Q&A with Mac Barnett, Author of May Indie Next List Top Pick “Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children”

Independent booksellers across the country have chosen Mac Barnett’s Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children (Little, Brown and Company) as their top pick for the May 2026 Indie Next List. 

“With a profound respect for the intellect of children and their openness to the world, both real and imagined, Mac Barnett has written a love letter to not only children’s literature, but to childhood as well,” said Diane Capriola of Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, Georgia.

Here, Barnett discusses his work with Bookselling This Week.

Bookselling This Week: What has the response been to this book so far?

I’m imagining that it’s either really enthusiastic agreement or kind of like self-righteous tut-tutting.

Mac Barnett: I have been so pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm and goodwill and interest with which has been received.

Because the book is not out yet, a lot of the response has come from booksellers, through the reps and my editor. My editor will send this weekly digest of things that booksellers have written about this book, and it has just been so good for my soul because I’m ready for the tut-tutting. It’s going to come. I know it.

There are a lot of doubters about kids books out there, and that’s one of the reasons this book needed to be written. And hopefully some of those tut-tutters will wrestle with it and have their mind changed.

I’m getting ready to put these ideas into the world, which mean a lot to me, but don’t always feel like where the culture is. I don’t think that we’re a culture that takes children’s literature or children themselves very seriously. So, there is some nervousness going into this. Hearing the warmth and excitement and real intellectual engagement with which booksellers are meeting this book, has been encouraging to me.

BTW: I’m glad to hear that. I imagine that for most booksellers, it’s hard to spend so much time talking to children directly about books and not realize that these are tiny, complete people.

MB: I think you make an interesting point, right? Booksellers and children’s librarians, those are two jobs where you talk to a lot of different kids every day about what they’re reading and what they’re interested in. You get this firsthand knowledge of kids as readers and kids as people.

As opposed to people who don’t get to spend their time directly coming in contact with kids, especially large groups of kids. Even if you have kids, you really just know your kids.

I’ll tell you, the most encouraging stuff that I’ve gotten has been from people who work in bookshops — maybe people on the adult side or who manage buying for everything — who’ve written about having their mind changed or about how this was going to change the way that they talked to kids and adults who come into the shop.

BTW: In the author’s note, you mentioned that this book came directly from a conversation with one of your publishers in Italy, but it seemed like this was a conversation that you’d been having for a while with them, and with your other friends in the industry.

How long have you been having this conversation?

MB: Almost since I started publishing books for kids.

As a kids’ author, you spend a lot of time talking to adults, especially librarians and booksellers at conferences — very serious-minded adults who are wondering how we can get the best books in kids’ hands.

On top of that, I think from the start, I became interested in talking about children’s books in cultural spaces that were interested in literature, but didn’t consider kids’ books to be part of literature.

It wasn’t something that, when you only have one or two books out, anybody’s necessarily interested in hearing from you about. But after kind of planting my feet…

I remember when Jon Klassen and I were on book tour for Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, The Reading Reptile (a now-closed bookshop in Kansas City) asked us if we’d do an event for families in the early evening and then do an event for adults only.

That had been something that Jon and I had wanted to do for a long time, but I didn’t know if adults would necessarily come without their kids to talk about kids’ books. We were really moved by that invitation, and the event filled up really quickly.

The room was electric. It was a mix of teachers, librarians, parents, grandparents, authors, illustrators, and just people who cared about kids’ books. I think for a lot of them, there was something really cathartic about acknowledging that a lot of work goes into making children’s books. I think anybody who interacts with kids’ books and with kids has been moved by one of these books and also has been touched by the profound reaction that children have to them.

Right away, talking about it and saying, “This is real and worth discussion,” in that bookshop opened up a new mission. I want to talk to adults about how this stuff works.

BTW: I do feel obligated to mention that when I worked at the library, Sam and Dave Dig a Hole was my best friend’s go-to read. Any time we got a new group of kids in, she’d grab it.

MB: That means a ton. That book has this really mysterious and ambiguous ending. It’s a real challenge. It demands a lot of the reader. When we were putting it together, a lot of the adults we were showing it to were not convinced that kids would get it, or be excited about it, or even notice it.

