another great article on jumpstarting your creativity from brain pickings...

Chuck Close on Creativity, Work Ethic, and Problem-Solving vs. Problem-Creating

by Maria Popova

“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.”

Questions of why creators create, how they structure their days, and where they look for inspiration hold a strange kind of mesmerism over us mere mortals, an elusive promise of somehow reverse-engineering and absorbing genius through voyeurism. In 2003, artist Joe Fig began interviewing famous painters about how, where, and why they do what they do. The result was Inside the Painter’s Studio (UK; public library) — an anthology of 24 conversations with some of today’s most revered contemporary artists. Among them was legendary photorealist Chuck Close, who despite his paralyzing 1988 spinal artery collapse remains one of the most prolific, disciplined, and sought-after artists working today.
In the interview, Close echoes Tchaikovsky and Jack White in the supremacy of work ethic over “inspiration”:

I was never one of those people who had to have a perfect situation to paint in. I can make art anywhere, anytime — it doesn’t matter. I mean, I know so many artists for whom having the perfect space is somehow essential. They spend years designing, building, outfitting the perfect space, and then when it is just about time to get to work they’ll sell that place and build another one. It seems more often than not a way to keep from having to work. But I could pain anywhere. I made big paintings in the tiniest bedrooms, garages, you name it. you know, once I have my back to the room, I could be anywhere.

When asked about the motto or creed by which he lives, Close puts it even more forcefully, negating the notion of creative block:

Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art ida.’ And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you didid today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.
[…]
I never had painter’s block in my whole life.

Indeed, like many famous creators, Close enacts this belief in his own daily routine:

On a typical country day I am painting by nine, and I usually work until noon. Three hours in the morning. I will have lunch either at my desk, or if it’s nice I will go to the pool. Of if it’s really nice I will go to the beach for an hour. Have lunch on the beach perhaps, and then I come back and I paint from one to four, another three hours, and about then the light is failing, and I am beginning to fuck up. So then my nurse usually comes at four, and I stop working, clean up, have a big drink, and that’s a typical day. I work every day out there, every single day.

Close closes by offering emerging artists some words of advice on creative autonomy:

I think while appropriation has produced some interesting work … for me, the most interesting thing is to back yourself into your own corner where no one else’s answers will fit. You will somehow have to come up with your own personal solutions to this problem that you have set for yourself because no one else’s answers are applicable.
[…]
See, I think our whole society is much too problem-solving oriented. It is far more interesting to [participate in] ‘problem creation’ … You know, ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome — which I think is a more interesting place to be.

Then again, there’s always the question of whether it’s at all possible — or desirable — to fully purge ourselves of influences, given everything we create is an amalgamation of our lived experience, our “personal micro-culture,” without which we’d be unable to come up with “new,” combinatorial ideas.

Images courtesy Princeton Architectural Press / Joe Fig

 

   

 

 

 

    

 

The Art of Being Still

By SILAS HOUSE

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

 

Writers, Writing

Many of the aspiring writers I know talk about writing more than they actually write. Instead of setting free the novel or short story or essay that is sizzling at the ends of their fingers, desperate to set fire to the world, they fret about writer’s block or about never having the time to write.
Yet as they complain, they spend a whole lot of that precious time posting cartoons about writing on Facebook or putting up statuses about how if they only had more free time they just know they could get their novels written. They read books about writing and attend conferences, workshops and classes where they talk ad nauseam about writing. However, they spend very little time alone, thinking, much less hunkering down somewhere and actually putting words on the page.
The problem is, too many writers today are afraid to be still.
The people who see me out in the world might scoff at this since I am nearly always in motion, but those who know me best realize that I am being still even in my most active moments. This is because I’m not talking about the kind of stillness that involves locking yourself in a room with a laptop, while you wait for the words to come. We writers must learn how to become still in our heads, to achieve the sort of stillness that allows our senses to become heightened. The wonderful nonfiction writer Joyce Dyer refers to this as seeing like an animal.
Most writers today have jobs or families or responsibilities, and most often, all three. We don’t have time to sit in the woods for a few hours every day, staring at the leaves, pondering life’s mysteries and miracles and the ways we can articulate them for the reading masses.
We writers must become multitaskers who can be still in our heads while also driving safely to work, while waiting to be called “next” at the D.M.V., while riding the subway or doing the grocery shopping or walking the dogs or cooking supper or mowing our lawns.
We are a people who are forever moving, who do not have enough hours in the day, but while we are trying our best to be parents and partners, employees and caregivers, we must also remain writers.
There is no way to learn how to do this except by simply doing it. We must use every moment we can to think about the piece of writing at hand, to see the world through the point of view of our characters, to learn everything we can that serves the writing. We must notice details around us, while also blocking diversions and keeping our thought processes focused on our current poem, essay or book.
This way of being must be something that we have to turn off instead of actively turn on. It must be the way we live our lives.
The No. 1 question I get at readings is: “How many hours a day do you write?” I used to stumble on this question. I don’t write every day, but when I first started going on book tours I was afraid I’d be revealed as a true fraud if I admitted that. Sometimes I write for 20 minutes. Other times I don’t stop writing for six hours, falling over at the end like an emotional, wrung-out mess, simultaneously exhausted and exhilarated. Sometimes I go months without putting a word on the page.
One night, however, I was asked that question and the right answer just popped out, unknown to me before it found solidity on the air: “I write every waking minute,” I said. I meant, of course, that I am always writing in my head.

