Additional Book Information
Series: NYRB Kids
ISBN: 9781681370941
Pages: 56
Publication Date: May 16, 2017
The Milk of Dreams
by Leonora Carrington
The maverick surrealist Leonora Carrington was an extraordinary painter and storyteller who loved to make up stories and draw pictures for her children. She lived much of her life in Mexico, and her sons remember sitting in a big room whose walls were covered with images of wondrous creatures, towering mountains, and ferocious vegetation while she told fabulous and funny tales. That room was later whitewashed, but some of its wonders were preserved in the little notebook that Carrington called The Milk of Dreams.
John, who has wings for ears, Humbert the Beautiful, an insufferable kid who befriends a crocodile and grows more insufferable yet, and the awesome Janzamajoria are all to be encountered in The Milk of Dreams, a book that is as unlikely, outrageous, and dreamy as dreams themselves.
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Praise
It is a book that opens the imagination. . . . [In The Milk of Dreams] there are two narratives: one is written and the other is illustrated, the two converse, one with the other, and have a strange dialogue to be discovered. This kind of story is entertaining in a way that is increasingly hard to find.
—Gabriel Weisz, son of Leonora Carrington
Carrington is best known for her surrealist paintings and sculptures, but her idiosyncratic literary legacy is equally deserving of attention. . . their vivid imagery, irreverence, and surreal transformations are as provocative as they were at the time of their writing.
—Tobias Carroll, The Paris Review
These pages have traveled in my hands for more than twenty reverent years. At last they arrive. . . . ”
—Alejandro Jodorowsky