Seeing that book be really embraced by kids was a confirmation of what I’m talking about in Make Believe. Kids, in so many ways, are ideal readers of literature and an ideal audience for art. They notice things keenly. They don’t have preconceived notions about how stories or artworks should work. They are undaunted by ambiguity.

All of these qualities that we cultivate in ourselves as readers, kids have very naturally.

That book was a nice confirmation of a hunch I’d had from working with kids. But I think we pushed it really hard on that one and kids got what we were up to.

BTW: What was the experience of writing this book like?

Obviously, the methodology is going to have to be very different from working on a children’s book, but also just emotionally, because it was this chance to do something you’d been thinking of for a long time.

MB: It was very intense, because I’ve given my life to kids’ books. I feel happiest and most comfortable telling stories to kids.

But here was this work that is part artist statement, part argument, part like literary criticism, and part memoir — that’s the stuff I’m least comfortable — so it did feel vulnerable in this new way.

It was also really exciting because this is the stuff that I believe most deeply.

I do believe in the power of art, and the power of books, and the brilliance of kids.

Then that doubles back because then I’m like, “Don’t mess it up!”

I really wanted it to feel approachable, to feel conversational, because I knew I’d be talking to some people who hadn’t thought about this before or who were skeptical of the entire notion that kids’ books were worth consideration at all. I did want to take good care of that adult reader who was maybe engaging in this for the first time.

BTW: You did an excellent job.

I do think the bits that were memoir play perfectly into the larger argument. For example, you mentioned how your mother never put away the kids’ books in your home, so they lived on the bookshelf alongside the other books. It all really fit together.

So, you’re going on tour for this book soon. You’ll be stopping at some indies.

Do you have anything to say about the role of indie bookstores in your life? Or any favorite memories of indie bookstores?

MB: I feel like I am, in so many ways, the product of indie book stores.

I grew up in the Bay Area, and there were two bookstores in Berkeley on Telegraph Avenue — Cody’s Books (which is no longer there) and Moe’s Books.

They were basically a few doors down from each other and they were my two favorite places to go when I was a kid.

Moe’s is this amazing used bookstore. Cody’s sold new books and it was huge. It was a big bookstore, and then when you go in there and you’re five years old…the size of that bookstore in my memory is so wild.

Moe’s is where I got a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Cody’s was where I got a paperback box set of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both of those were so formative to me.

A book would catch my eye and I would bring it to my mom, and she would buy it for me on the spot.

I remember bringing The Chronicles of Narnia box set to her. I was like, “Man, this is seven books. This is pushing it.” I don’t think I’d ever seen a box set before. I couldn’t believe that there were seven books all wrapped together. Maybe she wouldn’t notice that was gigantic?

She was like, “Okay, I’ll buy this for you. You want to read it? I’ll buy it for you.”

She said, “Never feel guilty about buying books.” And that stuck with me.

I remember, right out of college, spending way too much money in a bookshop and calling her in the parking lot afterwards just to have her tell me that again.

I don’t know that this is sound financial advice for everybody in the universe, but it has served me so well.

I love my books and I love these bookshops. They made me who I am, as a reader, as a writer, as a person. I am able to do this job because of indie bookshops.

My books don’t seem strange to me because they’re just me, but I realize that they seem strange to some people. It’s the real readers who work in indie bookshops, who read my first books, and saw what I was up to, and saw their worth, and stocked them.

Booksellers know so many of the families who come into that shop, like truly know them, know what they’ve read, what they’ve liked and what they haven’t, and can guide them to those books that will matter most to them. Even when a stranger walks through that door, they often don’t leave a stranger.

Booksellers are the reason anybody ever found my stuff in the first place.

I don’t know what I’d be doing if it wasn’t for independent bookshops. But I tell you, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.

BTW: Is there anything else that you want to mention to our members?

MB: Jon Klassen and I have a newsletter where we write about picture books called Looking at Picture Books.

It sort of continues this conversation. It is a newsletter for adults about how picture books work, and it’s been really fun to do too.

If you want to hear more about children’s books, and how they work, and why they’re important, Jon and I are doing that now.