Sleepy Stories
by Diego Bianki, Mario Levrero
Translated from Spanish by Alicia López
Published:
By Mario Levrero
Illustrated by Diego Bianki
Translated from the Spanish by Alicia López
Each story told in Sleepy Stories drifts deeper into a beguiling dream world, telling of an elastic gentleman who stretches his body across town to effortlessly slip into bed, or of another sleepy young man who curls inside an upside-down umbrella to take a snooze. In Diego Bianki’s magical universe, the waking world is made small (a French press and a red top hat shrink before our eyes), while the dream world Levrero and his son Nicolás build together (a land of sly frogs, giant apes, and smiling squids) waltzes across the page. On the last of Bianki’s whimsical illustrations, Nicolás holds the book over his father’s nodding head and says, “Another.” This is a book to giggle with and curl up with, to take on every sleepy adventure.
Coming on July 7th, 2021
Praise
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Young Nicolás has a voracious appetite for stories and no sympathy for a profoundly sleepy storyteller . . . A storyteller identified only as “Me” spins the yarns to Nicolás, often yawning and nodding off midstory . . . Young readers and their perplexed grown-ups will want to read and reread again and again. Wildly imaginative, surreal, beautiful…in a word, this Argentine import is fabulous.
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We are all his children.
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Beloved among Latin American readers for his gleeful weirdness.
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One of the funniest and most influential writers of recent times.
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I love the stories that Nicolás's dad tells him. They are beautifully crafted, goofy, filled with lots of creativity, and cuteness. You just can't help yourself but laugh when the dad tells these stories.
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What arises with beautiful vitality on the pages of Sleepy Stories is that intimate, quotidian scene of a parent telling a story to their child before bed. In Levrero’s hands, this subject acquires the very essence of dreams: the random drifts, the surprising turns, and the capriciousness and elusiveness that makes them so attractive and mysterious…. A lovely and potent book with the beauty of a starry night sky, [Sleepy Stories] pays the best possible homage to the act of storytelling.
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Anyone who has read Levrero intuits that his writing defies categorization…. It slips, calmly and with little fuss, beyond readers’ expectations. In Sleepy Stories … the quotidian, pleasant, and intimate act of storytelling spills over and arrives at surprising places…. With Levrero, a small bedtime story can launch literature to the stratosphere.
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Peppered with yawns, silences, and more than a few snores, Sleepy Stories is an extravagance of humor and imagination. With splendid illustrations and minute, entertaining vignettes … this is a true celebration of fantasy and of the affectionate complicity between parents and their children.
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Like a Moebius strip, a sleepy narrator sleepily tells the story of one very sleepy gentleman.
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Diego Bianki’s stencilled illustrations are marvellous…. they create standalone, fantastical scenes in intensely shining colours — dreamscapes that fit Levrero’s texts perfectly.
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From this playful, newly-published text, Bianki creates characters of truly captivating colors and gestures.
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Sleepy Stories are the bedtime tales spun by Mario Levrero for his son. Through these delightful stories, Bianki animates the fantastical world of the great Uruguayan writer and creates an endearing book where adults recognize bedtime encounters with their own children, and where children discover new, humorous ways to fall asleep.
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You know those times when you are too tired to think straight, but your kiddo wants a story? That's the premise of Sleepy Stories. The father pleads exhaustion, but the child says that any story, even a sleepy story, would be fine . . . It's short, sweet, and totally relatable . . . Sleepy Stories is lovely and soothing, and it elicits chuckles from this adult reader.
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The artwork in this one is quite original and will offer young readers something beyond the 'normal' picture book illustrations they're usually exposed to . . . The unique illustrations allow the quirkiness of 'Me's' tales to come across with an original and strange flair.
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Extras
Check out Diego’s personal sketchbook project,”Papeles fútiles” (“Futile Papers”), too!