Sarah Williamson

I live a few blocks from the campus where I teach. Every morning, I ride my bicycle to work. Along the way, I’m focusing on the cars speeding by me, seemingly intent on making the life of a bicyclist as miserable as possible. But I am also thinking about the main character in the novel I’m writing now.
The book is set in Key West, so naturally he rides his bicycle all over the Florida island. When pumping those pedals toward my office, I am not myself on an orange-leaf-strewed campus. I am my character, pedaling down to the beach after a long day of working as a hotel housekeeper. I see the world through his eyes. I imagine what he is thinking. I use that brief time to become him.
I transform the mundane task of grocery shopping into a writing exercise by studying my fellow shoppers through the eyes of my character, a man who is on the run from the law.
I eye each one with suspicion and dodge any cop who might be trotting along with a grocery basket in hand. I sometimes steal a quirk from a woman nearby to apply to one of my female characters in the book. I am multitasking, but there is stillness at work here.
I found myself as a writer at a gathering deep in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. I often encourage burgeoning novelists, poets and essayists to seek out conferences where they can be exposed to established authors, agents, editors and — most important — other folks like them who are struggling and hoping their writing dreams will come true. But I discourage people from going to too many of these, because if a writer isn’t careful, she will end up packing and traveling and workshopping far more than she writes.
Writers have been meeting at the Appalachian Writers Workshop for 35 years, and in that time the gathering has produced many award-winning, best-selling authors. One of its most beloved centerpieces, until his death in 2001, was James Still, a novelist and poet known for his keen insights into the natural world. Shortly before he died I met him.
I was a young, naïve, foolish writer who was searching for my way. I swallowed hard and asked him if he had any advice on how to be a better writer. He didn’t answer for a long minute, gazing off at the hills as if ignoring me.
But then he spoke, and I realized that he had taken that moment for quiet thought. “Discover something new every day,” he said. That advice changed me as a writer and as a person.
I give it to you now and hope that you will take it out into the waiting world, pushing forth through all of your daily work and joys and struggles with a bit of your mind focused on reality and the larger part of it quiet, still, and always thinking like a writer.

---

Silas House, the author of five novels, a work of nonfiction and three plays, teaches at Berea College and Spalding University’s M.F.A. program in creative writing.

A version of this article appeared in print on 12/02/2012, on page SR9 of the NewYork edition with the headline: The Art Of Being Still.

this is not a joke, i just discovered this,  it is an actual , but little seen Dr.Seuss book for adults and as an added bonus, there's nudity as well...oh the places he goes!!

New Love: A Short Shelf Life

IN fairy tales, marriages last happily ever after. Science, however, tells us that wedded bliss has but a limited shelf life.

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American and European researchers tracked 1,761 people who got married and stayed married over the course of 15 years. The findings were clear: newlyweds enjoy a big happiness boost that lasts, on average, for just two years. Then the special joy wears off and they are back where they started, at least in terms of happiness. The findings, from a 2003 study have been confirmed by several recent studies.

The good news for the holiday season when families gather in various configurations is that if couples get past that two-year slump and hang on — for another couple of decades — they may well recover the excitement of the honeymoon period 18 to 20 years later, when children are gone. Then, in the freedom of the so-called empty nest, partners are left to discover one another — and often their early bliss — once again.

