Book strikes nerve with frustrated parents of sleepless kids

By Gisela Ostwald Jul 7, 2011, 3:06 GMT

New York - A book barely 30 pages long written by the father of a little girl who has problems falling asleep is a huge success in the US particularly among parents whose children are similarly affected.

The book, Go the F**k to Sleep, has been at the top of Amazon.com's bestseller list for weeks as an e-book and a regular book too thanks to a high number of pre-orders for the hardbound version. It is being translated into 20 languages and a movie version is planned.

The book is a set of 14 poems, each one only four lines long with the f-word in the last line and expressing the pent-up frustration of a father over the go-to-bed ritual of his little daughter.

Adam Mansbach, a professor of literature at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is the author of the surprise hit.

'It's not like that I don't love my daughter,' the 34-year-old American told the German Press Agency dpa. But Mansbach said when the elaborate process was taking more than two hours during the only free time in his day, he felt the resentment rising and he needed to do something to finally get her to go to sleep.

Mansbach initially let out his frustrations over the nightly test of his patience on Facebook. Friends encouraged him to write a book about the ritual that his daughter Vivien requires. An acquaintance, Ricardo Cortes, offered to do the illustrations.

Mansbach said that it took barely an afternoon to put the verses down on paper. He then found a publisher relatively quickly. Akashic Book in New York wanted to bring out the book in October. But a glitch made it a bestseller far sooner.

The small publisher released the book to a bookseller under strictly confidential terms in order to hear the bookseller's opinion. It got handed around among his friends and soon the book was a hot item on the internet. People wanted to buy it in bound form. Because of the many orders that came in to Amazon.com, the publisher moved the publishing date up to the middle of June.

The book has been available in recent weeks in US stores and in many places it has been gone in a flash - 100,000 copies in two days, said Mansbach. The author's last novel The End of the Jews won the California Book Award. Some 400,000 copies of his latest book have been printed in the US. Mansbach said he hadn't imagined such a success.

'The only thing I knew was that the book was funny,' he said.

US critics believe that Mansbach is speaking to parents from the heart and his break with the taboo against complaining about the little darlings draws parents in. He also defended his decision to put the F- word in the title. Everyone knows the word, he told dpa. 'Why don't we write it?'

Mansbach's paternal family originally came from Germany, but he said he grew up without Grimm's fairy tales. His mother came from Sweden and the stories she told were a mixture of Scandinavian and American tales. Vivien, now 3, has put her bedtime issues behind her, but when she was younger, she didn't want to hear stories about witches and trolls.

She demanded her own stories about a bear, a giant kangaroo and a character called Uncle Max and she would ask her father about his life when he was young.