Greetings from Greenpoint!
Image from Chirri & Chirra, The Snowy Day by Kaya Doi
Greetings from Greenpoint, Brooklyn! We’re so glad you’re here and so glad our site is finally LIVE!!!
Enchanted Lion has been without a website for a long time, so we’re feeling especially excited to be gathering our books and collaborators within a single space that will help to show you who we are, who they are, and what we’re collectively thinking about, doing and making, and why.
Here, you will find our full catalog of available and forthcoming titles. (Please note that some of our 2019 books are still awaiting photography and inclusion.) You’ll also find pages for the authors, illustrators, and translators with whom we work, as well as great book pages that will give insight into the books themselves and what their reception has been.
In this blog space, we’re planning on having either monthly or bi-monthly posts about whatever it is we’re thinking about and discussing that we think will be of relevance to all of you. We also will have guest bloggers—from authors, illustrators, and translators to educators, sales reps, kids, and readers—to open up a space of conversation that will bring us together around common interests, provocative topics, and shared loves. Should you wish to discuss further, please go ahead and email us. It may take a minute for us to respond, but we will, as we always love to discuss, explore, amplify, and deepen our own understanding of pictures, stories, and what’s at stake in publishing books for children and youth.
Image from Bear and Wolf by Daniel Salmieri
In thinking about our forthcoming winter/spring 2019 books, we’ve been excited to realize that they all relate to truth-telling and modes of refusal that turn the world inside out and upside down in favor of the WHAT IF. . . This yes-saying to what might be serves to ground young readers in the world as it is, while giving them the powerful sense that our world is a work in progress that can be made better and cared for more wisely. So many of the stories written for children were once about wisdom and foolishness, luck, right action, and care. This is true of our upcoming books, too, where it’s through clear-sightedness as well as the most fantastical twists and imaginative turns that children are given the truth about reality. As we know from one of the great authors of children’s literature, the Italian writer Gianni Rodari, children need to be able to play with life’s rules within a grammar of imagination to make sense of the contradictions and bafflements of their lives.
Our books aren’t so much about answers, as about the whimsical, imaginative, and rich ways we have of elaborating and dealing with life’s small, great, and ultimate questions.
Image from What If… by Thierry Lenain, illustrated by Olivier Tallec
What is it to be happy? To be poor? Afraid? To choose? Who are we as human beings? What is possible for us? What might we call upon? Can we feel for others without suffering ourselves? What is it to be born, to die? How do we know when we’ve learned to add, subtract, multiply, and divide well enough? What is it to share? And, truly, what might we see and feel when we spin around on a carousel that takes us out into the cosmos and home again?
We stand in the face of mystery, with all of the most important knowledge shared through poems and stories. Facts are key, of course, and help to provide anatomy. But facts alone never carry a life or describe the acts that occur within the inner life of a person. The world is made up of stories; stories are what we have for making sense out of life and of ourselves.
We are so very excited to be launching this website to share our books and ponderings with all of you, and to celebrate the incredible authors and illustrators whose words and pictures—whose stories—help to illuminate the way not just for children, but for all of us, through the questions they open and the manifold ways in which they show how beauty and truth-telling are able to find and form and remake the world again and again and again.