When love is new, we have the rare capacity to experience great happiness while being stuck in traffic or getting our teeth cleaned. We are in the throes of what researchers call passionate love, a state of intense longing, desire and attraction. In time, this love generally morphs into companionate love, a less impassioned blend of deep affection and connection. The reason is that human beings are, as more than a hundred studies show, prone to hedonic adaptation, a measurable and innate capacity to become habituated or inured to most life changes.

With all due respect to poets and pop radio songwriters, new love seems nearly as vulnerable to hedonic adaptation as a new job, a new home, a new coat and other novel sources of pleasure and well-being. (Though the thrill of a new material acquisition generally fades faster.)

Hedonic adaptation is most likely when positive experiences are involved. It’s cruel but true: We’re inclined — psychologically and physiologically — to take positive experiences for granted. We move into a beautiful loft. Marry a wonderful partner. Earn our way to the top of our profession. How thrilling! For a time. Then, as if propelled by autonomic forces, our expectations change, multiply or expand and, as they do, we begin to take the new, improved circumstances for granted.

Sexual passion and arousal are particularly prone to hedonic adaptation. Laboratory studies in places as far-flung as Melbourne, Australia, and Stony Brook, N.Y., are persuasive: both men and women are less aroused after they have repeatedly viewed the same erotic pictures or engaged in similar sexual fantasies. Familiarity may or may not breed contempt; but research suggests that it breeds indifference. Or, as Raymond Chandler wrote: “The first kiss is magic. The second is intimate. The third is routine.”

There are evolutionary, physiological and practical reasons passionate love is unlikely to endure for long. If we obsessed, endlessly, about our partners and had sex with them multiple times a day — every day — we would not be very productive at work or attentive to our children, our friends or our health. (To quote a line from the 2004 film “Before Sunset,” about two former lovers who chance to meet again after a decade, if passion did not fade, “we would end up doing nothing at all with our lives.” ) Indeed, the condition of being in love has a lot in common with the state of addiction and narcissism; if unabated, it will eventually exact a toll.

WHY, then, is the natural shift from passionate to companionate love often such a letdown? Because, although we may not realize it, we are biologically hard-wired to crave variety. Variety and novelty affect the brain in much the same way that drugs do — that is, they trigger activity that involves the neurotransmitter dopamine, as do pharmacological highs.

Evolutionary biologists believe that sexual variety is adaptive, and that it evolved to prevent incest and inbreeding in ancestral environments. The idea is that when our spouse becomes as familiar to us as a sibling — when we’ve become family — we cease to be sexually attracted to each other.

It doesn’t take a scientist to observe that because the sex in a long-term committed monogamous relationship involves the same partner day after day after day, no one who is truly human (or mammalian) can maintain the same level of lust and ardor that he or she experienced when that love was uncharted and new.

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We may love our partners deeply, idolize them, and even be willing to die for them, but these feelings rarely translate into long-term passion. And studies show that in long-term relationships, women are more likely than men to lose interest in sex, and to lose it sooner. Why? Because women’s idea of passionate sex depends far more centrally on novelty than does men’s.

When married couples reach the two-year mark, many mistake the natural shift from passionate love to companionate love for incompatibility and unhappiness. For many, the possibility that things might be different — more exciting, more satisfying — with someone else proves difficult to resist. Injecting variety and surprise into even the most stable, seasoned relationship is a good hedge against such temptation. Key parties — remember “The Ice Storm”? — aren’t necessarily what the doctor ordered; simpler changes in routine, departures from the expected, go a long way.

In a classic experiment conducted by Arthur Aron and his colleagues, researchers gave upper-middle-class middle-aged couples a list of activities that both parties agreed were “pleasant” (like creative cooking, visiting friends or seeing a movie) or “exciting” (skiing, dancing or attending concerts) but that they had enjoyed only infrequently. Researchers instructed each couple to select one of these activities each week and spend 90 minutes doing it together. At the end of 10 weeks, the couples who engaged in the “exciting” activities reported greater satisfaction in their marriage than those who engaged in “pleasant” or enjoyable activities together.

