Salon.com > Go the F to Sleep

Fox adapting “Go the F**k to Sleep” into feature film

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 22:12:00 +0000

The 32-page children's book and internet meme, "Go the Fuck to Sleep," will soon be a movie -- at least if Fox 2000 has its way.

Adam Mansbach's children's book parody became a viral hit in 2011, leading both Samuel L. Jackson and Werner Herzog to tape readings of it. Jackson even parodied the parody for an Obama ad in 2012.

Now, the A.V. Club reports that Fox 2000 is attempting to churn out another round of punch lines from the tired book. Since the main punch line of the book involves the word "fuck," and Samuel L. Jackson has already worn out that meme, it's not clear what direction the movie can go in. But Fox has hired Ken Marino and wife Erica Oyama Marino of "Burning Love" to figure it out.

Hell is my own book tour

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

There are a number of reasons authors such as myself go on book tours, all of them basically stupid.

The publishing industry stopped having new ideas out of respect for the untimely death of Ernest Hemingway in 1961, and has been doing everything the same way ever since. Usually without adjusting for inflation. Thus, when a publishing house releases a book – a gala event that occurs only 3,567 times per house per day, straining the resources of each house’s four publicists (collectively comprising 6 percent of Sarah Lawrence College’s class of 2009) and two Commodore 64 computers – the strategy to propel that title to the top of the bestseller list is usually multi-pronged:

1) Send copies of the book to whatever newspapers still exist, along with a polite note asking them to start reviewing books again.

2) Encourage the author to capitalize on his social media network by hassling the shit out of nursery school friends of his parents on Facebook with constant, self-serving blather.

Adam Mansbach: My year on the bestseller list

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

It’s been a year since "Go the Fuck to Sleep" was published, and a year and a half since I read the manuscript at a museum in Philadelphia, taking the stage after a 94-year-old tap dancer. (You never want to follow a 94-year-old -- not on the freeway, not onstage.) But I woke up the next morning to find the book among Amazon’s top 100, despite the fact that it had not yet been published.

A lot of crazy shit has happened since then. Samuel L. Jackson, Werner Herzog, Thandie Newton and an adorable Filipina grandma all did readings that went viral. Corporate publishers tried to buy the book away from tiny, independent Akashic Books for a lot of money, and we said no. Jenna Elfman randomly made a music video, and in return for our not suing her, met up with us in Miami with a plastic baby doll to speak to fans of literature. Time magazine named "Go the Fuck to Sleep" its “Thing of the Year,” presumably in a squeaker win over that bacon-flavored mayonnaise. Sam Jackson and I teamed back up for “Wake the Fuck Up,” a pro-Obama video that reminded America of the importance of voting and vulgarity.