Last week, Ramin Setoodeh and I had the honor of interviewing Maurice Sendak, Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers at Mr. Sendak’s house in Connecticut. It was the only time the creative team behind Where the Wild Things Are would be getting together to speak to the press. This morning, Newsweek posted the magazine version of our exclusive conversation, which you can read here. We think it’s the definitive WtWTA interview.

Instead of reblogging portions of the official transcript, however, we thought we'd do something different on Pop Vox: share some of the stuff that we couldn’t squeeze into print. To find out what death, danger and Discovery Channel documentaries have to do with kiddie lit, read on…

NEWSWEEK: Why write about death in a children’s story?
Sendak: Well, it’s a great subject. There’s a lot of charm to it. I remember when we did Hansel and Gretel, the opera. All of the kids are out in the open, unprotected from the weather, and so we had one of the little girls die. And the opera people and everybody was: “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s Hansel and Gretel.” But I said: “Hansel and Gretel is one of the scariest stories ever written! Psychotic mother; stupid, inane father. What the hell are you talking about? Of course there’s going to be somebody dead in it.” After the show, the kids came backstage and they wanted the autograph of the dead girl. [laughter] Like, I was just like chopped liver, they walked right past me. “Where’s the dead girl?”

There’s something in that, though—danger and rebellion are the things that are thrilling to you when you’re a kid.
Sendak: Kids are barbaric. They really have to be. They don’t know what it is to be polite or nice. There is a toughness to being a child. Childhood is a very tough time. I always had a deep respect for children and how they solve complex problems by themselves.

How did this translate when you sat down to write and illustrate Wild Things?
Sendak: Well, Max and his mother - it’s not that good a relationship. But it’s really what a lot of relationships are like between children and parents. A lot of yelling and losing of one’s temper and throwing of things, and then you’re sorry you did it. I’ve always been interested in how children maneuver and figure out how to live. 
Jonze: And how do they? 
Sendak: Cleverness, shrewdness, fantasy, and just plain strength. They want to survive. The kids in Hansel and Gretel¬ she is the heroine, she saves her brother’s life. Little girl saving a little boy’s life - when do children have to confront such terrible ordeals? But they do! They do. 

What was it like to see the Wild Things embodied onscreen with the voices of James Gandolfini and Forest Whitaker? Did it clash with the image of them you’d kept with you all these years?
Sendak: Yes, but at the same time, I fell in love with the new versions. They were gentler, they were kinder. Underneath, of course, they were capable of the same terrible things. One of them puts Max in her mouth. There always is the possibility that something might go wrong, and you’ll get eaten. And you don’t know what it is that might go wrong. What you’ll say or what you’ll do that will provoke a Wild Thing to eat you. I love watching animal movies on television. One of the only things I like. And they always say, don’t do this and don’t do that, don’t run away and don’t turn your back and don’t lie flat. I love that. It’s from my childhood. How do you prevent dying? How do you prevent being eaten or mauled by a monster? I still worry about it. 
Jonze: When we went to shoot the movie, we actually watched nature documentaries, and wanted to feel like we were watching animals-
Sendak: Good.
Jonze: -and that’s part of the reason we shot it out on location. We wanted it to be not on soundstages and not with greenscreen, but in real places. The camera doesn’t know where these creatures are going to go. What’s motivating them is unpredictable, unknowable, and the cameraman is just there, trying to document these wild animals, from the point of view of Max, who knows just as little as we do of what they’re going to do. 
Sendak: Yes, he doesn’t know what’s to come next. I mean, that’s gotta be scary for a kid, but it’s also gotta be what a kid likes most. It’s that enticement of what might or might not happen.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

by Malcolm Jones

What exactly does it mean for Herta Müller, the Romanian-born novelist, to take home a Nobel Prize in Literature? Most concretely, it means collecting roughly $1.4 million. That's not chump change, but after that, the benefits become more nebulous. If you've languished in semi-obscurity before winning the prize, it means a brief period of instant celebrity, a period in which critics play catch-up with your work and publishers lucky enough to have bought the rights to your work in leaner times now rush to get your books into print, if they're not there already.

by Marc Bain

Photo courtesy of Alain de Botton.

Over the last decade, British author Alain de Botton has built an empire out of his cotton-candy approach to big ideas. In a fistful of hits—including Status Anxiety, The Architecture of Happiness, and The Consolations of Philosophy—as well as numerous BBC and PBS documentaries, he’s offered a clever look at Western civilization, all from the mercilessly pragmatic perspective of what helps people live more fulfilling lives. But while his style has certainly sold books—more than 5 million worldwide—it has also drawn gob-smacking levels of professional scorn. The New York Times’s Jim Holt called his work “piffle dressed up in pompous language,” feminist critic Naomi Wolf wrote that “40 pages into his newest offering I was ready to hurl it across the room,” and Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker described de Botton as “an absolute pair-of-aching-balls of a man—a slapheaded, ruby-lipped pop philosopher who's forged a lucrative career stating the bleeding obvious in a series of poncey, lighter-than-air books.”

