It famously became a hit long before it was released. Enthusiastic tweets followed a public reading, a PDF was leaked, and the book powered up the Amazon bestseller list months before its scheduled release date. Its publication was rushed to coincide with Father’s Day. Since then, it has sold more than 400,000 copies in the United States and Canada with about half a million in print through seven printings, and the book has been licensed to more than 30 markets around the world.
Wal-Mart wouldn’t stock the book, but most of the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.
“We get the odd letter from someone who thinks we’ve contributed to the collapse of civilization, but those are few and far between,” says Ibrahim Ahmad, senior editor with Akashic, a tiny Brooklyn-based publishing house of four full-time employees, which will post its first-ever profitable year thanks to Mansbach’s “obscene fake children’s book,” as the author puts it. Film rights have been sold, Mansbach has a “parent-related” sitcom in the works, and now a G-rated version is on the way.
Seriously, Just Go to Sleep will be published next spring, and will be “100-per-cent child-friendly,” according to Ahmad.
“A lot of parents have told us that they’ve read the book to their kids and censored it as they go,” says Mansbach. “This way [the sequel] sort of keeps the verses intact and allows people to do that without having to improvise as they go and mess up the poetry.”
A rash of other, unsolicited sequel suggestions – such as Eat Your F---ing Vegetables and Get the F--- Out of Bed – have been rejected as trite and obvious, says Ahmad.
While the success of this book may have been fuelled by the large numbers of very tired parents, there is clearly an appetite for what you might call children’s books for adults.
“People enjoy reading books that have political, weird or subversive content – and if they take on the form of a children’s picture book, they get the humour or the message easily,” says Vancouver bookseller Phyllis Simons, who carries both Mansbach’s and Coupland’s titles at her Kidsbooks stores, albeit in the adult section.
“Adults find the concept amusing – especially those who have had a relationship to the book it is parodying,” she adds.
Maddox says these works (he brings up South Park too) are forms of legitimate cultural expression created by people like him who were raised on cartoons and video games.
“Stuff like I’ve written and ... Go the F--- to Sleep are kind of satires on children’s artwork and children’s literature where it’s always this pristine world that kids live in and everything’s happy and everything’s kind and polite,” says Maddox. “It’s fun to write in that style and kind of satirize the genre for adults. Because adults don’t get to read very fun books.”
Whether you agree with that statement or not, it’s clear Coupland got to write one. His delight is palpable during a discussion about Highly Inappropriate Tales.
“I just love the fact there’s not one single moral to be gained from this entire book,” he says, laughing. Then, however, he rethinks the statement, pointing to a passage from the story Kevin, the Hobo Minivan with Extremely Low Morals.
“I too learned long ago that it’s really a lot easier in life if you have small, manageable dreams,” declares Tony, the Liquor Locker clerk. “Big dreams are for losers.”
Maddox will read at Chapters at John and Richmond in Toronto on Monday at 7 p.m. Adam Mansbach will be at Chapters at Granville and Broadway in Vancouver on Saturday, Nov. 12, at 2 p.m.
