#Daniel pinkwater

[neil-gaiman]

The book I'm reading, Crazy In Poughkeepsie, has a quote from you on the cover! Have you ever been to the real life Poughkeepsie? We've got a cool bridge.

I have. (In fact I tore my meniscus at the beginning of October running for a train in Poughkeepsie.)

[forthegothicheroine]

One of my favorite young adult novels as a child was called, appropriately, Young Adult Novel by Daniel Pinkwater. It was about a bunch of dorky boys who formed a club devoted to the art of Dada and did various surreal pranks in the name of Dada that mostly served to annoy the vice principal. Eventually, a boy who had been the focus of their stupid stunts lead the other students in pelting them with wet cereal. They talk about what has happened and decide that there is no moral, it is a Dada story.

We need more YA fiction like that.

[agblend13]

Deep in the Lookyloo Forest dwells the rarest of confections, a treat for the eyes and the senses. The strange... the wonderful... the night blooming... banana split. 🍌

A tiny slice of a major Wood Bot adventure! I was having a really nice time re-reading '4 Fantastic Novels' by Daniel Pinkwater, which I hadn't picked up since I was a kid. At the end of 'Borgel', on a small island on the outskirts of Hell, young Melvin and his dimension hopping uncle get to meet god... also known as The Great Popsicle, a being of pure goodness and light that is also literally a little orange popsicle dancing beautifully through the fields. It's so funny and charming and I was ready to paint Wood Bot observing The Great Popsicle itself, but ultimately decided it would be too small to make an impact here. It did however lead to the discovery of the night blooming banana split, which I would imagine carries a small piece of The Great Popsicle in its spirit.

♡ Anka

Acrylic painting on handmade mixed media panel, 4.5x4.5", 2024

Shop ✦ artbasealpha.com ✹

[valentinsylve]

Tagged by @bloodripelives, which of my 5 favorite characters do you like best? I'm leaving out fandom favorites for obvious reasons :)

[yekokataa]

the post about wayside school reminded me that i've been meaning to make a post about my other favorite absurdist children's author, daniel pinkwater. i recently revisited two of my favorite books of his, borgel and alan mendelsohn, the boy from mars, and they really held up. he has a number of audiobooks on his site that you can download completely free. his voice acting as borgel, a mysterious distant uncle from a never-named 'old country' (which might be somewhere in eastern europe, but might also be another planet) is particularly delightful.

playing kentucky route zero, of all things, was what made me want to re-read borgel. it's about a road trip through 'time, space, and the other' which looks like a long highway through dark nothingness, punctuated by stops at root beer stands owned by blob-shaped aliens, friendly diners, and a roadside attraction which is a replica of a giant popsicle. at some point there's a metaphor about an everything bagel that is highly reminiscent of everything everywhere all at once. (this book came out in 1990 by the way) our characters then embark on a quest to find the living, breathing, dancing giant popsicle. the popsicle is god. this is a 10/10 book and you should really go read it.

[doyouknowthisjewishcharacter]

Do you know this Jewish character?

[supersoulmotivation]

Episode 4: Why Autonomy Matters in the Workplace According to Daniel Pin...

[scattershotsilly]

cute author bio

[laselvadeleones]

La Selva de Leones, XXVIII. Bear in Love

El león patatín desempolva su pronunciación de Inglés para este libro “con dibujos y letra” que trata de un oso que se va encontrando zanahorias en una roca al lado de su cueva… Las zanahoras se las lleva un personaje misterioso, pero hasta aquí podemos contar. Edad? De 5 a 12 años. Y, ¿Cómo no? Le damos un 10. 🙂 Portada de Bear in Love de Daniel Pikwater e ilustrado por Will Hillenbrand

[etherdiver]

Not sure that this is real but like 30-40% sure it's a reference to the Daniel Pinkwater book Lizard Music whether it's a real album or not.

[outerspace-iiinnerspace]

m about halfway through rereading the afterlife diet and i have a lot of thoughts on it.

[chiropteracupola]

books for children with the message 'reading dumas is a thing Cool People do and you can become cooler by doing that' are very important to me

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Daniel Pinkwater's "Jules, Penny and the Rooster"

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in BURBANK with WIL WHEATON on THURSDAY (Mar 13), and in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24. More tour dates here.

"Cult author" is a maddeningly imprecise term – it might mean, "writer whose readers are a small but devoted band," or it might mean "writer whose readers are transformed forever by their work, so that they never see the world in the same way again."

That latter sense is what I mean when I call Daniel Pinkwater a "cult author." Pinkwater has written more than 100 books and has reached a vast audience, and those books are so singular, so utterly fantastic that when one Pinkwater fan meets another, they immediately launch into ecstatic raptures about these extraordinary works.

