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| photo: Sylvie Rosokoff | |
Elliott Kalan, author of Sadie Mouse Wrecks the House, illus. by Tim Miller (HarperKids, April 22, 2025) and Joke Farming (University of Chicago, November 12, 2025), is an Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning comedy writer who has written for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Mystery Science Theater 3000. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons, who are very vocal about how uncool he is.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Sadie Mouse Wrecks the House: Sadie's tired of being the good mouse who does all the chores! She's going to be so bad she never has to do chores again!
Joke Farming: The clearest, most comprehensive, and funniest book you'll ever read about how jokes work and how to write them without going insane.
On your nightstand now:
Muybridge by Guy Delisle; On the Origin of Time by Thomas Hertog; Bleak House by Charles Dickens; and the 1944 history book for children, Abraham Lincoln's World.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Lizard Music by Daniel Pinkwater, the story of a kid who gets left home alone by his family and discovers the late-night TV signals of an island of talking lizards. It's the first book I read that challenged me to figure out what was going on beneath the surface of the text. I remember thinking, "I want to find out what happens next, and I want to find out what it means."
Favorite book to read to a child:
1. The first books I read to both of my sons were Lewis Carroll's two Alice books, which I love dearly.
2. If I'm reading to a child who is in the mood for a picture book: Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, one of the all-time great picture books.
3. If I'm reading to a child who is having trouble sleeping: Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates by Harry Jaffa. I have issues with aspects of Jaffa's ideology, but the kids usually fall asleep before I can get too far into it anyway.
Your top five authors:
1. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is close to a religious text for me.
2. Robert Caro: The Master.
3. Jack Kirby: Blazing, nonstop imagination. His New Gods series led to a major positive change in my outlook on life.
4. Jonathan Lethem: Favorite living author, fiction division.
5. Italo Calvino/Thornton Wilder (a tie, I'm cheating).
Book you've faked reading:
I've never read anything by James Joyce, so if he comes up in conversation I just nod and smile and then change the subject to the X-Men.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Power Broker by Robert Caro, which I literally co-hosted a year-long podcast about. People resist reading it because it's so enormously long, but it's such a powerful work of both journalism and literature; it's so suspenseful, and there are so many memorable personalities in it. Give yourself a year to get through it, but read it!
Book you hid from your parents:
I knew the cover to The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death would to be too much for them to handle, so I taped a blank piece of paper around the cover before I shelved it on my bookcase.
Book you've bought for the cover:
That same Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft book I didn't want my parents to see.
Book that changed your life:
Whatever book it was that I first read by myself, with no adult assistance. Taking that step into the world where anything printed on a page was open to me and knowing I could explore that world whenever I wanted, was probably the most important post-birth moment of my life.
Favorite line from a book:
I've got two answers for this, one cynical and one hopeful. The cynical one is from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy regarding human unhappiness: "Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."
The hopeful one is the end of Stuart Little by E.B. White: "As he peered ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction."
Five books you'll never part with:
Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini, which isn't a book to read so much as decode. I've spent many hours puzzling over it, and I managed to draft my younger son into helping me. Now it means that much more to me, because it's something we can do together.
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, my first grown-up SF book, but specifically the copy I bought at the National Air & Space Museum gift shop when I was 10, which I still have.
Sock Monkey Vol. 3 #2 by Tony Millionaire, a heartbreaking comic. It's the story of a toy sock monkey's inadvertent harming of a baby bird that doubles as a parable about shame and nonjudgmental love. Not for children, even though it stars a sock monkey!
Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson, just the loveliest little story about creativity and thinking in two dimensions.
Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, the most beautiful book ever made.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Either Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy or Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Both are series where so much of the delight is in seeing them unfold before you, revealing the wonders they've got inside.