We’re very, very pleased to announce the publication of Daniel Pinkwater’s cult classic Lizard Music as the newest title in The New York Review Children’s Collection. Lizard Music and more books for children ages 8-14 are available at a limited-time 30% discount.

Lizard Music

Written and illustrated by Daniel Pinkwater

When you’re an eleven-year-old kid like Victor, and your parents go on vacation, leaving you at home with your older sister, you’re not too happy. But to Victor’s surprise, when Leslie packs up to go camping with her friends as soon as the parents are out the door, a whole new life of options and independence opens up. Staying up late watching movies on TV, drinking grape soda for breakfast, eating donuts for dinner, taking the bus to watch weird wavy-horned animals at the zoo, and visiting the next town where you meet unusual characters like the Chicken Man (and Claudia, the hen, who lives under his hat), all leave you feeling pretty grown up, or at least like a teen. That is until strange things start happening.

Seeing a lizard band, playing their music on TV after the late-late movie has ended, is especially puzzling, until Victor discovers that the Chicken Man knows about the lizard musicians, too. With the help of Chicken Man, Claudia, and some of those life-size clarinet and saxophone playing lizards, Victor sets off for an invisible floating island anticipating high adventures and hoping to learn the answers to the questions that could fix the unfortunate problems that have occurred. What will happen next? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

But there’s one thing we can report on for sure: with a copy of Lizard Music you’re irresistibly and unforgettably transported to Planet Pinkwater. It’s a place where anything can happen—a land that’s magical for both adults and kids.

“No author has ever captured the great fun of being weird, growing up as a happy mutant, unfettered by convention, as well as Pinkwater has. When I was a kid, Pinkwater novels like Lizard Music…made me intensely proud to be a little off-center and weird—they taught me to woo the muse of the odd and made me the happy adult I am today.” —Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net

Lizard Music
Written and illustrated by Daniel Pinkwater
For ages 8-14

 

Winter months have us wishing for long summer days spent outside. While waiting for the first signs of spring, there’s no better way to keep warm than spending some time baking something delicious in the kitchen. With January 23rd marking National Pie Day, and February declared National Pie Month, bakers everywhere will be digging through their cookbooks for the perfect recipe to share. If you’re looking for something truly unique to try, especially with the littlest of chefs in mind, we have the perfect suggestion for you—Mud Pies!

 

Written by Marjorie Winslow, charmingly illustrated by Erik Blegvad, and called “delightfully digestible” by Life magazine, Mud Pies and Other Recipes is a cookbook for dolls filled with the finest of culinary curiosities. Reading it aloud is a perfect way to celebrate our pie holiday, while plotting plans for parties out among the garden plants when warmer weather finally comes our way.

Bon Appétit !

“Mud Pies delights because, like the very best children’s books, it gives young folks their due. Winslow’s recipes appeal to the considerable wit, sophistication and imaginative prowess of many young children…. Winslow’s book is a gem.” —Prospero, on The Economist website

“When I was about five years old, Granny gave me my first cookbook— Mud Pies and Other Recipes. Even though it was a pretend cookbook, it somehow persuaded me that real cooking must be fun.”—Sara Moulton

“One of the most charming picture books ever published.” —Horn Book

Our first releases of the year are by authors well known to NYRB Classics readers. The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor is “still the best piece of travel writing on the Caribbean” (The Guardian) and Conquered City by Victor Serge is a tragic novel of revolutionary terror.

This week we celebrate the birthday of the wonderful James Thurber by calling attention to two of his timeless classics available from our Children’s Collection. They are the perfect gift for anyone from 8 to 80.

“Thurber’s grown-up kids’ books, The Wonderful O and The 13 Clocks, long out of print, are back—rich with ogres and oligarchs, riddles and wit. What distinguishes them is not just quixotic imagination but Thurber’s inimitable delight in language. The stories beg to be read aloud…Thurber captivates the ear and captures the heart.” —Newsweek

The 13 Clocks
By James Thurber
Introduction by Neil Gaiman
Illustrated by Marc Simont

“It’s one of the great kids’ books of the last century. It may be the best thing Thurber ever wrote. It’s certainly the most fun that anybody can have reading anything aloud.” —Neil Gaiman

The Wonderful O
By James Thurber
Illustrated by Marc Simont

“A tale for children, and a reminder for adults, of the joys of love, liberty, language and, not least, humor. It has pirates and treasure and magic and a message that especially in complacent times must not be forgotten…The Wonderful O is a book worth finding, wherever you can, and reading, as one of its characters concludes, ‘lest we forget.’” —The Wall Street Journal

By Jules Renard
A new translation from the French by Douglas Parmée
Illustrations by Pierre Bonnard

Nature Stories is a deliciously whimsical classic from the era of the great French Post-impressionist painters. Renard mingles wonder and humor in a series of brief portraits of subjects drawn from the natural world: dogs, cats, pigs, roses, snails, trees and birds of all sorts, humans of course, and even a humble potato.

 

 

Ranging from a sentence to several pages, Renard’s literary miniatures are masterpieces of compression and description, capturing both appearance and behavior through a choice of details that makes the familiar unfamiliar and yet surprisingly true to life. In Jules Renard’s world, plants and animals not only feel but speak and yet, for all the anthropomorphic wit and whimsy the author indulges in, they guard their mystery too. These creatures fascinate Renard, who in turn makes them fascinating to us.

 

 

Sly, funny, and touching, Nature Stories—here beautifully rendered into English by award-winning translator Douglas Parmée and accompanied by the wonderful ink-brush images of Pierre Bonnard that appeared in the 1904 edition—is a literary classic of inexhaustible freshness.

 

Read Douglas Parmée’s introduction

 

“There is no real equivalent for the French word esprit which is somewhere between and beyond humor and wit and which is essentially what these short commentaries on the bird and animal world display.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Renard’s way with the detail is unforgettable. Renard writes about spiders, about the moon, and the poetry he makes from the things his eyes tell him is joyful.” —Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm

NYRB Classics make fantastic book group selections. Often with introductions by contemporary writers, they are a fresh alternative for your next meeting. We’re especially excited for our two newest additions, After Claude by Iris Owens, categorized in The New York Times as “a fresh voice that made us want to laugh out loud, pass the book around, read funny bits to our friends,” and The Outward Room by Millen Brand—a book that in its day was more popular than Gone With The Wind. We invite you to check out our growing list of NYRB titles that have Reading Group Guides on our website.