Although variety and surprise seem similar, they are in fact quite distinct. It’s easy to vary a sequence of events — like choosing a restaurant for a weekly date night — without offering a lot of surprise. In the beginning, relationships are endlessly surprising: Does he like to cook? What is his family like? What embarrasses or delights him? As we come to know our partners better and better, they surprise us less.

Surprise is a potent force. When something novel occurs, we tend to pay attention, to appreciate the experience or circumstance, and to remember it. We are less likely to take our marriage for granted when it continues to deliver strong emotional reactions in us. Also, uncertainty sometimes enhances the pleasure of positive events. For example, a series of studies at the University of Virginia and at Harvard showed that people experienced longer bursts of happiness when they were at the receiving end of an unexpected act of kindness and remained uncertain about where and why it had originated.

Such reactions may have neuroscientific origins. In one experiment, scientists offered drinks to thirsty subjects; those who were not told what kind of drink they would get (i.e., water or a more appealing beverage) showed more activity in the portion of the brain that registers positive emotions. Surprise is apparently more satisfying than stability.

The realization that your marriage no longer supplies the charge it formerly did is then an invitation: eschew predictability in favor of discovery, novelty and opportunities for unpredictable pleasure. “A relationship,” Woody Allen proclaimed in his film “Annie Hall,” “is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies.” A marriage is likely to change shape multiple times over the course of its lifetime; it must be continually rebuilt if it is to thrive.

The good news is that taking the long view on marriage and putting in the hard work has calculable benefits. Research shows that marital happiness reaches one of its highest peaks during the period after offspring have moved out of the family home.

The nest may be empty, but it’s also full of possibility for partners to rediscover — and surprise — each other again. In other words, an empty nest offers the possibility of novelty and unpredictability. Whether this phase of belated marital joy lasts, like the initial period of connubial bliss, for longer than two years is anybody’s guess.

This Life

She’s Got Some Big Ideas

SHE is the mastermind of the one of the faster growing literary empires on the Internet, yet she is virtually unknown. She is the champion of old-fashioned ideas, yet she is only 28 years old. She is a fierce defender of books, yet she insists she will never write one herself.

  Maria Popova grew up around books.

At precisely 9:30 on a chilly Saturday morning, Maria Popova slips out of her apartment in Brooklyn, scurries down a few stairs and enters a small basement gym. A former recreational bodybuilder from Bulgaria, Ms. Popova is the unlikely founder of the exploding online emporium of ideas known as Brain Pickings.

Her exhaustively assembled grab bag of scientific curiosities, forgotten photographs, snippets of old love letters and mash notes to creativity — imagine the high-mindedness of a TED talk mixed with the pop sensibility of P. T. Barnum — spans a blog (500,000 visitors a month), a newsletter (150,000 subscribers) and a Twitter feed (263,000 followers). Her output, which she calls a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness,” has attracted an eclectic group of devotees including the novelist William Gibson, the singer Josh Groban, the comedian Drew Carey, the neuroscientist David Eagleman, the actress Mia Farrow and the Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

“She’s a celebrator,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor and former State Department official. “You feel the tremendous amount of pleasure she takes in finding these things and sharing them. It’s like walking into the Museum of Modern Art and having somebody give you a customized, guided tour.”

Unlike most blogger celebrities, however, Ms. Popova revels in remaining anonymous, which means her followers know almost nothing about her. In an age when many tweet what they put in their morning coffee, she rarely uses the word “I.” Her personal history is almost completely absent. Her photograph is not on the site. “I don’t feel the necessity to be in the public eye that way,” she said after reluctantly agreeing to sit for an interview. “There’s a certain safety in making people feel like you’re an organization and not a person. ”

A fierce creature of habit, she begins every day by working out. On this morning, she alternates 20 chin-ups with 50 push-ups, then performs a series of planks and stretches. Once on the elliptical, she frantically highlights an obscure 1976 book, “The Creativity Question” (Amazon sales ranking: one million-plus), and checks her RSS feed on her iPad.

Exactly 70 minutes later, she returns to her modest one-bedroom apartment to write a brief essay about Freud and daydreaming, file her thrice-daily blog entries and schedule her regimen of 50 Twitter messages a day. She does this while balancing on a wobble board.

