Category Archives: DGLM Recommends

7

Baby Library Must -Haves

This weekend I attended my cousin’s baby shower and while every other person brought adorable gifts and essentials for the new mom-to-be, I came bearing books. Why? Well, why not? But really, it’s mostly because I have taken it upon myself to help build my little cousin’s first library.

Seeing as I don’t have any knowledge of what goes in a baby’s library past my personal favorites, OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO and HORTON HEARS A WHO by Dr. Seuss, I thought I’d enlist your help in completing this little project of mine. 

So what are the must -have books that should be included in every child’s first library? To start off, I took a poll around the office and this is what everyone had to say:

Jane suggested BROWN BEAR, BROWN BEAR, WHAT DO YOU SEE?­­­ by Bill Martin and Eric Carle, and Jessica seconded that and added GOODNIGHT GORILLA by Peggy Rathmann.

Miriam and Michael both went with Dr. Seuss and Miriam suggested a couple more titles: THE VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR by Eric Carle and GUESS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU by Sam McBratney.

Stacey’s daughters have loved TAP THE MAGIC TREE and TOUCH THE BRIGHTEST STAR by our very own Christie Matheson.

Jim’s go-to baby gift is Lane Smith’s IT’S A BOOK and IT’S A LITTLE BOOK.

Lauren suggested the hilarious classic ALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY, and Lisa Brown’s amazing mommy gifts BABY MIX ME A DRINK, BABY MAKE ME BREAKFAST, BABY DO MY BAKING, and other entertaining titles in the Baby Be of Use series. 

As well as the classics- Sendak, Carle, McCloskey, Rosemary Wells, etc., John also enjoys ALL THE WORLD by Liz Scanlon, which is enjoyable for both parent and child. He also made a good suggestion about getting board books, so babies can play and chew on them!

 Eric added MADELINE by Ludwig Bemelmans to the list, and Mike  and Sharon love THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD, GO DOG GO, and the Llama, Llama series.

Amy went with GOODNIGHT MOON by Margaret Wise Brown and Erin suggested the amazing classic, WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE by Maurice Sendak.

Thanks to my wonderful DGLMians , I am off to pretty good start!  Are there any other titles you would like to add?

0

The best books we read last year

Happy New Year! The last month has been a blur of holiday parties, vacations, birthdays, book deals, and lots of presents, both giving and receiving. Now it’s back to reality, and I thought before we get into more titillating conversations about the inner workings of book publishing that I’d share a link I read at the end of last year from the editors over at The Atlantic discussing their favorite books of the year. They’ve been doing this since 2010 and it’s a fun exercise to look at a sampling of the year in books over at The Atlantic from a very savvy literary perspective.

They’re not all new books, and they are wide-ranging in their categories. There really is something for everyone, even those of you who have small children will find Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site on the list! And read the descriptions by the staff at The Atlantic. They are quite entertaining.

How many of these have you read? And which books are you putting on your to-read list? I haven’t read nearly enough, but I will share a couple of my favorite books that I read last year. I thoroughly enjoyed The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty in the commercial fiction department (with thanks to the lovely Amy Einhorn, who gave me a copy at our lunch date), and I was completely mesmerized by Susannah Cahalan’s memoir Brain on Fire on the nonfiction side. There are so many wonderful books published every year, and I look forward to reading as many as I can in the year to come!

Product Details

Product Details

Welcome to the new DGLM blog and website!

Welcome to our shiny new home, blog readers!  For the new year, we bring you a new DGLM site, a merger of our website and blog.  Thanks to everyone who made suggestions a couple months ago on features and tech questions—where possible we’ve incorporated your feedback, and other things we’re keeping in mind in case we can implement them in future.

We’ll be blogging as usual over here at www.dystel.com now instead of at Blogger, and there are also some other things for you to explore over to the right (unless you’re not currently reading this on the site itself, in which case you might want to just poke your head in and take a look!).  You might be interested in learning more about us and our clients.  If you’re an author looking for representation, perhaps you’ll want to peruse our FAQ, Submission Requirements, Who We Are and What We’re Looking For, and Nonfiction Proposal Guidelines.  Need something new to read?  Check out our Staff Recommendations, Recent and Forthcoming Titles, and What We’re Reading in the column on the right. Maybe you want to know where we’ll be?  We’ve got a calendar with our upcoming conferences and events in that sidebar as well!  Of course, if you’d like, please feel free to use the links over there to Subscribe, Follow, or Like us and share our site with others!  The new blog should start feeding into our Twitter and Facebook accounts today, so if you’re already following us there, you don’t need to do anything.  If you’re reading us in a blog reader, please subscribe to the new RSS feed.

Make yourselves at home!

As always, we want to hear from you!  What do you think of the new digs?  Any suggestions for improvement?  Glitches we may not have caught?  (We hope not, but let us know if so!)  New features that you’d like us to consider?  We can’t always implement everything recommended to us, but we’re always open to hearing your ideas.