Sleep Demons: An Insomniac’s Memoir

Bill Hayes

“Sleep acts … more like an emotion than a bodily function. As with desire, it resists pursuit. Sleep must come find you.”

Fascinating read on the science of REM sleep, the poetics of sleeplessness, and Maurice Sendak’s antidote to insomnia:

Kenny’s Window

Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak’s forgotten, wonderfully philosophical first book:

The Big Green Book

Robert Graves and Maurice Sendak

In 1962, Maurice Sendak and Robert Graves collaborated in a wonderful and subversive children’s book celebrating the magic of reading and how books transform us:

King and King

Linda de Haan

The best LGBT children’s books – sweet celebrations of diversity and difference, from Maurice Sendak to the real-life story of a gay penguin family, by way of grandmothers and kings:

Nutcracker

E.T.A. Hoffmann

“It is rare and genuine and does justice to the private world of children. One can, after all, count on the instincts of a genius.”

Maurice Sendak’s weird and wonderful take on Nutcracker:

We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy: Two Nursery Rhymes with Pictures

Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak’s darkest, most controversial, yet most hopeful and personal children’s book – a moving cry for mercy, for light, and for resurrection of the human spirit at a time of hopeless darkness:

Pierre; or the Ambiguities

Herman Melville

“The strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.”

Maurice Sendak’s rare, wildly sensual illustrations for Melville’s greatest commercial failure and most personally beloved book,.

Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present

Charlotte Zolotow

To live long, write for children:

Artist to Artist: 23 Major Illustrators Talk to Children About Their Art

Eric Carle

“No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it’s not the work of the imagination.”

Maurice Sendak, Eric Carle, Quentin Blake, Alice Provensen, and other beloved illustrators give children advice on becoming an artist

Posters by Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak’s little-known yet utterly lovely vintage posters celebrating the love of books and the joy of reading

Open House for Butterflies

Ruth Krauss

“Krauss books can be bridges between the poor dull insensitive adult and the fresh, imaginative, brand-new child.”

The remarkable Ruth Krauss’s final and loveliest collaboration with Maurice Sendak:

Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work

Justin G. Schiller

“Maurice’s pleasures were his obsessions, and every one of them was contagious.”

Sendak as a teacher – lessons in art, storytelling, and life from his 1971 course at Yale:

I’ll Be You and You Be Me

Ruth Krauss [pictures by Maurice Sendak]

Indescribably heart-warming vintage ode to friendship and the imagination, illustrated by 27-year-old Maurice Sendak. See the lovely drawings at the link:

Nikolenka’s Childhood: An Edition for Young Readers

Leo Tolstoy

Young Maurice Sendak illustrates Tolstoy – many more gorgeous drawings at the link:

Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom

Leonard S. Marcus

“That is the creative artist — a penalty of the creative artist — wanting to make order out of chaos.”

Timeless wisdom from the great Ursula Nordstrom, who groomed Maurice Sendak’s genius and ushered in the golden age of children’s literature.