“I try to sit still when I work, but my mind goes spiraling elsewhere,” she said in a mild Slavic accent reminiscent of Bond girls in the 1970s. “When my body is moving, it’s almost like it takes the wind out of this mental spinning, and I’m able to focus.” Recently, she came upon a 1942 book on inspiration chronicling others with the same habit. “Mark Twain paced while he dictated,” she said. “Beethoven walked along the river. Maybe there’s a psycho-biological element.”

Ms. Popova traces her discipline to her upbringing behind the Iron Curtain. Her parents met as teenage exchange students in Russia and had her almost immediately. Her father was an engineering student who later became an Apple salesman; her mother was studying library science. “We’re not very much in touch,” she said of her parents today, “but recently we were on Skype, and this whole library science thing came up. I realized a lot of what I do is organizational, almost like a Dewey Decimal System for the Web. My mother got so emotional. It was very funny, and kind of moving.”

Her paternal grandmother was a rabid biblio and had a collection of encyclopedias, Ms. Popova said, and she credits the act of randomly opening volumes and happening upon entries for her passion to discover old knowledge. “The Web has such a presentism bias,” she said, with Facebook updates, tweets and blog entries always appearing with the latest first. By contrast, flipping through the encyclopedia was “an interesting model of learning about the world serendipitously and also guidedely.”

After graduating from an American high school in Bulgaria, she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where she quickly grew bored with what she calls the “industrial model” of education, involving large-scale lectures. While still a student, she was working part time at an advertising firm in 2005, when a colleague sent around an e-mail with clippings of rivals’ work to inspire the team.

• Ms. Popova thought it was the wrong way to spur imagination, so she told her boss she would begin sending around her own inspirational e-mail regularly. It would contain everything from a new piece of research into biomimicry to a haiku by a Japanese poet. Without much thought, she called it Brain Pickings. “It was the opposite of how school made me feel,” she said. “It was a kind of Rube Goldberg-like machine of curiosity and discovery.”

  Soon, her friends began forwarding the e-mails, so she set up a rudimentary Web site to collect them. She continued updating it while working in advertising, writing magazine articles, even returning to Bulgaria for a year to wait out a visa application.

  Today, Brain Pickings provides the bulk of her income. She eschews ads on the site, but openly solicits donations and earns a percentage from books purchased on her recommendation through Amazon. (Ms. Slaughter said she gives $25 a month — “a lot like giving to your public radio station.”) The earnings are “enough for me to live my life comfortably,” Ms. Popova said, “and be able to do what I do.”

  So what exactly is it that she does? Ms. Popova says she views her job as “helping people become interested in things they didn’t know they were interested in, until they are.” One entry might discuss how to find your true passion, with links to a talk by Alain de Botton, a book by the cartoonist Hugh MacLeod and a commencement address by Steve Jobs; another, how she asked an artist friend to illustrate thoughts on love from Susan Sontag’s diaries. Recently she recounted an aging Helen Keller’s visit to Martha Graham’s studio.

  Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art and a friend of Ms. Popova’s, said a good curator was someone whose own taste had somehow become the taste of millions. “What Maria has is the DNA of millions of people,” Ms. Antonelli said. “She somehow tunes in to what would make other people dream, or inspire them in a way that is quite unique.”

  One feature that helps make Ms. Popova’s work so popular is the visual style of her entries, with catchy graphics, abundant photographs and whimsical illustrations. In some ways, this reflects her personal style: she favors simple black clothes, highlighted by playful yellow accessories, including a yellow Lego ring and yellow clogs. Her apartment is filled with yellow boxing gloves, a yellow fire extinguisher and a giant yellow Lego piece.

  But her commercial instincts are rooted in a deeper place. Coming of age in post-communist Eastern Europe, Ms. Popova developed an interested in consumerism, “the notion of people making sense of themselves through stuff, through what they own and what they buy.” Brain Pickings takes ideas that are abstract, even arcane, and repackages them in a perky, Warhol way, which makes them accessible to the masses. One word that comes to mind is “bourgeois.”

  “What it reminds me of,” said Edward Tufte, the Yale professor emeritus of computer science, statistics and political science, “is there was a great series of interviews with authors in ‘The Paris Review.’ I read those over and over for inspiration but also to try to understand the meaning of a creative life.”

