The New Yorker has put up an excerpt from David Egger’s Wild Things, the companion novel to the Spike Jonze film adapting the classic Where the Wild Things Are book by Maurice Sendak.
You don’t get much better with novelizations of companion pieces then getting Eggers, who is also credited with Jonze as having written the screenplay for the film. We talk a bit about awards at BSC, but Eggers wins ones that his the wallet like the TED and Heinz, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Award and Pulitzer Prize. You can say enough about McSweeney’s either (which he founded).
Book Synopsis:
Seven-year-old Max likes to make noise, get dirty, ride his bike without a helmet and howl like a wolf. In any other era, he would be considered a boy. In 2007, he is considered willful and deranged. His home life is problematic. His parents are divorced; his father, immature and romantic, lives in the city. His mother has taken up with a younger man who steals quarters from the change bowl in the foyer. Driven by a series of pressures internal and external, Max leaves home, jumps in a boat and sails across the ocean to a strange island where giant beasts reign. The “Wild Things” is from Maurice Sendak’s visionary classic. This is an all-ages adventure, full of wit and soul, that explores the chaos of youth while Max explores the chaos of the world around him. The live-action film, co-written by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers, and directed by Jonze, is due this autumn.
Make sure you go check out the latest trailer for the film from earlier this month, and be amazed!
Wild Things is set to be published in the U.S. and UK by McSweeney’s in October. I would imagine that BSC will have a review for you.
