The book just called you a grouch!
It stuck its toe in your ear!
It just waved its pants at you!
It threw a protopappadum at you!
Yes, it's here! Or, well, it's there! It all depends on whether you're standing here or there, I suppose, but as long as you're on your feet, chances are you're one or the other. After so much time, so many promises of bountiful baskets of bosh, after teasings and queasings, I give you:
This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse, edited by Michael Heyman, with Illustrations by Priya Kuriyan.
---Out from Scholastic (India) right... now!
It features a tumble of oddball superheroes (and their superdog), mudpie masters, tree-climbing buffalos, a galloping Wollop, and pesky disobedient pants. The Old Masters are here, like Sukumar Ray, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mangesh Padgavkar, but also the shiny new voices of contemporary nonsense writers: Anushka Ravishankar (whose Just Like a Bug has also just arrived), Sampurna Chattarji, Samit Basu (he of the recent Turbulence fame! Swoon, ye flighty and Despair!), and even a special guest appearance of JonArno Lawson, the Canadian poet of extraordinary vim and vichtenstein (whose new Old MacDonald Had Her Farm continues in lipogrammatical lunacy). Kaushik Viswanath adds a hilarious short story about disobedient pants, and I also hucked a few pieces in there, in addition to a brief introduction that defines nonsense by way of juggling--and an Appendix that teaches all the little peepers how to write nonsense (and you too!)--through a mash-up Alice in Wonder(out)landish tale that includes nonsense heroes from around the world. Wrap that up in masterful illustrations by Priya Kuriyan, and you're got a real hum-dinger, bum-swinger, numb-finger-flipping book!
If all goes to plan, I'll be at Bookaroo in New Delhi in November, and then a tour of schools in a few other cities. Details to follow...
Here is the link to it on the Scholastic website. You lucky Indian souls with soles and souls in India, you can order directly from Scholastic. More sellers in India will join soon. As for those outside of India, you're out of luck for the moment, but I'll let you know when it will be available.
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