  She has faced criticism, of course. She has been dismissed as elitist and condescending. An initiative she helped start last spring, the Curator’s Code, which called for more respect and attribution in the Twittersphere, was harshly criticized. Ms. Popova responded in a blog post that began, “In times of turmoil, I often turn to one of my existential pillars of comfort: Albert Einstein’s ‘Ideas and Opinion.’ ” She ended with this thought: “There is a way to critique intelligently and respectfully, without eroding the validity of your disagreement. It boils down to manners.”

  Old-fashioned, indeed.

  As for her future, Ms. Popova said she had little interest in expanding her brand. “I get asked all the time, ‘How’s it going to scale?’ ‘What’s next?’ ” she said. “What I do is what I do, and I don’t think I’m ever going to change that.” The woman who rails against her contemporaries for turning their backs on old books said she had no interest in writing one. “That’s such an antiquated model of thinking,” she said. “Why would I want to write something that’s going to have the shelf life of a banana?”

  Instead, she is committed to the Internet. “So much of what the Web is presenting lowers people down,” she said. “What Paris Hilton ate for breakfast”; by contrast, the vast majority of its gems remain untapped.

  Brain Pickings is her attempt to create a 21st-century library, as she put it. “I want to build a new framework for what information matters,” she said. In effect, she wants to recreate the portals she first viewed the world through as a child — the library science of her mother and the encyclopedia of her grandmother.

  And if she’s able to do that? “I’ll feel stimulated,” she said, “like I’m learning.”

   

  
  

  
  

  Bruce Feiler’s latest book,“The Secrets of Happy Families,” will be published in February. “This Life” appears monthly.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 2, 2012, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: She’s Got Some Big Ideas.

Notable Children’s Books of 2012

This year's notable children's books — the best in picture books, middle grade and young adult fiction and nonfiction, selected by the children's book editor of The New York Times Book Review.

YOUNG ADULT

BITTERBLUE. By Kristin Cashore. (Dial, $19.99.) The companion to “Graceling” and “Fire,” this beautiful, haunting and thrilling high fantasy about a young queen and her troubled kingdom stands on its own.

CODE NAME VERITY. By Elizabeth Wein. (Hyperion, $16.99.) This tale of a spy and a fighter pilot during World War II is at heart a story about female ­friendship.

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS. By John Green. (Dutton, $17.99.) An improbable but predictably wrenching love story about two teenage cancer patients, written in Green’s signature tone, humorous yet heart-filled.

JEPP, WHO DEFIED THE STARS. By Katherine Marsh. (Hyperion, $16.99.) A dwarf at court in 16th-century Denmark is the surprising hero in this novel, which also features the real-life astronomer Tycho Brahe, an eccentric Danish nobleman.

NEVER FALL DOWN. By Patricia McCormick. (Balzer & Bray/Harper­Collins, $17.99.) This novelized memoir tells the tragic but inspiring life story of Arn Chorn-Pond, a boy who was 9 years old when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia.

SON. By Lois Lowry. (Houghton Mifflin, $17.99.) In the conclusion to the dystopian “Giver” quartet, Lowry returns to the story of a mother searching for her lost son. “A quiet, sorrowful, deeply moving exploration of the powers of empathy and the obligations of love,” our reviewer said.

MIDDLE GRADE

BEYOND COURAGE: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust. By Doreen Rappaport. (Candlewick, $22.99.) This book about the Holocaust dwells on the choice to fight and resist rather than the road to death. A lively, absorbing and eye-opening history for young readers.

THE FALSE PRINCE. By Jennifer A. Nielsen. (Scholastic, $17.99.) Four orphaned boys and would-be princes are captured in a treacherous medieval kingdom in the first book of a new series. Adam Gopnik, our reviewer, called it a “page turner” and praised its “persuasively surly and defiant character, and a realistic vein of violence.”

HAND IN HAND: Ten Black Men Who Changed America. By Andrea Davis Pinkney. Illustrated by Brian Pinkney. (Disney-Jump at the Sun, $19.99.) Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, A. Philip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Barack Obama feature in this collection.

THE HERO’S GUIDE TO SAVING YOUR KINGDOM. By Christopher Healy. Illustrated by Todd Harris. (Walden Pond/HarperCollins, $16.99.) The enchanting premise of this story is that four Princes Charming, carried over from their fairy tales of origin, must band together to track down Cinderella and restore harmony to their kingdom.

