Lifestyle

Maurice Sendak delights children with new book, 12 years after his death

Published

2 years ago

February 6, 2024

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An image of Mino from Maurice Sendak’s posthumous book Ten Little Rabbits.

Maurice Sendak/HarperCollins Publishers

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Maurice Sendak/HarperCollins Publishers

An image of Mino from Maurice Sendak’s posthumous book Ten Little Rabbits.

Maurice Sendak/HarperCollins Publishers

In Ten Little Rabbits, a new posthumous picture book by Maurice Sendak, Mino the Magician waves his wand and, poof, a rabbit appears. Another wave and out springs a second and then a third. By the forth rabbit, Mino yawns. By the sixth, he’s annoyed. Ninth, he’s exasperated, as the rabbits crawl all over him. So back they go, one rabbit at a time, giving readers the chance to count up and back again by the time Mino is done.

But it’s the unruly rabbits and Mino’s many facial expressions that kept this reader turning the page. Once again, Sendak’s knack for capturing just about every kind of emotion is on full display, 12 years after his death, in this book being brought to the public for the first time.

Look no further than 5-year-old Maurice Sendak (circa 1933) to see the model for Max, Pierre, Johnny and now Mino the Magician in Ten Little Rabbits.

The Maurice Sendak Foundation

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The Maurice Sendak Foundation

Sendak fans will immediately recognize Mino. While their names and adventures might be different, the boys in Chicken Soup With Rice, Where The Wild Things Are, One Was Johnny — Mino, Max, Pierre, Johnny — and other Sendak stories look very similar.

“Well, he’s Maurice,” says Lynn Caponera, executive director of The Maurice Sendak Foundation. “He” also didn’t look like most of the other boys in children’s books in the 1950s, says curator Jonathan Weinberg.

“Maurice really had created a kind of child that isn’t…the prettiest little boy. He has a kind of…an ethnic look, Jewish, almost European look to it. And Maurice was the child of Jewish-Polish Americans,” Weinberg says.

“The characters of my earlier books are really only sort of cockamamie self-portraits,” Sendak told Terry Gross, host of WHYY’s Fresh Air in 2003. “Unfortunately, I look like Max and the Wild Things, as children tell you in their brazen way. ‘Oh, Mommy, he looks like the Moishe, the big, wild thing.’ And you just want to crack them.”

A whistling night owl

Sendak had no heirs when he died in 2012, but Caponera and Weinberg were like family to him. They first met Sendak when they were kids, 11 and 10 years old respectively. Weinberg says Sendak and his partner Eugene Glynn, a psychiatrist, were like “surrogate parents.” Glynn “was my mother’s best friend,” he says.

Ten Little Rabbits is a new, count-along picture book by Maurice Sendak, published 12 years after he died.

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HarperCollins Publishers

Ten Little Rabbits is a new, count-along picture book by Maurice Sendak, published 12 years after he died.

HarperCollins Publishers

Lynn Caponera’s family lived down the street from Sendak and Glynn’s Ridgefield, Conn. home. Her brother took care of the property, which was built in 1790, and Sendak once called Caponera’s mother “a saint.”

Maurice Sendak began sketching a count-along picture book starring Little Mino the Magician around 1961, the same time he started Nutshell Library.

When Caponera was 18, she moved into an apartment on the property and helped take care of the house and the dogs. She quickly learned that Sendak was a night owl. Her apartment was right underneath his studio.

“So I would hear him like all night whistling and playing music,” she recalls, “And you could hear when things were going right. He would be whistling like crazy. So like actually whistling while he worked.” She adds it was “a really wonderful way to come up in the morning and see what he did.”

Weinberg adds that Sendak, “could whistle entire operas from beginning to end” — a claim that is difficult to fact-check. But some of his fantasy sketches actually note on the back what song he was whistling when he was working on them.

Artist Maurice Sendak signs prints July 26, 1990 in New York.

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Artist Maurice Sendak signs prints July 26, 1990 in New York.

Susan Ragan/AP

Like some of his characters, Sendak had a mischievous streak. His very first job was designing window displays for FAO Schwarz. On a recent visit to Sendak’s home, Caponera points out a little toy crow from the store whose likeness shows up in Hector Protector.

Sendak got it during a contest among the workers “to see what you could steal from the store,” Caponera laughs, “Maurice was very proud that he said he got a train set out once and…so besides being a great illustrator, apparently was a good thief.”

Sendak’s studio is as he left it

Weinberg says Sendak “was constantly learning and teaching himself” different styles and “emulating” other artists.

