Tag Archives: Humorous Stories

We Are in a Book!

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews We Are in a Book! [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Mo Willems, part of the Elephant & Piggie series.

Willems We Are in a Book

Children’s picture-book superstar Mo Willems (of bus-driving pigeon fame and confirmed disregard for the “fourth wall”) here entices budding readers into the pleasures of literacy by demonstrating the power of text to exert mind control. You will now think of a banana.

Further significance of the story might be found in the notion that Elephant and Piggie acquire agency by becoming conscious of their own containment in narrative. Their final yea-saying is an aspiration to eternal recurrence.

Z Is for Moose

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Z Is for Moose [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Kelly Bingham and Paul O Zelinsky.

Bingham Zelinsky Z is for Moose

Sure, kids find this book funny. But it combines a sort of capitalist precarity of labor with anxiety about the arbitrariness of semiotic identities. Fortunately, the solution is solidarity. The revolutionary pages N and O are the most engaging part of the story.

When you have magic powers and know it, it can be a fine feeling, like a pleasant tingling inside. But in order to enjoy that tingling, you have to know just how much magic you have and what the rules are for using it.

Edward Eager, Half Magic [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher]

Hermetic quote Eager Half Magic magic powers know feeling pleasant what the rules are