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Despite his best intentions, Giovanni cannot help but get distracted by the interesting world around him.
About the author
Italian author
Gianni Rodari wrote many beloved children's books and was awarded the prestigious Andersen Prize. But he was also an educator of paramount importance in Italy and an activist who understood the liberating power of the imagination. He is one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors for children, and Italy's greatest. Influenced by French surrealism and linguistics, Rodari stressed the importance of poetic language, metaphor, made-up language, and play. At a time when schooling was all about factual knowledge, Rodari wrote
The Grammar of Fantasy, a radically imaginative book about storytelling and play. He was a forerunner of writing techniques such as the "fantastic binomial" and the utopian, world engendering "what if...." The relevance of Rodari’s works today lies in his poetics of imagination, his humanist yet challenging approach to reality, and his themes, such as war and peace, immigration, injustice, inequality, and liberty. Forty years after his death, Rodari’s writing is as powerful and innovative as ever. He died in Rome in 1980.
Beatrice Alemagna has written and illustrated dozens of children’s books, which have received numerous awards all over the world and have been translated into 14 languages. The author-illustrator of three
New York Times Best Illustrated books, she has also been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award seven times and shortlisted for the Hans Christian Andersen Award twice. Enchanted Lion has published four of her picture books:
The Wonderful Fluffy Little Squishy (Batchelder Award winner)
; Child of Glass (a NYT Best Illustrated Book);
Telling Stories Wrong (a NYT Best Illustrated Book); and
You Can't Kill Snow White, a picture book for teens and adults, published under Enchanted Lion's Unruly imprint. Born in Bologna, Italy, Alemagna lives and works in Paris, France.
Antony Shugaar is a writer and translator, working out of Italian and French. He once interviewed the creator of Topo Gigio.
Summary
Written by Gianni Rodari, the father of modern Italian children's literature, and charmingly illustrated by award-winning artist Beatrice Alemagna, this bright, sweet story reminds us what children are really like in the most essential and beautiful way!
Following her New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Telling Stories Wrong, Beatrice Alemagna returns to illustrate another of Gianni Rodari’s delightful stories from Telephone Tales. With a Batchelder Award winning translation by Antony Shugaar, this classic story from one of Italy’s most beloved and important authors of children’s literature asserts the power of flights of fancy and the value of childlike wonder.
