Bruce Handy

New York

Freelance Writer at Freelance

Author: "Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult." New picture books: "The Book from Far Away" and "What If One Day." Many bylines!

Articles

"The Art of Endpapers," Explored at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, in Amherst

5 days ago | airmail.news | Bruce Handy

I can’t say when I first became obsessed with endpapers, but I know the exact moment I realized they could be the subject of a terrific exhibition. I was visiting the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, in Amherst, Massachusetts, not long after Carle’s death, in 2021. A memorial retrospective included six of his glorious endpapers for books such as The Very Quiet Cricket and Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?
Library Journal

6 days ago | libraryjournal.com | Bruce Handy

. May 2025. 384p. ISBN 9781501181177. $30. FILM COPY ISBN Teen movies seem ubiquitous, but every genre has its origins. Beginning with the Andy Hardy films of 1937–46, in which Mickey Rooney played the quintessential white American schoolboy, Handy’s ( Wild Things: The Joys of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult) book moves through 1950s juvenile-delinquency movies and James Dean as the ultimate misunderstood teen.
America Needs Cooties Now More Than Ever

1 week ago | theatlantic.com | Bruce Handy

A sudden and mysterious outbreak of communicable disease began recently in my apartment building in Manhattan. Three 7-year-olds, a boy and two girls, were sharing the elevator one day with a caretaker and a random adult (me). The boy was leaning against the back of the elevator, between the two girls. “Help! I’m in a girl sandwich,” he said.
R. Crumb Looks Back

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Bruce Handy

The cartoonist Robert Crumb is described in a new biography as “misanthropic.” In his own work, he typically characterizes his personality as an unpleasant cocktail of rage, lust, and social ineptitude. But he was perfectly affable the other day, during a visit to the Whitney Museum. The occasion was a private viewing of prints and drawings, including a couple of his own that he hadn’t seen in decades.
Trump Won-Get Over It, Charlie Brown!

Dec 24, 2024 | newyorker.com | Bruce Handy

Open on a tidy suburban street rendered melancholic by snowfall. Bouncy yet melancholic jazz piano plays. Charlie Brown and Linus rest their arms on a sturdy yet melancholic brick wall. CHARLIE BROWN: I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. The election is over and the wrong people won, but I don’t feel the way I think I’m supposed to feel. Charlie Brown and Linus start walking. Snowflakes fall, gently yet also somehow . . .
"Kate Carew: The First Great Woman Cartoonist," by Eddie Campbell: Book Review

Dec 18, 2024 | airmail.news | Bruce Handy

You expect to find witty artwork in a book titled Kate Carew: America’s First Great Woman Cartoonist, especially if the publisher is Fantagraphics, the gold standard when it comes to anthologizing classic comic strips. (The house is also a patron saint of contemporary graphic novels.) But as someone unfamiliar with Carew—like most everyone else alive today, I’d wager—I was not expecting a turn-of-the-past century Nora Ephron.
On the Block: Where Jerry Lewis and Buddy Hackett Once Schvitzed

Dec 1, 2024 | newyorker.com | Bruce Handy

It was a drizzly November morning: perfect weather for picking over a carcass. The remains in question were the Jerry Lewis Monastery, as the Friars Club’s home on East Fifty-fifth Street is formally known. But with the club having defaulted, last year, on what was originally a thirteen-million-dollar mortgage, the six-story town house had gone into foreclosure and was now up for auction. A cluster of real-estate professionals and hospitality-industry types had gathered out front for a tour.
Making the Big Hair Big Enough in “The Apprentice”

Oct 27, 2024 | newyorker.com | Bruce Handy

If the movie hairstylist Michelle Côté is going to work on a period picture, she prefers the restrained elegance of the nineteen-fifties. But neither restraint nor elegance was on hand with a recent job, for which she was tasked with re-creating the pouffy locks of the nineteen-eighties. The movie was “The Apprentice,” which dramatizes Donald Trump’s rise from outer-borough hustler to the pinnacle of, if not status or wealth, at least Trump Tower.
5 Picture Books About Space, From the Sublime to the Silly

Oct 3, 2024 | nytimes.com | Bruce Handy

We are creatures of constant awe,curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,a t grief and pleasure, sun and shadow. These are lines from a poem by Ada Limón that has been engraved on Europa Clipper, the space probe NASA will launch on Oct. 10, if all goes well.
Is "Heil Honey I'm Home!" the Most Offensive Comedy of All Time?

Sep 6, 2024 | airmail.news | Bruce Handy

The Day the Clown Cried, Jerry Lewis’s unfinished, unseen, and presumably ghastly movie from 1972—it’s about a clown who entertains doomed children at a Nazi death camp—has been making headlines of late. Not only is it the subject of a well-reviewed documentary that debuted at the Venice Film Festival, but just last week the Library of Congress announced it would finally allow the public to view raw footage and related material that Lewis donated before his death, in 2014.