Best illustrated books all over the world
Have you noticed the world is full of weird people? Someone says words nobody understands. Someone dresses funny. Someone always does things “just in case,” even when they don’t make sense. Someone laughs when it isn’t funny. Someone always thinks about others instead of themselves. Everyone around me is weird. […]
The Giant Story is a tender and playful tale about an unlikely friendship between a little boy and a gentle giant. Written by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers and brought to life with Maurice Sendak’s warm, expressive illustrations, the book explores themes of kindness, acceptance, and the joy of companionship. One […]
This book tells the story of how Duke Ellington grew from a boy who wasn’t sure he even liked piano into one of the most important figures in jazz. Andrea Davis Pinkney writes in a voice that has rhythm and swing, almost like the music itself, while Brian Pinkney’s pictures […]
The Bat-Poet is about a small bat who stays awake while the others sleep. He listens, watches, and begins to make poems about what he notices — the animals, the world, even himself. The other bats don’t really understand why he does this, and he sometimes feels unsure. But little […]
Original title: Русалочьи сказки The collection of fairy tales written by the young Alexey Tolstoy in the 1910s based on Slavic folklore is not particularly well known: it is perhaps a bit scary for children, and adults have not long ago made it a rule to read all sorts of […]
A classic picture book biography of the 16th President of the United States. With luminous lithograph illustrations and a warm narrative, the d’Aulaires bring to life Lincoln’s childhood on the frontier, his love of learning, and his journey toward leadership. Winner of the 1940 Caldecott Medal, this book remains a […]
Will sleds down a hill and crashes into a hunter, a dog, a fox, a rabbit, and a bear, all tumbling together on the sled. The text is short, rhythmic, and playful, full of Kharms’ absurd humor. Vladimir Radunsky’s illustrations capture the wild energy of the ride. Snow flies and […]
Boy Meets Girl / Girl Meets Boy (2004) by Christopher Raschka and Vladimir Radunsky is a playful picture book built around a simple but inventive idea. The story, featuring a boy, a girl, a green cat, and an upside-down red dog in glasses, can be read in both directions: one […]
Original title: Цветные стеклышки Galina Demykina looks at the world through the colored glasses of imagination, turning familiar, everyday things and events into incredible miracles and revelations. The writer knows the secret inner life of children, about whom she writes with captivating warmth and love. She is helped in this […]
Original title: Ворон, карась, медведь и лиса
Pim is the youngest in his family, but he’s determined to be captain of the boat. While the grown-ups doubt him, Pim is busy fighting “ice people” with hot pancake cannonballs and steering the table upside-down like a ship. Imagination makes him taller than his years, until the day comes […]
When you’re the only pink armadillo in a family of nine green ones, you can’t help but stand out. This little fellow decides the best way to shine is to be better at everything — and he’s not shy about saying so. His bragging grows as fast as his ambitions, […]
Chris Raschka’s The Blushful Hippopotamus (1996) is about a little hippo named Roosevelt. He blushes easily, especially when things go wrong or he feels clumsy. At first, his older sister teases him, and she looks so big on the page that Roosevelt seems tiny and unsure. He has a friend, […]
Books conceal magical worlds where someone is always hiding in a dark forest, unreachable kingdoms lie beyond the mountains, and the seas and oceans are ruled by the elements. Each fairy-tale setting has its own symbolism and its own origin story. And the illustrators are the very wizards who brings […]
«Secret River», illustrated by Leonard Weisgard, was first published in 1955, after the death of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. The story follows a girl named Calpurnia from a poor family, who, during the Great Depression, sets out with her puppy in search of a mysterious river to help feed her village. […]
Taught by bitter experience, Little Red Riding Hood has put together a handbook on how to trick a wolf, with a dozen unusual tactics. Among them: feeding the wolf pastries with hot chili pepper, competing to see who hides best, wearing a wolf costume on the way to the forest, […]
Dizzy (2006) is Jonah Winter’s picture-book biography of jazz great Dizzy Gillespie, brought to life with Sean Qualls’s bold, rhythmic art. Winter tells Gillespie’s story with a text that bounces and swings, echoing the playful, unpredictable nature of Dizzy’s music. It isn’t a dry retelling of dates and facts — […]
In 1897, the Gallery Arnold in Dresden exhibited several unusual watercolors with scenes from the life of flowers, created by a young and little-known Swiss artist, Ernst Kreidolf. The drawings caught the attention of several children’s book publishers, and a year later Kreidolf’s first illustrated story, “Flower Fairy Tale” (Blumenmärchen), […]
David Wiesner is known for his surreal, wordless picture books. One of his most celebrated works is “Tuesday”. On a Tuesday evening, around eight o’clock, a group of frogs suddenly takes off from their swamp and soar over the town, flying into houses and scaring people around — only to […]
In Alessandro Sanna’s nearly wordless book, the reader follows the four seasons along the Po River, witnessing the flow of time and the lives of characters who become part of the current. Soft watercolor transitions capture the first rays of dawn, twilight in the reeds, and storm-darkened skies. The horizontal […]