I lived in Richmond,Kentucky when I was a kid. It was a sweet, semi-rural upbringing where a six year old could walk up the street with his little poodle dog (that would be me and mine) and visit a kindly elderly couple that would only allow the dog on their couch when the dog had just been washed. Somehow the dog knew this and was always ready to take that walk up the street after it had been bathed. Weird, I know. It was also the kind of small town where people who read the New Yorker were few and far between, but this kindly elderly couple (The Ortenbergers) had not only a subscription to the magazine, but also a book filled with the cartoon, which were way too sophisticated for a six year old boy, but the boy would still gravitate towards that book every time he visited and try to figure out what made it funny that an old man sitting on a park bench would say "The pigeons really like you" to a skeleton that was seated next to him and was covered in pigeons.
Perhaps it was out of pity that this elderly couple gave that young boy a copy of "Where the Wild Things Are." Not that the young boy was wont for books. But this kindly, elderly couple sensed his need for some literature of his reading and intellect available to him now. They were right, and it has turned out to be a book the young boy would treasure into his adulthood. A book that he would, in turn, gift to other young literates because he recognized not just the beauty and quality of the illustrations, but the elegant simplicity of the childhood fantasy.

And the moral of the story is be a jerk to your mom??!
I don't get it.

Pues eso, un cuento para niños con bonitas ilustraciones.

If you don't already know why it's got five stars, go read it.

Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak

Where the Wild Things Are is a 1963 children's picture book by American writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak.

This story of only 338 words, focuses on a young boy, named: Max who. after dressing in his wolf costume, wreaks such havoc through his household that he is sent to bed without his supper. Max's bedroom undergoes a mysterious transformation into a jungle environment, and he winds up sailing to an island inhabited by malicious beasts known as the "Wild Things."

After successfully intimidating the creatures, Max is hailed as the king of the Wild Things and enjoys a playful romp with his subjects.

تاریخ نخستین نگرش: روز سی و یکم ماه آگوست سال2005میلادی

عنوان: سفر به سرزمین وحشی‌ها؛ نویسنده و تصویرگر: موریس سنداک؛ مترجم: طاهره آدینه پور؛ تهران، انتشارات علمی و فرهنگی؛ سال1383، در48ص، مصور، رنگی، داستانهای تخیلی برای گروه ب و ج؛ شابک9786001212413؛ موضوع: کتابهای تصویری از نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م

عنوان اصلی کتاب «جایی که وحشی‌ها هستند»، که با عنوان: «سفر به سرزمین وحشی‌ها»؛ ترجمه و منتشر شده است؛ کتاب مصور کودکان که داستان آن هم، در مورد رویاهای کودکی است، که بدون خوردن شام، به رختخواب فرستاده شده بود، این کتاب مصور، به عنوان یکی از بهترین، و دوست داشتنی‌ترین کتاب‌های مصور کودکان، در تمام دوران‌ها ستایش شده است

نقل از پشت جلد: (شاید بتوان گفت که سفر به سرزمین وحشی‌ها مشهورترین کتاب تصویری سده بیستم میلادی، در سراسر دنیای غرب است؛ «موریس سِنداک» برای نشان دادن روانشناسی پسرک نافرمان در داستان خود، از صفحه آرایی کتاب سود می‌برد؛ هم‌چنین صفحه‌ آرایی او به منظور نشان دادن بازگشت این کودک از نافرمانی به خانه و محیطی امن است؛ نقل از پیتر هانت)؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 20/03/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ 24/01/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

I have no doubt that this book damaged me, psychologically, as a small child. It is one of the earliest books I vividly remember reading aloud to myself, and I remember the first time my mother read it to me before she put me to bed. Here's the gist of the plot: A little boy named Max dresses up in a wolf costume, plays with a hammer, chases his dog with a fork, then threatens to cannibalize his mother. His mother, a master of irony, then puts him to bed with no dinner. Already, this story should start creeping you out. Then a forest starts to grow in Max's bedroom. And no, no chemicals have been ingested anywhere in the story. Though the bit about chasing the dog with the fork does imply a delusional state. Regardless, a fucking forest grows in the kids bedroom. So naturally he gets in a boat and sails off to the other side of the world, to where all these "wild things" are. And promptly subjugates everyone he sees. I'm a damn toddler, and my mom is reading me a book about a sociopath. So Max has a ball with this gang he's conquered and converted, and they howl at the moon and hop through trees. Then he gets hungry and goes home, where his mother, no doubt terrified of his new army of foreign creatures, has left his food for him, still warm. I thought, "This woman aims to do me harm." Yes, please, mother. Read me a story about my bedroom becoming a forest inhabited by monsters, then put me to bed. Think I slept that night? No, I hid out under my bed with a plastic baseball bat, a water gun and flashlight, hoping to God that if this was the night it all went wrong, I had the courage to look those monsters in the eye and pretend I wasn't wetting myself. I made a nest with a giant teddy bear and two pillows and didn't come out until the next morning, when I heard my mom coming down the hall. All day long I pretended nothing was different. But I asked her to read me Where The Wild Things Are again that night. And the next night. For months. I would ask her questions like "Do you think I will have my monsters get you if you don't make me supper?" And she'd smile, and say "Go to bed, Nathan." Spooky shit, I'm telling you. I learned to read through fear and intimidation. A subversive masterpiece.

