Make Believe
On Telling Stories to Children
$42.09
- Hardcover
112 pages
- Release Date
4 August 2026
Summary
Make Believe is a book for adults about books for children, a rallying cry for art and imagination, and a celebration of the power of storytelling in all our lives.
Mac Barnett, the beloved, bestselling children’s author and U.S. National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, urges us to think expansively about the potential of children’s books—and the particular brilliance of young readers:
What if children are a great audience for art? What …
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781806173143 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 180617314X |
| Author: | Mac Barnett |
| Publisher: | Bonnier Books Ltd |
| Imprint: | Leap |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 112 |
| Release Date: | 4 August 2026 |
| Weight: | 216g |
| Dimensions: | 14mm x 135mm x 216mm |
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Critics Review
In his chatty, compulsively readable first book for adults, Mac Barnett champions his career choice and urges our culture to hold kids in higher esteem. * New York Times *
Make Believe transforms the sly, direct voice of Barnett’s fiction into a sharp, ticklish, bracing polemic for adults. The book dismantles patronizing, outcome-oriented models of children’s media and argues instead that children deserve art just as much as adults do. * New York Magazine *
Kids are very strange and original beings, and the books we send their way should be strange and original, too. Mac has shown this brilliantly in his own work, and here lays out an urgent path for the rest of us. * Dave Eggers *
With a tone and humour that is so distinctively his own, Mac Barnett delivers a collection of essays which is both a love letter to children’s literature and an exposé of the deeply rooted cultural bias that plagues it. * SHELF Magazine *
Mac Barnett
Mac Barnett is the ninth U.S. National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, appointed by the Library of Congress and Every Child a Reader. He’s a New York Times-bestselling author of stories for children and the writer, with Jon Klassen, of Looking at Picture Books, a newsletter for adults about how picture books work.
Barnett’s work has been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. His books have won many prizes, including two Caldecott Honors, three New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Awards, three E.B. White Read Aloud Awards, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, Germany’s Jugendliteraturpreis, China’s Chen Bochui International Children’s Literature Award, The Netherlands’ Silver Griffel, and Italy’s Premio Orbil.
Barnett lives in Oakland, California.
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