Via Crooked Timber, comes the news that Maurice Sendak, arguably the greatest, and certainly the most influential, living picture-book author has died. I can think of no equal to Sendak in his contribution to building--visually, verbally, lyrically--an entire vocabulary to the relationship between small children and the wider world, and most crucially small children and their parents. Possibly Dr. Seuss was his equal, and then of course there are those who operated in other media besides books. But we're a book family, us Foxes, and so alongside Seuss and many others as our children grew up, there was Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are, of course, and his fabulous, funny, subversive illustrations for What Can You Do With a Shoe?, and my favorite, and I think his best work: In the Night Kitchen. Check it out here, with the incomparable Peter Schickele doing the narration:
RIP, Maurice Sendak. Hope there are wild things where you've gone.
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