Throughout Sendak’s home there is all kinds of art everywhere: 19th century oil paintings and photographs, Winslow Homer engravings from Harper’s Weekly, mechanical toys Sendak made with his brother, a vast collection of Mickey Mouse memorabilia and much more.

Maurice Sendak’s home studio, left, remains as it was during the time he was working there, down to the sweater on the chair and the slippers on the floor. He kept an image of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, right, by his desk for inspiration.

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Meghan Collins Sullivan/NPR

His studio is almost exactly as it was when Sendak was alive, says Caponera. Slippers on the floor, sweater draped over the chair, art supplies on his desk. “Cheap…cake paints” like the kind you’d “use in kindergarten,” she notes.

Among the many photographs by Sendak’s desk is one of Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired the main character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. She doesn’t look too happy; Sendak loved it.

“Maurice used to say that he really identified with that photo because, you know, being an illustrator is a very lonely job,” Caponera says. “You’re usually hours and hours doing tedious work at a drawing table by yourself. So he liked to think that Alice was sort of looking over him and that she looked so dejected because she’s so tired.”

Overseeing Sendak’s legacy can be “daunting,” Caponera says. She says she’s confident he would have approved of the new edition of Ten Little Rabbits.

He initially thought the count-along picture book would be part of Nutshell Library, his 1962 collection of pocket-size books Alligators All Around, Chicken Soup with Rice, One Was Johnny, and Pierre. But “he decided to go in a different direction because the other books in Nutshell Library are much more elaborate,” Weinberg says.

Eventually, in 1970, Sendak turned Ten Little Rabbits into a 3.5 x 2.5-inch pamphlet for a fundraiser for Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum.

Ten Little Rabbits was originally created in the style of the books that are part of the Nutshell Library. In 1970, Sendak turned it into a 3.5 x 2.5-inch booklet for a fundraiser for Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum.

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Meghan Collins Sullivan/NPR

This is the third posthumous book of Sendak’s to be published, after My Brother’s Book (2013) and Presto and Zesto in Limboland (2018). And in addition to the new book, Caponera and Weinberg have organized a major retrospective of Sendak’s work that will head to the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles in the spring and then to the Denver Art Museum in the fall.

Caponera says Sendak’s instructions for how to guide his legacy were pretty much “You’ll know what to do.”

It’s evident he trusted her. Nine months before he died, at age 83, Sendak did a sweeping, poignant interview with Terry Gross. He reflected on his career, losing extended family in the Holocaust, depression, getting older and, as he put it “trying to understand what it means to be an artist.”

Gross asked him if he had someone helping him. Sendak told her about Lynn Caponera. “She is a youngish lady who puts up with my oldness; that is, I’m fighting and struggling against,” he says. “She puts up with my bad behavior and she loves me and I love her.”

Meghan Collins Sullivan edited this story for radio and the web. Isabella Gomez Sarmiento produced the audio.

Lifestyle

Street Style Look of the Week: Airy Beachy Clothes

Published

11 hours ago

April 22, 2026

Press Room

Street Style Look of the Week: Airy Beachy Clothes

“She’s like a female Willy Wonka,” Sakief Baron, 36, said about Kendra Austin, 32, after she explained that her personal style had a playful and cartoonish spirit.

Dressed in loose, oversize layers in blue and neutral shades, the couple were walking on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when I noticed them on a Saturday in April. There was a symmetry to their ensembles, so it wasn’t too surprising when she noted that he had influenced her fashion sense.

Before they met, she said, she was “less sure” about her wardrobe choices. “I also have lost 100 pounds in the time we’ve been together,” she added, which she said had helped her to recalibrate her relationship with clothes.

His style has been influenced by hip-hop culture, basketball players like Allen Iverson and his mother’s Finnish background. “I just take all these pieces and then it kind of comes together,” he said.

Both described themselves as multidisciplinary artists; he also has a job at a youth center, mentoring children. “I want to make sure that I look like someone they want to aspire to be every time they see me,” he said.

Lifestyle

What are Angelenos giving away in one Buy Nothing group? All this treasured stuff

Published

12 hours ago

April 22, 2026

Press Room

What are Angelenos giving away in one Buy Nothing group? All this treasured stuff

In my L.A. Buy Nothing group, I started noticing how some objects, given for free from neighbor to neighbor, carry emotional weight. An item was more than it appeared. It was a piece of personal history, perhaps one with generational memories.

From one person’s hands to another’s, objects find new life through the free gift economy on Facebook or the Buy Nothing app. Buy Nothing Project, a public benefit corporation, reports having 14 million members across more than 50 countries who give away 2.6 million items a month. There are more than 100 groups in Los Angeles alone.