THE LAST DRAGONSLAYER. By Jasper Fforde. (Harcourt/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $16.99.) A 15-year-old orphan, indentured to magicians, in a world where dragons are dying out. Fforde’s first book for young readers.

LIAR & SPY. By Rebecca Stead. (Wendy Lamb, $15.99.) A bunch of misfits star in this contemporary tale, Stead’s follow-up to her Newbery Medal-winning “When You Reach Me.”

THE SECRET TREE. By Natalie Standiford. (Scholastic, $16.99.) Two children, a summer and a tree that tells secrets in this story about neighborhood kids.

SEE YOU AT HARRY’S. By Jo Knowles. (Candlewick, $16.99.) With four siblings at its center, Knowles’s story is about a family who run a restaurant and the commonplace and serious traumas they face.

SPLENDORS AND GLOOMS. By Laura Amy Schlitz. (Candlewick, $17.99.) A Gothic novel, from the Newbery-winning author, about three children and a master puppeteer in Dickensian London.

“WHO COULD THAT BE AT THIS HOUR?” By Lemony Snicket. Illustrated by Seth. (Little, Brown, $15.99.) A prequel of sorts to “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” this humorous riddle of a book is the start of a mock-autobiographical series.

WONDER. By R. J. Palacio. (Knopf, $15.99.) This novel tells the moving story of August Pullman, a 10-year-old boy born with severe facial malformations, and the bullying he endures when he attends school for the first time.

PICTURE BOOKS

BROTHERS AT BAT: The True Story of an Amazing All-Brother Baseball Team. By Audrey Vernick. Illustrated by Steven Salerno. (Clarion/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $16.99.) The true story of the longest-running all-brother baseball team, 12 Acerra siblings who played together during the 1930s. A captivating story, impeccable layout and glorious illustrations make this historical account an unqualified winner.

THE DAY LOUIS GOT EATEN. Written and illustrated by John Fardell. (Andersen Press, $16.95.) A boy is eaten by a Gulper, which is eaten in turn by a Grabular, an Undersnatch, a Spiney-Backed Guzzler and a Saber-Toothed Yumper. His intrepid sister, traveling by bicycle and other hand-jiggered contraptions, comes to the rescue. Hilarious and sweet, both. “I love this book so much I want to eat it up,” our reviewer said.

DRAGONS LOVE TACOS. By Adam Rubin. Illustrated by Daniel Salmieri. (Dial, $16.99.) Rubin and Salmieri, the team behind the equally hilarious “Those Darn Squirrels!,” bring their kooky sensibility to this irresistible story about what can go wrong at a taco party for dragons. Salmieri’s drawings are not only a wacky delight, they’re also strangely beautiful.

A GOLD STAR FOR ZOG. By Julia Donaldson. Illustrated by Axel Scheffler. (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, $16.99.) A school for dragons and a dragon-loving princess (who really wants to be a doctor) are at the center of this rhyming tale from the team behind “The Gruffalo” and “Room on the Broom.” Humor, heart and a worthy heroine earn this story its own star.

HELLO! HELLO! Written and illustrated by Matthew Cordell. (Disney-­Hyperion, $16.99.) In this ode to nature and the palpable joys of pre-technology days, a girl runs wild on a horse while her screen-­addicted family members tap away indoors. The book’s “art is gloriously old-style,” our reviewer, David Small, said. Its message is loud, clear and important.

I’M BORED. By Michael Ian Black. Illustrated by Debbie Ridpath Ohi. (Simon & Schuster, $16.99.) Black, a comedian, has become a fine children’s book storyteller (“A Pig Parade Is a Terrible Idea”). This original story features a bored child, a bored potato and a bored flamingo. Readers will not be bored.

KING ARTHUR’S VERY GREAT GRANDSON. Written and illustrated by Kenneth Kraegel. (Candlewick, $15.99.) On the day of his sixth birthday, Henry Alfred Grummorson, the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King Arthur, sets out for peril and conquest. Alas, all he finds are peaceable beasts. There are still dragons in this clever story by a first-time author and illustrator.

THIS IS NOT MY HAT. Written and illustrated by Jon Klassen. (Candlewick, $15.99.) The hat is back, but this time it belongs to a fish, not a bear. It belongs to a big fish, to be precise, but a small fish has stolen it. You will probably guess what happens in this delightfully dark, comic follow-up to “I Want My Hat Back.”

from the  New York Times