NC

A Perfect Picture Book

I’ve been teaching Where the Wild Things Are (1963) here at Fukuoka University for over twenty-five years now, and almost every time I learn something new about how it works and enjoy it again.



Maurice Sendak had some false starts making his classic book, one in 1958 called Where the Wild Horses Are, a book about an inch in height with wide pages, and then one in 1963 with the final title but fashioned too small (about the size of his Nutshell Library). And then when he’d found just the right size and title of the eventual book, he had to de-clutter the words (the text being overwritten) and pictures (the initial pictures having too many objects and details). Anyway, he did finally make a perfect picture book.

In the compact and potent story Max is wearing his “wolf suit” pajamas and going violently crazy at home (torturing his stuffed animal bear, hammering a nail in the wall to hang a string to make a blanket lair, chasing his dog down the stairs with a large fork, threatening to eat his mother up, etc.), so his mother calls him, “WILD THING!” and sends him to bed without supper, whereupon his bedroom changes into a forest and an ocean, and he sails off in a boat to Where the Wild Things Are, where he tames the monsters and becomes their king and plays with them, until he finally is sated and realizes he misses someone who loved him most of all and returns to his bedroom to find his supper waiting for him.









To tell that story, the pictures and words do interesting things, separately and together.

Sometimes the words add details absent from the pictures, like Max’ mother, whom Sendak never draws. One sentence goes on for about eight pages! But he uses “and” skillfully and ends each page at a pause-able point so as to make it easy and fun to read the book aloud. There’s even a neat touch whereby he puts the time words when Max travels to Where the Wild Things Are in an order increasing from small to large (night, day, weeks, year) only to reverse them (year, weeks, day, night) when his hero returns home, giving the impression of time travel (though then how is one to explain the full moon in his bedroom window at the end of the story when it began with a crescent moon?).

Sometimes the pictures add details absent from the words, like the nature of Max’ mischief, the picture on the wall of a wild thing that Max has drawn, the presence of the moon throughout, the way the moon changes size to match Max’ changing moods, the items in his supper, the diverse and chimerical composition of the wild things, and so on. Sometimes the illustrations provide a pleasing balance or symmetry, as when Max and the wild thing with human feet are sitting like mirror images in the same pose. Sendak’s extensive cross-hatching makes the pictures solid and substantial but also dreamlike and nocturnal.



Sometimes the words and pictures work together, as when Max is “lonely,” and the picture shows his melancholy face. Sometimes the words and pictures work against each other, as when “mischief” seems an understatement for the mayhem Max is unleashing, and when “terrible” repeatedly describes the wild things, but they look more silly or cute or ugly.

Sendak also cleverly uses layout, as in the way the pictures at first appear on the right hand pages with big white margins around them, while the words at first appear on the left hand pages, but as Max’ wildness grows, the pictures grow across the pages as the words and margins retreat, until in the wild rumpus climax there are three consecutive wonderful wordless two-page spreads where the pictures go from edge to edge (it is now that the moon is finally full, too). Then after Max expresses his wildness and fulfills and exhausts himself, the pictures start retreating as the words start advancing, till the last page has no image at all but only the words, “and it was still hot.” A wonderful touch to represent the degree of Max’s wildness by the presence or absence of words (more civilized) and pictures (more primitive).

It must be so fun for kids to read a story in which the little boy hero goes wild at home, escapes punishment by journeying to his ideal wild play place, takes command of giants like grotesque adults, gives them the punishment his mother has given him by sending them to bed without their supper, then returns home to his own still hot supper comprised of soup, milk, and cake. (The themes on using fantasy to express one’s anger and resentment and frustration are great.) And although in the last picture he has pulled down his wolf suit head to reveal his good boy’s head, he is still wearing the wolf suit, and he can go wild again any time, and the moon is full, and the wild thing on the cover is waiting for him.



Finally, I’m impressed by Sendak’s emotional restraint in the book, which is unsentimental. Imagine if at the end, instead of the brilliant last blank white page bearing only the words, “and it was still hot,” Sendak had, for instance, forced on us a picture of Max and his mother hugging or of Max’s mother watching her son eating! (Contrast that with the ending of the 2009 movie.)

This year the book is sixty, but it never feels old.

Превъзходна книга –красива и умна.
Преведена е прекрасно, като почнем още от заглавието – мразя мързеливите буквализми и мисълта, че можеше да се казва "Където живеят дивите неща" или нещо такова, ме натъжава. При тях е, точно така. И вътре е също толкова точно, истинско и живо!
На две-три места – най-вече при "стените станаха света навред", човек сякаш малко се затруднява или замисля, но ми се струва, че както се стараем да запознаваме децата си с различни видове изобразителна естетика, така би трябвало да им предлагаме и различни текстове, в някои от които може би не всичко е автоматично ясно.

