NYRB – Nesbit's Children

May 3, 2011November 3, 2018

Michael Chabon on the Phantom Tollbooth

NYRB blog, 21st April 2011

I liked the tone and it reminded me that The Phantom Tollbooth was advertised at the back of every single Puffin book when I was young but was never in any libraries or bookshops.

I finally found it, 7 years after first reading about it. A search of impossible duration now.

April 26, 2011

With extraordinary perceptiveness, she realized that each grown-up must kill the child he was before he himself can live. Nesbit’s vow to survive somehow in the enemy’s consciousness became, finally, her art—when this you see remember me—and the child within continued to the end of the adult’s life.

Gore Vidal, “The Writing of E. Nesbit”, NYRB, Dec 1964