Buy Nothing reduces waste by keeping items out of landfills. It also builds community. When our lives are increasingly online, Buy Nothing encourages us to get out of our cars and make connections with neighbors, even if the interaction is no more than a wave when picking something up left by a doorstep. Researchers have found that even small social interactions can foster a sense of belonging.

Still, Buy Nothing has its challenges. For years, some have complained that the groups shouldn’t be limited to neighborhoods, but rather have more open borders. Last year, many longtime members complained about the project enforcing its trademark, leading Facebook to shut down unregistered groups even if they were serving people under economic strain. Critics saw the tattling as a shift from mutual aid toward control and branding. For its part, Buy Nothing says its decisions are based on building community, trust and safety.

Despite those disagreements, Buy Nothing offers a platform for special connections. As much as there are jokes about people offering half-eaten cake, many have passed along treasured items. Buy Nothing items may feel too valuable for the trash or too personal for Goodwill. The interaction between giver and receiver becomes just as meaningful as the object itself.

I set out to document these quiet exchanges in my Buy Nothing group, drawn to the question of why people choose to pass their belongings from one neighbor to another.

Tiny builders, big exchange

Lidia Butcher gives a toolbox and worktable her two sons used to Chelsea Ward for her 17-month-old son.

“We’ve had the toolbox and worktable for the last 10 years, it’s been very special. When I told my youngest son we were going to give it away, he was a little sad. He said he was still playing with it, but then I explained that it’s been sitting untouched for a year and that if we gave it to someone else, maybe someone else would be happy about it. So he felt joy about giving it to another child who would want to play with it. I have this little emotional feeling letting it go, but at the same time, it’s a good feeling. Like a new beginning.”

— Lidia Butcher, 35, joined the group several years ago when someone told her a person in the group once asked for a cup of sugar.

“We’re getting a worktable. Benji is now old enough to be interested in playing with tools. I’m going to move my drafting table out of his room. His bedroom is my office. So that will go into storage or the Buy Nothing group and the worktable will go in its place. We live in an apartment, and as he’s growing, his needs change but our space doesn’t. Buy Nothing is really helpful to be able to cycle out of stuff.”

— Chelsea Ward, 38, has found the Buy Nothing group extremely helpful since becoming a mom.

Something borrowed

Abby Rodriguez lends Sophie Janinet a veil for her wedding.

“Sophie had asked for a wedding veil on our Buy Nothing group and I’m lending it to her because I wanted it to have a second life. I hate the idea that precious things just sit there and never get touched. My wedding day was one of the best days of my life. At one point the power went out and now we have this amazing picture with my husband and I and everyone using their phone to light up the dance floor.”

— Abby Rodriguez, 40, discovered Buy Nothing when she moved to her northeast L.A. neighborhood in 2020.

“I moved to Los Angeles from France four years ago. The day I joined Buy Nothing was the first time I felt connected to the community. It played a huge role in my adapting to life here. I’m receiving a veil because I want my wedding to look and feel like my values. I thrifted my dress, I chose a local seamstress to alter the dress but when I tried it on, I felt something was missing. I wanted a veil but I didn’t want to buy new because I didn’t want to add anything to the landfill. So I posted a request for the veil on Buy Nothing.”

— Sophie Janinet, 37, is recreating the low-waste, slower-paced values she once lived by in France through her local Buy Nothing community.

2 Two women sit on steps with a fake owl.

1. Abby Rodriguez, left, holds her wedding veil that she is lending Sophie Janinet, right, for her upcoming wedding. 2. Michele Sawers, left stands with Beth Penn, right, while giving her a decorative owl.

A pigeon-spooking owl gets a second life

Michele Sawers gives Beth Penn a decorative owl.

“Coming from a place of luck, now I have plenty to give. The owl has been with me for 26 years. I bought the owl soon after I bought this house. The owl was purchased because I had a pigeon problem, they would camp out under my eves and I would have bird poop everywhere. The owl must have worked because they’re gone and they haven’t come back.”

— Michele Sawers, 58, uses Buy Nothing regularly to connect with her community and support her low-consumption values.

“There are things I don’t want to own. So borrowing those things on Buy Nothing is really nice. There is a person who I borrowed their cooler twice and their ladder twice so I feel like they are my neighbor even though they are not [right next door]. We get these birds that poop on the deck and the recommendation online was to get a fake owl. When it was posted on Buy Nothing, I thought, ‘I have to have that owl!’ It’s going to have a good home with me on the deck with some cats, a dog and some kids.”

— Beth Penn, 47, once helped build her local Buy Nothing group and now experiences it from the other side, as a member.

Stuffed toys find a new purpose

Two women stand in front of a green plant holding stuffed dolls and a bag of ball pit balls.

