering in the breezes of southern climes right now, returning north next summer in his new incarnation as the soul of...
October 21, 2009
What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?
Sendak: I would tell them to go to hell. That's a question I will not tolerate.
Sendak sounds off on overly protective parents and other matters in a Newsweek interview. He also gives us his take on the MGM film Wizard of Oz and points out the irony of the phrase "There's no place like home." You could say that about almost any place–there's no place like it.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/216997/page/1I've always had...
October 20, 2009
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/the-reading-life-what-makes-a-childrens-classic/
Dwight Garner takes the film version of "Where the Wild Things Are" as his point of departure for a meditation on what makes a children's classic. He invites readers to post titles of children's books passed down through the generations.
The success of "Where the Wild Things Are" has led to a sharp spike in the number of articles and reviews of children's literature. Why is the media suddenly paying ...
Daniel Zalewski writes about children's picture books in this week's New Yorker. "The kids are in charge," he tells us, and today's picture books are full of anxious, apologetic parents who resort to canned psychobabble in an effort to get their kids to behave: "Use your words," "Hands are not for hitting," "Is there a nicer way to say that?"
We live in a "confrontation-averse age of parenting," he writes, but many picture books have a strong disciplinary edge, no doubt a legacy of all...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblo…
The Guardian is featuring fairy tales for an entire week, with "booklets of our best-loved fairy tales"), all of which can be read on the web. The writers who selected the stories for publication provide a guide to each set of tales. On October 10, for instance, Hilary Mantel wrote about "Wicked Parents in Fairytales." On October 12, A.S. Byatt offered an exquisite meditation on "Love in Fairytales." Philip Pullman, Alison Lurie, Marina Warner, ...
Maria Tatar's blog