Илюстрациите са превъзходни. В последно време съм се зарибила да прерисувам разни любими "картинки" – от "Зайчето Питър", "Пипи", "Мечо Пух", Туве Янсон – за бъдещата нова стая на малките бобри и просто нямате представа как ме засърбяват ръцете, като ги гледам тези разкошни цъкни.

Може би най-категоричната оценка е, че след първото четене, Бран каза "Прочети я пак" и така още четири пъти, и ако не бях му намерила нещо да го разсея, може би щяхме да продължим нощи и дни, седмица след седмица и почти над година.

Благодарим, Стефан Русинов, благодарим, "Лист"!

One of the best children's books of all time. You can be a 'wild thing' and have adventures but home is still the best place to be!

Maurice Sendak, in my opinion, struck oil when he created this children's story. Childhood memories can be shady or impossible to remember until you discover something that came directly from your childhood. Where the Wild Things Are has that magical power over me. Every time I hear of the book or see the familiar images I return to the age of six when I received my first (and only) copy of the book from my teacher as a Christmas present.

It was my favorite book as a child and one of the first books I ever read on my own (obsessively). The story struck a cord in me and even now when I read it I remember what excited me so much.

While some children would be scared of the story I found it to be fantastic. The premises is that a little boy (Max) is sent to bed without any dinner because of his poor behavior. This immediately was seen as fantasy to my child eyes because I had never before been sent to bed without a meal. The idea was blasphemous and to me was impossible to occur! But I knew there were other kids who were bad and would get punished. I had just never thought that such a punishment could be no food. He stomps off into his room and it magically becomes a forest. I think this was my most favorite part of the book. I would look at the illustrations over and over again because I understood, in my child's mind, exactly how a bedroom could become a forest. I mean, my bedroom turned into a ship, Santa's sleigh, and forests all the time; why couldn't Max's room do the same?

He adventures off to the land where the wild things are. Monsters of sorts who are made up of different body parts from different animals. This scared me slightly as a child. While Max joyfully joined the wild things I would have paired them as the scary monsters in any of my playtimes. But seeing that Max didn't find them all that scary and they in turn seemed to worship Max I realized... maybe monsters aren't all that scary.

I'd love to say that this book enlightened me to believe that wild things who look scary might not actually be. It's not the outside that counts, blah blah. But they still kind of creeped me out and I still had plenty of monsters in my playtime moments.

But the book remained a classic in my mind. I would read it over and over. When I got older and was doing art project for school I recall making the wild things out of clay and even today I feel a soft happiness inside of me when I look over the colorful drawings and read the brief story. As a child it's a great story to loose yourself in and a wonderful start for a child to learn to read. As an adult it holds the warmth of nostalgia.

Se lee en un santiamén... Me gustaron las ilustraciones pero hasta ahí.

What kind of mother will send his child to bed without dinner?

Statistics say the many Filipinos go to bed with empty stomach. They just sleep so that they'll forget that they are hungry. Living in a Pacific island when I was a young boy, our family was poor too. However, my mother made sure that we ate something before going to bed. If my parents were hard up on cash because there were four of us young kids in the family and their only source of income were the coconut trees, there were times when we had to eat rice with a couple of fresh raw eggs with pinches of salt. But as small kids, we enjoyed it as we took turns eating from the same spoon and big plate while our mother was chasing each one of us while we ran around the house trying to have fun as we felt very happy with out mother chasing us. She ran after each of us with a spoonful of rice with egg and we keep on evading her until she got angry (you could tell this by the tone of her voice). Or its decibel depending on how long it took her to complete our feeding time which meants how long would it take for her to lose her patience. She called out our names according to our age: To!... Ningcoy!... Mon!... K.D.! (joke... I am only using this alias here in GR).

Chasing us. Wanting to feed us. However, this Max's mother called him "WILD THING" and Max said "I'LL EAT YOU UP" and he was sent to his room without dinner. Poor Max got hungry and started having delusions seeing forest, ocean, boat inside his bedroom then later all those scary-looking monsters with who he had a rumpus with.

And many of my friends are saying her in Goodreads that this is the best children's book ever. I came from another culture probably and I did not grow up with this book (no sweet memories attached to it). However, I do appreciate the uniqueness of the story. A mischievous child turns on his imagination similar to the boy in Dr. Seuss' 1937 children's book To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street which for me is a better book on how powerful children's imagination can be. I see and got amazed too at how imaginative Sendak's drawings that are becoming bigger and bigger as you turn the pages. Regarding the appearance of the characters, my problem is that I had seen the movie before reading the book and I found the moving pictures more interesting than the still pictures. However, of course the basic plot is the same. I just don't remember regarding the absence of food as punishment and the food showing up at the end of the movie. Which I think makes more sense being more rational.

Overall, it is nice to have finally read this classic work. Mo Twister of Good Times told us his listeners one morning last year that this is his favorite children's book. Mine is still Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince.

Thank you, Jzhun for lending me this book. 2 stars means "It's Okay!". Please please don't let your future children go to bed hungry. It is inhumane.