{"product_id":"questions-without-answers-isbn-9780593733622","title":"Questions Without Answers","description":"\u003cb\u003ePondering the questions only kids would think to ask, this hilarious, poignant collection captures the wonder of a child’s imagination, brought to life by beloved \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e cartoonist Liana Finck.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“This book is for anyone who has secret questions in their mind they are too embarrassed to ask out loud. In other words, this book is for everyone.”—Lemony Snicket, bestselling author of A Series of Unfortunate Events and \u003ci\u003eAll the Wrong Questions\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eWhy does a ghost wander? Are bubbles in drinks their thoughts? Do dogs have chins? Where does the dark go when the light comes on? How will it feel on the last day I’m a child?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eWhat’s the best question a kid ever asked you? \u003c\/i\u003eWhen Sarah Manguso opened a Twitter account and posted this single (and only) tweet, she immediately received hundreds of answers. Many, she discovered, were intelligent, intuitive, inventive, and philosophical. For Manguso, these responses seemed to form a “choral philosophy” that she believes disappears from most people’s lives in kindergarten. As she says in her illuminating foreword, “These questions are cute by the word’s original definition, swift and piercing. They cut to the quick.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGathering more than one hundred of the best questions from this poll and bringing them brilliantly to life with illustrations by \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e cartoonist Liana Finck, \u003ci\u003eQuestions Without Answers\u003c\/i\u003e ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime—encompassing birth, death, poop, dinosaurs, and everything in between—to show us the wit and wisdom of little people in all their wondrous glory.“This book is for anyone who has secret questions in their mind they are too embarrassed to ask out loud. In other words, this book is for everyone.”\u003cb\u003e—Lemony Snicket, bestselling author of the children’s book series \u003ci\u003eA Series of Unfortunate Events\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eAll the Wrong Questions\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If you’ve talked with a young child for any length of time, here’s a scene you may find familiar: The kiddo is minutes-deep into some cutely semicoherent ramblings when they pause to ask you—apropos of nothing and almost in the same breath—about the nature of death. It’s not that kids say the darndest things; it’s just that they intermittently, and without warning, spring some of the most challenging questions you’ll encounter outside of a doctoral exam, or remote mountain top temple. Good on [Sarah] Manguso, then, for not only resisting the urge to flee but even collecting—in this illustrated compendium of delight and distress—some of the artfully impossible questions that kids have put to her and many other contributors.”\u003cb\u003e—NPR\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If you’ve ever spent any time around young children, you’ll know that they take nothing for granted and that the world and everything in it is all news to them. The questions they ask are by turns serious, hilarious, deep, silly, and completely off the wall. Liana Finck’s delightful drawings perfectly complement the text. . . . A terrific book for anyone who has ever been around kids, or has been a kid themselves.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e cartoonist Roz Chast, author of \u003ci\u003eI Must Be Dreaming\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A miracle . . . \u003ci\u003eQuestions Without Answers\u003c\/i\u003e captures the bewildering wonderment of a child’s mind. It’s the most profoundly silly and wise book I’ve read in years, and should be required reading for every philosophy graduate student or anyone considering having kids. Also I’ll never think of sunroofs quite the same way again.”\u003cb\u003e—Bess Kalb, author of \u003ci\u003eNobody Will Tell You This But Me\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBuffalo Fluffalo\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I loved this book. Each page is a love letter scribbled to my present self, from some space that still exists within me from childhood. It made me whole and left me heartbroken, all at once.”\u003cb\u003e—Joana Avillez, author of \u003ci\u003eD C-T!\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sweet, smart, and shockingly insightful, this collection of questions asked by kids will leave you smiling and stumped. It reminds you of what it’s like to be curious about everything, and it shows, conclusively, that kids are first-rate philosophers who can reshape the way we see the world.”\u003cb\u003e—Scott Hershovitz, professor of philosophy at University of Michigan and author of \u003ci\u003eNasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with Kids\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eSarah Manguso \u003c\/b\u003eis the author of nine books, most recently the novels \u003ci\u003eLiars\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eVery Cold People.\u003c\/i\u003e Her other books include a story collection, two poetry collections, and several acclaimed works of nonfiction. Her work has been recognized by an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLiana Finck\u003c\/b\u003e is a cartoonist living in Brooklyn. She is the author of \u003ci\u003eLet There Be Light, Passing for Human,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eExcuse Me;\u003c\/i\u003e a children’s book, \u003ci\u003eYou Broke It!;\u003c\/i\u003e and a memoir about motherhood, \u003ci\u003eHow to Baby.\u003c\/i\u003e She is a regular contributor to \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker.\u003c\/i\u003e She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Wallant Award.\u003cb\u003ePreface\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePopular culture sells parenthood as an experience of sweet, meek, mind-numbing duty, a selfless erasure in service to the next generation. I was prepared for big feelings, a love like none other, quiet music swelling as I nestled the beloved babe. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI wasn’t at all prepared for how intellectually interesting it was to spend time with a young child. I realized happily that it was a project in translation, in how to understand and communicate with a creature who possessed intelligence but limited experience. The baby had a particular cry for milk that differed from his other cries. When he was slightly older but still preverbal, when he was finished eating, he waved his hands over his plate. He used that same signal when he wanted to stop whatever activity he was doing—playing a game, getting his teeth brushed. Sometimes I used the sign to tell him that we needed to stop doing something. It never failed to register. