• The illustrator of more than 100 books, including many that he wrote, Maurice Sendak has changed the shape of children’s literature and won countless awards, including the 1996 National Medal of Arts. Making Mischief features more than 150 thought-provoking illustrations by Sendak and other celebrated artists.

• The publication of Making Mischief coincides with the release of a full-length feature film adaption of Sendak’s classic book Where the Wild Things Are. Scheduled for release on October 16, 2009, the film, directed by Spike Jonze with a screenplay adapted by Jonze and Dave Eggers, features the voices of Forest Whitaker, Catherine Keener, James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, and Paul Dano.

Published in 1963 to great critical acclaim, Maurice Sendak’s Caldecott Award–winning Where the Wild Things Are has sold millions of copies worldwide, garnered countless awards, and been translated into nineteen languages. In this beautifully designed, inspired book, Gregory Maguire, himself a master of literary invention, pays tribute to Sendak and his work as both an illustrator and author.

In Making Mischief Maguire reconsiders Sendak's oeuvre with the same adroit and idiosyncratic scrutiny that allowed him to see a heroine in the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked) and a backstory to the Little Match Girl (Matchless). An accomplished critic, with signal reviews published in the New York Times Book Review and lectures on art delivered at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, and other places, Maguire examines Sendak's aesthetic influences from William Blake to Walt Disney. He intuits the "conversations"–often unconscious and unspoken–that artists have with one another. Maguire examines recurring motifs in Sendak's life work–from monsters to mayhem–as well as the author/illustrator's profund understanding of children, including their gift for imagination and the breadth of emotions with which they encounter the world. At once a writers' style guide and an historical consideration of the picture book and its place in literature, Making Mischief is a cunning gift of mischief itself: a tale told about one master mythmaker from another.