Go the F**k to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real
world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don't always send a
toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and
radically honest, California Book Award-winning author Adam Mansbach's verses
perfectly capture the familiar-and unspoken-tribulations of putting your little
angel down for the night. In the process, they open up a conversation about
parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations, and laugh at their
absurdity.
With illustrations by Ricardo Cortés, Go the F**k to Sleep is beautiful,
subversive and pants-wettingly funny-a book for parents new, old and expectant.
You probably should not read it to your children.
Extract
The cats nestle close to their kittens,
The lambs have laid down with the sheep.
You're cozy and warm in your bed, my dear.
Please go the f**k to sleep.
The windows are dark in the town, child.
The whales huddle down in the deep.
I'll read you one very last book if you swear
You'll go the f**k to sleep.
The eagles who soar through the sky are at rest
And the creatures who crawl, run, and creep.
I know you're not thirsty. That's bullshit. Stop lying.
Lie the fuck down, my darling, and sleep.
Reviews
“Nothing has driven home a certain truth about my generation, which is
approaching the apex of its childbearing years, quite like this.” –The
New Yorker
“A parenting zeitgeist” –Washington Post
“A hilarious take on that age-old problem: getting the beloved child to go
to sleep.”–National Public Radio
“A new Bible for weary parents” –New York Times
“Resonates powerfully with almost everyone” –Boston Globe
About the Author
Adam Mansbach's novels include The End of the Jews, winner of the California
Book Award, and the best-selling Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco
Chronicle Best Book of 2005. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New
York Times Book Review, the Believer, Granta, the Los Angeles Times, and many
other publications. He was the 2010–2011 New Voices Professor of Fiction at
Rutgers University. His daughter, Vivien, is three.
Ricardo Cortes has illustrated books about marijuana, electricity, the
Jamaican bobsled team, and Chinese food. His work has been featured in the New
York Times, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, New York Magazine, the Village
Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, and on the O'Reilly Factor and CNN. He lives
in Brooklyn, NY, where he is working on a book about the history of Coca-Cola
and cocaine.