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI learned that children are dizzyingly fast-learning engines of art and experiment. I watched my child make sense of the world not as a simple-minded cherub but as a measuring, remembering machine. The idea that children were actually less limited than adults, smarter than we are in every measurable way except in accumulated experience, was humblingly new to me. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBefore I started spending time around children, I thought that people who paid close attention to these simpletons were people who had decided not to be interesting anymore. I thought that people found their own children fascinating simply because they’d been biologically hypnotized into loving them. Once I learned what children are really like, I immediately wanted to create an artifact of their weird eloquence, which was such a surprise to me when I finally noticed it. During this period of my education, my son, Sam Chapman, was my first and most essential teacher. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBefore he was capable of conversation, I thought I already knew what a preschooler would say because I’d seen it represented so tediously in advertisements and crappy entertainment. But by the time Sam was about four years old, I was writing down almost everything he said, shedding my indoctrination as I went. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was indeed cute, too, as when he tried to pick up a freckle from my forearm or played at feeding a piece of pancake to his toy truck, but the cute things he did always had a hint of the abyss about them. His most interesting questions all seemed, in some way, to be about death; it was Leanne Shapton who pointed this out to me plainly. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 2021 I opened a Twitter account and posted a single tweet: \u003ci\u003eWhat’s the best question a kid ever asked you?\u003c\/i\u003e Within twenty-four hours I had more than a hundred questions. Within a week I had hundreds more. I asked some famous friends to retweet the tweet. I asked everyone I knew to ask everyone they knew. I read multiple iterations of the if-God-is-everywhere conundrum and multiple accusations of pregnant women having eaten their babies, but I also had the privilege of reading a lot of accidental poetry and philosophy in multiple languages. Death was a common topic. So was birth. I was surprised to receive so many questions about necks and chins.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe poet Kenneth Koch, who taught at Columbia University for many years, also taught poetry to young children at New York City’s P.S. 61 in the late 1960s. He wrote three books on teaching poetry to young children, including many examples of the poems that arose from his prompts. When I teach creative writing, I always bring in a few poems from his anthology \u003ci\u003eWishes, Lies, and Dreams \u003c\/i\u003eand mix them in with my more recognizable texts. I love asking, with a straight face, if anyone has read the work of so-and-so, and then to announce that the author was seven years old when she wrote the poem we’ve just discussed. My students are impressed and a bit unnerved. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVery young children, younger even than Koch’s elementary school students, might not be old enough to write poems themselves, but they have access to imaginative worlds that are just as interesting, and just as notable a fount of worthwhile literature. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe word \u003ci\u003eliterature\u003c\/i\u003e might first suggest to the lay reader a Shakespeare play or a Tolstoy novel, but I’ve spent much of my writing life composing and delighting in very short literary forms, among them the short poem, the very short story, and the aphorism. There’s always something a bit magical about one great standalone line. The aphorist James Richardson writes, “No one will ever write a novel by accident. A poem, too, takes time. But if I say ‘Pick a word’ and you say one, where did it come from? You certainly don’t say you ‘wrote it’ or ‘created it’—more like you chose it, or it chose you. One-liners must be in the middle of that spectrum.” One-liners, among them the one-line questions that constitute this book, float somewhere between thinking and writing, where verbal but preliterate young children dwell. That place is the origin of this text. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy chief purpose, in assembling the text of this book, is to challenge the popular depiction of children as adorable idiots, instead portraying them as they are: intelligent, intuitive, inventive, philosophical, funny. Their questions are a work of found choral philosophy, a collective subjectivity that disappears from most people’s lives by kindergarten. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike all minimalist art, Liana Finck’s drawings look easy because they are simple, but her work’s apparent looseness and spontaneity belie the rigor from which it is borne. She’s a master at rendering huge concepts with a few strokes of the pen and maybe a word or two. Her sensibility is a perfect match for this text: playful, quick, brilliant, weird. She contains big feelings in small packages, and she resists received ideas as completely as children do, though in the latter case it’s only because they haven’t heard of them yet. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYoung children are here with us, yet they maintain an easy access to the supernatural realm—they walk in both worlds. Most preschoolers don’t yet understand that they’re performing for an adult audience that desperately wants to write them off as sentimental. The questions I included in this book are the ones that seemed the least contaminated by that adult audience. These questions are cute by the word’s original definition, swift and piercing. They cut to the quick. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI return to these questions when I need a little effortless wisdom. Their ease with the abyss comforts me. They present corpses, rocks, beards, and graves as more or less emotionally equivalent, and they show me that anything can be interesting if you look at it from the right angle. They remind me that when I feel bound up and inarticulate, when I have nothing to add, I too might begin with a question. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSarah Manguso \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLos Angeles, 2023","brand":"Hogarth","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302630117605,"sku":"NP9780593733622","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593733622.jpg?v=1767735292","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/questions-without-answers-isbn-9780593733622","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}