Picture Books I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings Elizabeth Spires . FSG/Foster , $17.95 (64p) ISBN 978-0-374-33528-1 Of interest to adults as well as children, this handsomely produced black-and-white book intriguingly combines photography, sculpture and poetry. The illiterate child of freed slaves, William Edmondson (1874–1951) experienced religious vi...

Picture Books What a Good Big Brother! Diane Wright Landolf , illus. by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher. Random , $16.99 (40p) ISBN 978-0-375-84258-0 Every time Cameron's infant sister cries, his parents seem to have an answer: she's wet, she's hungry, she's tired. And once Cameron knows the problem, he's eager to help out.

Ever since Stephenie Meyer's vampire romances became a smash success among teen readers, particularly girls, all things dead have been given a new life—at least in the minds of children's editors hoping to take advantage of the trend. But that's not to say that every project with a supernatural cast is being green-lighted.

Picture Books How to Build an A Sara Midda . Workman/Artisan , $17.95 ISBN 978-1-57965-378-1 Offering a hands-on approach to learning the alphabet, this small-format book comes with 11 off-white foam shapes (as well as a mesh storage bag). In the book, miniature, stylized people (and the occasional dog) work together to construct each letter of the alphabet, using rectangular blocks and arcs...

With publishers and booksellers nervous about Christmas sales, a little $12.95 book might be the season's savior. The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a Harry Potter offshoot by J.K. Rowling, is being published by Scholastic on Dec. 4. This will be the first Rowling book to be published at the height of the holiday season; all her previous Harry Potters were published in the summer—and the timin...

Picture Books Hush Little Polar Bear Jeff Mack . Roaring Brook , $16.95 (40p) ISBN 978-1-59643-368-7 In his first solo outing, Mack (illustrator of the Bunnicula series) sends an eager-looking polar bear on a series of dreamtime adventures: “Swim through a waterfall./ Splash in a stream./ Paddle past rainbows/ that glisten and gleam.

Picture Books Do You Love Me? Joost Elffers and Curious Pictures . HarperCollins/Bowen , $14.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-06-166799-2 Elffers (Food Play) teams up with Curious Pictures, producer of such TV shows as Little Einsteins, to introduce Snuzzles. Amorphous and solid-colored, the Snuzzles look a lot like rubber squeak toys, with their heads defined only by protrusions for noses and ears and ...

The Baudelaire orphans' sad story may be over but, like a post-apocalyptic cockroach, Lemony Snicket persists—to the great delight of booksellers, children, HarperCollins and Daniel Handler himself. “I miss them,” Handler admits of Violet, Klaus and Sunny, whose adventures concluded in 2006 with The End—60 million copies from his Unfortunate Events series have sold world...

Picture Books I Got Two Dogs John Lithgow , illus. by Robert Neubecker. Simon & Schuster , $17.99 (32p with CD) ISBN 978-1-4169-5881-9 Lithgow’s (I’m a Manatee) singing tribute to a couple of canine ne’er-do-wells named Fanny and Blue strives for the kind of goofy, bouncy simplicity of Burl Ives’s classic Little White Duck album.

Picture Books The Baby in the Hat Allan Ahlberg , illus. by André Amstutz. Candlewick , $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-7636-3958-7 Ahlberg and Amstutz (previously paired for The Shopping Expedition) overlook few opportunities for humor in this tall tale (even the copyright includes jokes), which gains extra punch from the narrator's repeated insistence that the story is a true one.

Picture Books She Sells Sea Shells: World Class Tongue Twisters Seymour Chwast . Cider Mill/Applesauce , $19.95 (64p) ISBN 978-1-60433-009-0 Drawing on his distinguished career in graphic design, Chwast's (The Twelve Circus Rings)visual exposé of tongue twisters teems with humor and cheek, starting with the debossed cover's inset art of a woman in a beach hat before a table's worth of s...

I have been heavily criticized. This idea of the ideal world for the ideal child has nothing to do with reality.” So said author/illustrator Tomi Ungerer, reached by phone in Ireland, whose 1962 picture book, The Three Robbers, about a trio of villains and a young orphan, returns to bookstores this month, as part of a relaunch program from Phaidon Press.

Picture Books Peter Pan: A Classic Collectible Pop-Up Robert Sabuda . S&S/Little Simon , $29.99 ISBN 978-0-689-85364-7 Continuing to innovate, Sabuda enhances the already powerful enchantments of J.M. Barrie's classic 1902 tale with astonishing paper engineering. Illustrations suggest a hybrid of period styles, somewhere between arts and crafts, with their rich patterning, and art nouvea...

This week on the Web: a vaccine and pediatrics expert on the latest autism myths, an activist on America's fossil fuel addiciton, a bad-boy screenwriter's path to God, a Jewish typographer's memoir of survival in the Nazi counterfeiting operation, a French marine biologist explains the origins of life, and a multi-talented UK writer takes a trip through the human head. Plus: doughnuts, dogs, green cosmetics, farming, Richard Nixon and exquisite Chinese food.

Picture Books Amandina Sergio Ruzzier . Roaring Brook/Porter , $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-59643-236-9 Amandina Goldeneyes, a shy, lonely, long-eared dog, is a talented performer, “but nobody knew that, because nobody knew Amandina.” Amandina decides to rent the rundown Teatro Ventura “in the old town” and spruce it up.

At one time, Danica McKellar was best known for her role as Winnie Cooper on the TV show The Wonder Years; more recently, she played a speechwriter on NBC’s The West Wing. But now the actress, a longtime mathematics advocate (not to mention the co-author of a physics theorem), is making herself known to a new generation, with two books about math for teenage girls.

It's never too late to go young: 40 years after its founding, scholarly Temple University Press in Philadelphia is broadening its children's book publishing. The press, which publishes between 50 and 60 new titles a year, will release two kids' books at the end of September: Marc Bekoff's Animals at Play: Rules of the Game, illustrated by Michael J.

Picture Books Say a Little Prayer Dionne Warwick , David Freeman Wooley and Tonya Bolden , illus. by Soud. Running/RPKids , $17.95 (32p plus CD) ISBN 978-0-7624-3268-4 The title is borrowed from one of Warwick's timeless collaborations with Burt Bacharach and Hal David, but her book is a flat, pedestrian self-esteem primer.

When Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, founders of Small Beer Press in Easthampton, Mass., first considered publishing children's books several years ago, they had a problem: the name of their press sounded like a brewery. And they had already faced having a book display taken down at Comic-Con because of a presumed alcohol connection, until the powers that be realized that the press actually special...

Picture Books Sourpuss and Sweetie Pie Norton Juster , illus. by Chris Raschka. Scholastic/di Capua , $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-0-439-92943-1 This welcome sequel to the Caldecott Medal title The Hello, Goodbye Window knowingly describes a child's conflicting personalities. “Sometimes I'm Sourpuss,” a multiracial girl admits.