Unruly Books
ELB's picture book imprint for adults and teens!
What is Unruly?
As an independent publisher of uncompromising books for children, Enchanted Lion Books has been pushing the boundaries of the picture book for the past 23 years. But in 2020, we started to push those boundaries even further with Unruly, our exciting imprint of picture books intended specifically for adults and teenagers (even if the rare one might be good for readers 10 & up.)
Our vision for Unruly is to create a space where the picture book can truly break out for older readers––where it can expand and flourish as the boundless storytelling medium that it is.
Why picture books for adults and teens?
Picture books created for adults and young adults are substantially different from those created for children. When it comes to children’s picture books (with a nod to Jean Piaget), we seek to share a sense of well-being, a love of life, nonconformity, acute observation, as well as a sense of wonder, a sense of humor, and a gentle sense of irony that respects the child’s awareness that things are not always as they seem.
The picture books we are proposing under Unruly are centered around the insights and experiences, temptations, anxieties, and dilemmas that we come to know having clocked some time on Earth. Children are not mini adults. The lives they lead are very different from our own—and good children's stories are, too. The way we understand this might be filtered through the first stanza of Pablo Neruda’s poem, Many Thanks, which says:
We have to walk a long way in the world
to know the truth of certain things,
certain laws of blue sunlight,
the inherent rumor of pain,
the precision of spring.
Why picture books?
There is a very real difference between showing and telling, and our assertion is that we need pictures across our lives. Today, rather than living richly with images, we seem to do everything we can to drown out the showing forth of things through an excess of all kinds of information. We are submerged in explanations and all forms of decontextualization, as opposed to revelations, which need space and time through which to unfold and show themselves.
The importance of narrative picture books for adults and teens lies in the fact that there are things we apprehend that we cannot comprehend, and that what art shows forth are the ineffabilities that words can’t say. It is pictures that present us with what is not reducible to a single meaning or understanding; it is pictures that put us face-to-face with mystery.
We all already know how deeply story and narrative move us as humans, and to add the layer of image into the mix in the space of the picture book broadens our capacity to plumb that depths of our experiences and what we intuit and feel.
Unruly is here to remind us that images speak with us, no matter how old we are, in a way that nothing else really can. Every picture tells a thousand stories, meaning they are endlessly open to interpretation, defying our drive to reduce, categorize, and explain. They invite us to live with wonder, questions, nuance, and the shifting sands of interpretations and meanings.
The 8th and 9th Unruly books, The Forgotten Teachers and Gravity and Other Substances (coming out in October) don’t have an Unruly note, as we thought we’d said everything we wanted to say about Unruly. But now we miss those notes and the little differences they offer, so we’re hoping to add them to books 8 and 9, should we have cause to reprint them. If not, we might just write them anyway, for those who want them…
Coming soon to Unruly…
Gravity and Other Substances by Daniel Liévano!
Sneak peak:
Pre-Order Here!
Have you spent time recently with a visual book, whether a children’s picture book, a graphic novel, an art book, an artist’s book, or what have you? If so, what imprint did that leave, what thoughts did it provoke?
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