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| | | | | Category Full 1 | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures |
| | Category Full 2 | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs |
| | Category Full 3 | LITERARY CRITICISM / Children's & Young Adult Literature |
| | | | | Inserts/Illus | b&w chapter opener images; |
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| | |  | About the BookOther FormatsProduct Images | An irresistible, nostalgic, insightful—and “consistently intelligent and funny” (The New York Times Book Review)—ramble through classic children’s literature from Vanity Fair contributing editor (and father of two) Bruce Handy.
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| | The dour New England Primer, thought to be the first American children’s book, was first published in Boston in 1690. Offering children gems of advice such as “Strive to learn” and “Be not a dunce,” it was no fun at all. So how did we get from there to “Let the wild rumpus start”? And now that we’re living in a golden age of children’s literature, what can adults get out of reading Where the Wild Things Are and Goodnight Moon, or Charlotte’s Web and Little House on the Prairie?
A “delightful excursion” (The Wall Street Journal), Wild Things revisits the classics of every American childhood, from fairy tales to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and explores the back stories of their creators, using context and biography to understand how some of the most insightful, creative, and witty authors and illustrators of their times created their often deeply personal masterpieces. Along the way, Handy learns what The Cat in the Hat says about anarchy and absentee parenting, which themes are shared by The Runaway Bunny and Portnoy’s Complaint, and why Ramona Quimby is as true an American icon as Tom Sawyer or Jay Gatsby.
It’s a profound, eye-opening experience to re-encounter books that you once treasured decades ago. A clear-eyed love letter to the greatest children’s books and authors from Louisa May Alcott and L. Frank Baum to Eric Carle, Dr. Seuss, Mildred D. Taylor, and E.B. White, Wild Things is “a spirited, perceptive, and just outright funny account that will surely leave its readers with a new appreciation for childhood favorites” (Publishers Weekly).
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| | Bruce Handy is currently a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. A former writer and editor at Spy and Time, his articles, essays, reviews, and humor pieces have appeared in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, Vogue, The Village Voice, and The New Yorker. Handy was nominated for an Emmy in 1993 as a member of Saturday Night Live’s writing staff. He won a GLAAD Award in 1998 for his “Yep I’m Gay” Time cover profile of Ellen DeGeneres. At Vanity Fair, he has written on topics and personalities as diverse as Mad Men, Amy Schumer, film composer John Barry, PeeWee Herman, Miley Cyrus, the J.T. Leroy hoax, Cinerama, and the history of flight attendants. A native of California and a graduate of Stanford University, Handy lives in Manhattan with his wife, novelist Helen Schulman, and their two children. Wild Things is his first book.
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| | “A terrific rumpus of a journey into the world of illustrated and young reader classics . . . Wild Things makes a convincing case for reading children’s books as an adult.” —The A.V. Club
“A charming, discursive encounter with classic children’s literature from the perspective of a parent . . . Mr. Handy writes with zip, sincerity, and good humor. . . For parents who are embarking on this phase of rediscovery, for those in the thick of it, and for those for whom it is a warm and recent memory, Wild Things will be a delightful excursion. . . . It is also engaging and full of genuine feeling, and I liked it very much.” —Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal
“Consistently intelligent and funny . . . The book succeeds wonderfully. . . . The Handy children’s appearances are brief but disproportionately memorable. Just as almost all kids’ books, with their frequent appearances by talking animals, are part emotional masquerade, Wild Things, too, is in disguise. It reads as a companionable romp through all the stories you sometimes tire of reading to your own children. But like The Runaway Bunny, it’s really a gently obsessive tale, a man gathering up so many words and ideas as if to create a magical stay against his own children growing up.” —Rivka Galchen, The New York Times Book Review
“Nothing less than a Golden Ticket into the Whipple-Scrumptious world of children’s classics, where mystical and marvelous surprises await . . . Literary criticism through the prism of memoir, Wild Things is a read—a ride!—of pure pleasure.” —Vanity Fair
“Wild Things is relaxed, discursive, and personal. . . . The result is very pleasing to read. . . . Handy quotes liberally from each book he admires, and he curates those passages beautifully, allowing readers both literary pleasure and a kind of time travel. His analyses are affectionate and often eccentric. He’s got a magpie’s eye for odd and shiny details. . . . His foray into children’s literature allowed him more than a simple chance to re-encounter the favorite books of his youth. It allowed him the chance to hold close his children’s younger selves. ‘By one measure, I suppose,’ he writes, ‘you are holding in your hands a work of sublimated grief.’ How beautiful, and how painful, and how incontrovertibly true.” —The New York Times
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