LIVE from the NYPL: GO THE F**K TO SLEEP: A Bedtime Book for Parents Who Live in the Real World

June 14, 2011

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Go the F**k to Sleep, a pants-wettingly funny bedtime book for parents, has received an extraordinary amount of pre-publication attention from parents around the world. As Peter Maravelis of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco told the New York Times: “It’s the zeitgeist.”

Go the F**k to Sleep author Adam Mansbach, illustrator Ricardo Cortés, and Special Guests in conversation with Paul Holdengräber on Children, Sleep Deprivation and Insomnia.

ADAM MANSBACH novels include The End of the Jews, winner of the California Book Award, and the best-selling Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Believer, Granta, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He is the 2010-2011 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University. His daughter, Vivien, is three.

RICARDO CORTÉS has illustrated books about marijuana, electricity, the Jamaican bobsled team, and Chinese food. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, New York Magazine, the Village Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, and on the O'Reilly Factor and CNN. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, where he is working on a book about the history of Coca-Cola and cocaine. To see more of his work, visit: Rmcortes.com.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER is the Director of LIVE from the NYPL.

Comments

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Go the F**k to Sleep, a pants-wettingly funny bedtime book for p

Very sick humor. We daily see kids whose parents wish their F**King kids were't there and abuse, misuse, and fail the kids over and over and over. The real world is not nice or funny when it comes to kids.

Obviously there are kids that

Obviously there are kids that are mistreated in the world, but really, this book is for parents and it is just meant to be funny. I hate that we have become so politically correct all the time that we can't take a joke anymore....It is funny. It is meant to be funny...Get over it already.

The Mansbach Book

Does the reading public really need a book with this kind of title? Evidently by the popularity , it does- or so the publicists and reviews tell us. From an individual whose childhood included screaming, hitting and foul language I prefer the soothing peaceful atmosphere of a Mr. Rogers segment but perhaps that's too much to hope for these days. My condolences over the new normal the NYPL helped to create.