In the newest installment of Poets & Writers magazine’s Inside Indie Bookstores series, FWR Associate Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin profiles Chicago’s fabulous Women & Children First bookstore, featuring an interview with the bookstore’s co-owner Linda Bubon.
The online version (along with a slideshow of images from the store) is available at no cost on P&W’s [...]

Six months ago, we here at FWR (and many others) mourned the end of long-running PBS show Reading Rainbow. Now, rumor has it that Reading Rainbow may make a comeback. Host LeVar Burton recently tweeted:
You heard it here first… Reading Rainbow 2.0 is in the works! Stay tuned for more info. But, you [...]

One last take on Where The Wild Things Are: its author, Maurice Sendak, has some advice for parents who think the book is too scary for kids:
“I would tell them to go to hell,” Sendak said. And if children can’t handle the story, they should “go home,” he added. “Or wet your pants. Do whatever [...]

Maurice Sendak’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are is nearly 50 years old, but the release of Spike Jonze’s film adaptation has sparked a resurgence of critical interpretations of the story. A sampling:
On the Oxford University Press blog, philosophy professor Stephen T. Asma ties our love for Where the Wild Things Are [...]

ia Jeffrey Rotter: ReadThis is a great organization “devoted to promoting access to books and reading wherever needed.” Among other projects, they helped create a library last spring for the public middle/high school Brooklyn Collegiate.
Now you can help stock this library by clicking here and buying a book (chosen by the school to fill gaps) [...]

Earlier this fall, School Library Journal published an article called “Has the Newbery Lost Its Way?”, sparking a heated debate about criteria for what has long been recognized as the most prestigious prize in children’s literature. Are the latest Newbery medal-winning books really too “inaccessible” for kids? Should accessibility and popularity be issues in [...]

The first review in FWR’s “You’ve Got to Re-Read This” series. These days there is always something for children to do–often a rather shallow electronic distraction–but Tove Jansson’s Moomin books show readers of all ages that quietly sitting and thinking by yourself is a valuable activity. Her characters let us know that almost everyone is lonely from time to time, and that while community can be an antidote to loneliness, we can also learn from solitude.

I’d already planned to curl up with Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and get into the mood.
And things, it appears, are getting better all the time. The author’s 9-city video tour concluded on October 9, and now, as I read, I can go here to watch and listen to Gaiman — in a fetching leather [...]