Go the Fuck to Sleep
"Nothing has driven home a certain truth about my generation, which is approaching the apex of its childbearing years, quite like this." --New Yorker
"A parenting zeitgeist" --Washington Post
"A hilarious take on that age-old problem: getting the beloved child to go to sleep." --National Public Radio
"A new Bible for weary parents" --New York Times
"Resonates powerfully with almost everyone" --Boston Globe
Go the Fuck to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don't always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, California Book Award-winning author Adam Mansbach's verses perfectly capture the familiar--and unspoken--tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, they open up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations, and laugh at their absurdity.
With illustrations by Ricardo Cortés, Go the Fuck to Sleep is beautiful, subversive, and pants-wittingly funny--a book for parents new, old, and expectant. You probably should not read it to your children.
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Adam Mansbach's novels include The End of the Jews, winner of the California Book Award, and the best-selling Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Believer, Granta, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He was the 2010-2011 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University. His daughter, Vivien, was his inspiration for Go the F*** to Sleep.
Ricardo Cortes has illustrated books about marijuana (It's Just a Plant), electricity, the Jamaican bobsled team, Chinese food, and A Secret History of Coffee, Coca & Cola. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, New York Magazine, the Village Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, and on the O'Reilly Factor and CNN. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
By any definition, the subversive Go the Fuck to Sleep--in which a desperate father cajoles his child to please, please, slip off into dreamland--is a real game changer; it lets frazzled parents vicariously enjoy chastising their stubborn offspring with well-placed profanity while never uttering a harsh word aloud.-- "Miami Herald"
Adam Mansbach's Go the Fuck to Sleep is the most controversial picture book on the shelves. Exhausted by his own daughter Vivien's tedious two-hour bedtime routine, Adam penned a would-be bedtime book that speaks the mind of beleaguered parents everywhere and the difficulties of getting your child to 'Go the Fuck to Sleep.'-- "In Touch Weekly"
Perfectly timed, lightly applied touches of profanity are funny. Super funny. It's especially the case when the profanity puts words to common feelings that we aren't really allowed to own up to. Well, in that spirit comes this perfect little picture-book parody.-- "Booklist"
Anyone who has ever had a newborn, an infant, a baby, a toddler, a preschooler . . . oh, heck, anyone who has ever known a young child will understand the impetus behind Adam Mansbach's runaway bestseller and 'children's book for adults.'-- "Shelf Awareness"
The bracing language may be earning it headlines, but its true appeal--and, I suspect, the reason it has caught on with the toddler-terrorised masses--lies in its unapologetic acknowledgment that early parenthood is a struggle, a state defined as often by frustration as delight. For the exhausted parent, nudged to the brink of sanity by lack of sleep, Go the Fuck to Sleep is more than a reason to snigger--it's a gesture of compassion.-- "Daily Telegraph (UK)"
Total genius.--Jonathan Lethem, father of two, author of Motherless Brooklyn