Magaly Leyva gives stuffed toys and plastic play balls to Tatiana Lonny.

“My mother-in-law gave the dolls and plastic play balls to my daughter, but she has so much. My daughter is not going to play with them with the same intent that another kid would, because she’s really little. I’d rather another kid use these things.”

— Magaly Leyva, 35, joined Buy Nothing nearly four years ago to find clothes for her nephew.

“I’m taking these new items to a township called Langa in South Africa. I know the kids there will be so happy. They have so little there. I’m doing this all by myself, I’m just collecting a GoFundMe for the suitcase fee at the airport.”

— Tatiana Lonny, 51, began using Buy Nothing in hopes of finding resources to support the animals she rescues.

A second helping

Laura Cherkas gives Aurora Sanchez a cast iron pan.

“Buy Nothing gives me the freedom to let go of things because I know that they will stay in the community and the neighborhood. I’m giving a couple of cast iron items that my husband and I got when we were on a cast iron kick, probably during COVID. We determined that we don’t actually use these particular pans and they were just making our drawers heavy. So we decided to let someone else get some use out of them.

“I hate throwing things away. I want to see things have another life. Sometimes I take things to a donation center, but I like the personal connection with Buy Nothing and that you know that there is someone who definitely wants your item.”

— Laura Cherkas, 40, has built connections with other moms through Buy Nothing and values it as a way to cycle toys in and out for her child.

Two women stand by a gate at night holding cast iron pans.

“I wanted a cast iron pan because I cook a lot of grilled meat. I’m excited to try this style of cooking out and it will help me when I cook for only one or two people. I got lucky because I was chosen to receive it.”

— Aurora Sanchez, 54, has spent the past two years engaging with Buy Nothing, finding in it a sense of neighborly support that makes her feel valued while strengthening her connection to the community.

Next player up

A man poses next to a basketball hoop in front of his garage.

Joe Zeni first offered a basketball hoop on Buy Nothing in 2023, where it remains unclaimed.

“I’m giving away a Huffy basketball freestanding hoop because it’s just taking up space. We used to play horse and shoot baskets together. My son is now 35, he doesn’t live here anymore.”

— Joe Zeni, 70, uses Buy Nothing often to give items away, believing many of the things he no longer needs still have purpose.

Lifestyle

Armani Goes Back to the Archive

Published

23 hours ago

April 21, 2026

Press Room

In the year since his death, there has been no hard pivot at Armani. The shadow of the founder has stayed in place over the Milan HQ, where the brand seems happy to leave it. Armani is not just plumbing the past for continued inspiration, it’s reselling it.

Today, Giorgio Armani is announcing Archivio, a grouping of 13 men’s and women’s looks, plucked from the brand’s back catalog and remade for today. (And, yes, at today’s prices.) There’s a jacket in pinstriped alpaca of 1979 vintage; a buttery one-and-a-half breasted jacket with a maitre d’s flair that first appeared in 1987; and an unstructured silk-linen suit that will activate ’90s flashbacks for die-hard Armani clients and those who want to capture that era’s nostalgia. The advertising campaign was shot and styled by Eli Russell Linnetz, who has his own label, ERL, but always seems to be the first call brands make when they want sultry photos with the aura of Details magazine circa 1995. (He did a similar thing for Guess recently.)

Linnetz’s images are a reminder of how Armani’s work still reverberates decades later.

Archivio is also a canny recognition of what shoppers crave now. On the resale market, Armani wares are as coveted as can be. Every week it seems as if I get an email from Ndwc0, a British vintage store, announcing a new drop of meaty-shouldered ’90s Armani power suits. They sell for less than $500. At Sorbara’s in Brooklyn, you can buy a tan Giorgio Armani vest for $225.

That vintage-mad audience is in Armani’s sights: To introduce the collection, it’s staging an installation, opening today, at Giorgio Armani’s Milan boutique. It will feature the hosts of “Throwing Fits,” a New York-based podcast whose hosts wear vintage Armani button-ups and shout out stores like Sorbara’s.

It’s prudent, if a bit disconnected. Part of the charm of old Armani is that it can be found on the cheap. I’m wearing a pair of vintage Giorgio Armani corduroys as I write this. I bought them for $76 on eBay. Archivio is reverent, but its prices, which range from $1,025 to $12,000, may scare off shoppers willing to do the searching themselves.

If you ask me, the next frontier of this archive fixation is that a brand — and a big one — will release a mountain of genuine vintage pieces. J. Crew and Banana Republic have tried this at a small scale, but a luxury house like Armani hasn’t gone there. Yet. Eventually, Armani (or a brand like it) is going to grab hold of the market that exists around its brand, but through which it gets no cut.