Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Oriental fairy tale, written around 1923 for his young daughter and illustrated by his first wife — a wandering child who is repeatedly offered safety and repeatedly leaves.
Children's books
Books for children by writers who spent their careers writing for adults — usually one apiece, usually for a particular child, and usually stranger than the shelf they were sold on.
Writers known for difficult adult books occasionally produce one book for children, and the results rarely sit comfortably in the children's section. The audience is real — these were written to be read by or to a child — but the writer arrives with the only equipment they have, which is the equipment they built for everyone else.
James Baldwin's Little Man, Little Man is this shelf's first entry and shows the pattern clearly. He wrote it in 1976 for his nephew Tejan, set it on a Harlem block, and wrote every line in the speech the children on that block actually used. It was illustrated by Yoran Cazac, a French painter with no experience of children's books whom Baldwin had met in Paris in 1959. Reviewers could not decide whether it was a book for children or a book about them, and it stayed out of print for forty years until a university press brought it back.
That is the usual fate of these books, and the reason to keep them together rather than scattered among the story collections. They are the least-read titles in their authors' catalogues, they are short enough to finish in one sitting, and they show a writer working without the defences the adult books allow.
The children's books we recommend
James Baldwin's only children's book: a four-year-old named TJ on a Harlem block, written for his nephew and illustrated by a French painter he had known since 1959.
A boy turns punishment into play, then discovers dangers that cannot be settled by make-believe.
Twelve bedtime stories about how the camel got his hump and the elephant his trunk, told to "O my Best Beloved" and drawn by Kipling himself.
Puck brings back the dead of English history to talk to two children in Sussex, and between two of their stories sits "If—".
Seven stories and their songs: a boy raised by wolves, a mongoose against two cobras, a white seal, and a night when the elephants dance.
Four tales in a 61-page booklet: a soldier with a magic tinderbox, a pea under twenty mattresses, and a reviewer who hoped Andersen would stop.
A girl no bigger than a thumb, carried off by a toad, a beetle and a mole's marriage plans, and saved by a swallow she once nursed.
Two tales in one thin booklet: a mermaid who trades her voice for legs, and an emperor who walks through town in clothes that are not there.
The collection that made Andersen famous: an ugly duckling, a nightingale in China, and a girl who walks to Lapland to bring her friend home from the Snow Queen.
A beggar boy and the Prince of Wales swap clothes for a joke, and a palace guard throws the real prince out into the streets of Tudor London.
Other styles on the shelf
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