What is Unruly?

As an independent publisher of uncompromising books for children, Enchanted Lion Books has been pushing the boundaries of the picture book for the past 20 years. And now we’re pushing the boundaries even further, with Unruly: our exciting imprint of picture books intended specifically for adults and teenagers.

Our vision is to create a space where the picture book can truly break out for older readers, where it can expand and flourish as the boundless storytelling medium that it is.

Why picture books for adults?

Picture books created for adults are substantially different from those created for children. When it comes to children’s picture books (with a nod to Jean Piaget), we seek to share a sense of well-being, a love of life, nonconformity, acute observation, as well as a sense of wonder, a sense of humor, and a gentle sense of irony that respects the child’s awareness that things are not always as they seem.

The picture books we are proposing under Unruly will be adult-centered, which means that they will offer complex visual and written narratives that put their lens onto the intrinsic beauty and mystery of the world, but also onto the monstrousness, the strangeness, and the weirdness inherent in all that is. These books will explore all manner of insight and experience, temptation, anxiety, and dilemma that is of pressing interest to us as adults. Children are not mini adults. The lives they lead are very different from our own—and good children's stories are, too.

But why picture books?

There is a very real difference between showing and telling, and our assertion is that we need pictures across our lives. Today rather than living richly with images, we seem to do everything we can to drown out the showing forth of things through excessive telling. We are submerged in explanations as opposed to revelations.

The importance of narrative picture books for adults lies in the fact that there are things we apprehend that we cannot comprehend, and that what art shows forth is a wild excess of meaning. It is pictures that present us with what is not reducible to a single meaning or understanding, pictures that put us face-to-face with mystery.

We all already know how deeply story and narrative move us as humans, and to add the layer of image into the mix in the space of the picture book broadens our capacity to plumb that depth. 

Unruly is here to remind us that images speak with us, no matter how old we are, in a way that nothing else really can. Every picture tells a thousand stories, meaning they are endlessly open to interpretation, defying our drive to reduce, categorize, and explain. They invite us to live with wonder, questions, nuance, and the shifting sands of interpretations and meanings.