A Light in the Attic & Where the Sidewalk Ends

Shel Silverstein

'Shel Silverstein...is an enduring influence. His people and animals twist, stretch, contort and distort in the effort of keeping alive. Like Dr Seuss, he teases language. His characters are so much on the side of disobedience as to form a virtual credo for children of the 1960s, and today.' Amanda Craig, The Times

"By turns sardonic, surreal, and mockmoralistic, his is a spontaneous overflow of playfulness which spreads over page after page of off-the-cuff but neatly versified invention. ..very much in the New Yorker tradition of James Thurber's cartoons and Ogden Nash's verses, and its almost as if the two of them had got together in a Greenwich Village bar and invented him."
Times Educational Supplement

Shel Silverstein is one of America’s best loved poets, whose work is read by every child in the USA but is almost unknown in the UK. Think Spike Milligan meets Edward Lear: it’s nonsense poetry that makes perfect sense. Of course you would sell your sister, who wouldn’t want to get rid of ‘This crying and spying young sister for sale?’ Shel Silverstein’s work is full of children who eat whales, who can kick footballs from here to Afghanistan, who know that thumb sucked thumbs taste the sweetest, and can’t go to school because their brains have shrunk.

Shel Silverstein wrote ‘A Boy Named Sue’ for Johnny Cash and many other lyrics as well as his poetry for children, which has sold over 4 million copies worldwide.

Also available from Marion Boyars Publishers: Runny Babbit

Price (both titles): £9.99
Format: Hard Cover
Illustrated
A Light in the Attic: ISBN: 978-0-7145-3096-3,
Where the Sidewalk Ends: ISBN: 978-0-7145-3095-6
Poetry