Pinkwater writes all kinds of books: memoir, picture books, middle-grades titles, young adult novels, extremely adult novels that appear to be young adult novels, and one of the classic works on dog-training (which I read, even though I don't own a dog and never plan on owning a dog) (it was great):

https://pinkwater.com/book/superpuppy-how-to-choose-raise-and-train-the-best-possible-dog-for-you/

Pinkwater has a new book out. It's great. Of course it's great. It's called Jules, Penny and the Rooster and it's nominally a middle-grades book, and while it will certainly delight the kids in your life, I ate it up:

https://tachyonpublications.com/product/jules-penny-the-rooster/

Jules and her family have just moved to a suburb called Bayberry Acres in the sleepy dormitory city of Turtle Neck and now she's having a pretty rotten summer. She misses all her friends back in the city, her grumpy bassoon-obsessed sister broke her finger and it staying home all summer watching old movies and hogging the TV instead of going to bassoon camp, and all the other kids in Bayberry Acres are literal babies, which may pay off in babysitting gigs, but makes for a lonely existence for Jules.

Worst of all: Jules's parents always promised that she could get a dog when they eventually moved out of their little apartment and bought a house with a yard in the suburbs, and now that this has come to pass, they're reneging. They say that all they promised was that they would "talk about getting a dog" after moving, and that "no, we're not getting a dog" constitutes "talking about it," and that settles the matter. Jules knows that what's really going on is that her parents have bought all new furniture and rugs and they're worried the dog will mess or chew on these. Jules loves her parents, but when she gets her own place, she's a) definitely getting a dog, and b) not allowing her parents to visit, because they might mess or chew on her furniture.

All that changes when Jules enters an essay contest in the local newspaper to win a collie (a contest she enters without telling her parents, natch) and wins – coming home from a visit to see her beloved aunt back in the old neighborhood to find her finger-nursing, oboe-obsessed big sister in possession of her new dog. After Jules and her sister do some fast talking to bring their parents around, Jules's summer – and her life in the suburbs – are rescued from a summer of lonely doldrums.

Jules names the collie Penny, and they go for long rambles in the mysterious woods that Bayberry Acres were carved out of. It's on one of these walks that they meet the rooster, a handsome, proud, friendly fellow who lures Penny over the stone wall that demarcates the property line ringing the spooky, abandoned mansion/castle at the center of the woods. Jules chases Penny over the wall, and that's when everything changes.

On the other side of that wall is a faun, and little leprechaun-looking guys, and a witch (who turns out to be a high-school chum of her city-dwelling, super-cool aunt), and there's a beast in a hidden dilapidated castle. After Jules sternly informs the beast that she's far too young to be anyone's girlfriend – not even a potentially enchanted prince living as a beast in a hidden castle – he disabuses her of this notion and tells her that she is definitely the long-prophesied savior of the woods, whose magic has been leaking out over years. Jules is pretty sure she's not the savior of anything, but the beast and the witch are very persuasive, and besides, the prophecy predicts that the girl who saves the woods will be in company of a magic wolf (Penny's no wolf, but close enough?) and a rooster. So maybe she is the savior?

This is where Pinkwater really whips the old weird/delightful plotting into gear, introducing a series of great, funny, quirky characters who all seem to know each other (a surprising number were in the same high-school as Jules's aunt), along with some spectacular, mouth-watering meals, beautifully drawn animal-human friendships, and more magical beings than you can shake a stick at.

The story of how Jules recovers the lost artifact that will save the woods' magic is just a perfect, delicious ice-cream cone of narrative, with sprinkles, that you want to share with a friend (rarely have I more keenly regretted that my kid is now a teen and past our old bedtime story ritual). As I wrote in my blurb:

"The purest expression of Pinkwater's unique ability to blend the absurd and the human and make the fantastic normal and the normal fantastic. I laughed long and hard, and turned the final page with that unmissable Pinkwatertovian sense of satisfied wonder."

I am so happy to be a fully subscribed member to the Pinkwater Cult (I've got the Martian space potato to prove it).

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/11/klong-you-are-a-pickle/#martian-space-potato

[thatsbelievable]

Thanks, @vbartilucci ! Big fan of both, so this tracks. (In fact, one of the movies in the book is called The Hoboken Werewolf…)

CHOMP!

Frank the turtle takes a bite out of crime! Or a giant monster named Glaarg!

From The Monstrous Adventures of Mummy Man and Waffles, the new spooky humor middle-grade book written by me and illustrated by Robb Mommaerts. Kirkus Reviews calls Mummy Man “a popcorn bucket of a book!”

Writing is how I make a living, so if you’re inclined, you can get your own signed copy from Books of Wonder HERE. Or, you can choose a store HERE. You could even ask for it at your local library!

Thanks, Team Turtle!

[neil-gaiman]

Hi, Neil. Have you ever met Daniel Pinkwater?

I have! He's one of my heroes.