De Botton explained his thinking to Pop Vox:

Cover image, Vanguard Press.

by Daniel D’Addario

by Malcolm Jones

Mark Twain’s A Double-Barreled Detective Story is a novella-length parody of whodunits. Much of the action takes place out West, in a mining camp where at one point a young man is visited by his uncle, who turns out to be none other than Sherlock Holmes. By the time Holmes appears, the implausible coincidences in the plot have begun tumbling over each other with such rapidity that the appearance of the English sleuth seems merely routine.  At any rate, it quickly becomes apparent that Twain has introduced Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation for the sole purpose of mocking the stories that recount Holmes’s exploits. And no one is more skeptical of Holmes than his nephew, who thinks to himself, “Anybody that knows him the way I do knows he can’t detect a crime except where he plans it all out beforehand and arranges the clues and hires some fellow to commit it according to instructions.”

Today is Lost Symbol day—or, just another day that Dan Brown will deposit a ginormous check (see Malcolm Jones' review of the book here). The king of the beach read tackles the secrecy of the Freemasons in his latest thriller, and leans on boldface names from art history to create several high-stakes puzzles. (If "puzzles" sounds too pedestrian for $29.95, slip on Doubleday's rose-colored glasses: "Dan Brown's novels are brilliant tapestries of veiled histories, arcane symbols, and enigmatic codes," per the back cover.)

In Brown's earlier novels, those boldface names have typically been legends of Italian history─Galileo, Bernini, da Vinci, and more. But this time we traverse north: please welcome 538-year-old Albrecht Dürer, a German woodcutter and engraver responsible for some groundbreaking, northern Renaissance graphic design you've probably never seen. (Not that this Dürer rhinoceros engraving won't soon be on the sides of buses everywhere. Tourists stampeded to see Bernini's fountain after it was featured as a murder weapon in Angels & Demons).

Despite the fact that Dürer is intrinsically a lot less sexy than da Vinci, the Freemasons' indignity at Symbol is expected to be appreciably "milder" than that of Opus Dei or the Roman Catholic Church. Still, we did find a few select glove slaps. As we learn on page 239, at least one character is under the impression that Masons like "playing dress-up with a bunch of old men"!

I do beg your pardon.

After 26 years, LeVar Burton has turned his last page for Reading Rainbow. According to NPR, "no one—not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show's broadcast rights." This on the heels of news that classroom fixture The Weekly Reader and its parent company (Reader's Digest Association, Inc.) have filed for bankruptcy.  What childhood institutions are left unscathed?

Read on for a juicy excerpt from socialite Gloria Vanderbilt’s new erotic novel, “Obsession"—only, we left a few spots blank for Madlib-style reader participation.  Put your answers in the comments, but please keep it in good taste! (And if you don't, our filters will catch you—so there's no point in trying). The scene: Priscilla, a young, sexually-repressed widow, has just discovered a stack of letters uncovering her late husband’s secret kinky sex life. She decides to confront his mistress. (For our Q&A with Vanderbilt, click here).

She leads me into a room looking out over the (body of water). The first thing I spot is the (piece of furniture). It is exactly like the one in our (place), one that (man’s name) designed, covered in (noun), with rounded padded arms, the upholstery soft as (noun). A (the same piece of furniture) I love to sink into, (verb ending in -ing), and often (same man’s name as before) had tried to distract me, taking (object) from me, lifting up my (piece of clothing), skimming over my (body part), continuing until it (verb, past tense) to his satisfaction, then (verb ending in -ing) down, spreading my (body part), and, with great (adjective), (action ending in -ing) my (body part) with his (another body part), and as it (verb, past tense) I begged for more, knowing in time he would (verb) it with his (body part)—and (exclamation!)—what better way of (verb ending in -ing) an afternoon.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Jon Meacham has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for biography for his best-selling book "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House." The Pulitzer Board described Jon's book as "an unflinching portrait of a not always admirable democrat but a pivotal president, written with an agile prose that brings the Jackson saga to life."

You can read an excerpt from Meacham's award-winning book here, and you can read his Newsweek columns, cover stories and essays here.

The other arts winners are as follows, per the Associated Press's full list:

• Fiction: "Olive Kitteridge" by Elizabeth Strout

• Drama: "Ruined" by Lynn Nottage

• History: "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family" by Annette Gordon-Reed

• Poetry: "The Shadow of Sirius" by W. S. Merwin

• General Nonfiction: "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II" by Douglas A. Blackmon

• Music: Double Sextet by Steve Reich, premiered March 26, 2008 in Richmond, VA (Boosey & Hawkes)

Also, "Twilight" fans should click here for an explanation of why the books suck, while the movie is great.